Assassin's Creed Shadows Guide: Mastery and Knowledge Points - What they are and how to earn them

Thankfully for Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ubisoft has looked at the enormous and frankly absurd progression skill tree of Assassin's Creed Valhalla and completely reworked and toned it down. This game has a much more streamlined progression setup, a structure that introduces a few new ideas that may require a bit of explaining to understand in their entirety. So, to help you on your way, let's delve into Mastery and Knowledge Points and how to earn and spend them.

• Don't miss our Assassin's Creed Shadows review

Mastery Points

These are your typical skill points to spend. You earn them for pretty much everything in Assassin's Creed Shadows, be it levelling up, eliminating a target, completing a quest or side quest, the list goes on. You'll be handed so many of these throughout your adventure that it may seem extortionate, but in practice you'll always have something to spend them on.

At the start of the game, you'll notice that the abilities that you can utilise Mastery Points for are typically quite cheap, and you may even end up acquiring every possible upgrade in each skill tree before the next stage of the skill tree unlocks. Our advice would be to choose which weapons you enjoy to use for each character and then to invest in those skill trees and save any remaining points for the future. This is because skills start to become quite expensive as the skill trees develop, with some abilities costing seven or more points each.

To note: Naoe and Yasuke do not share their Mastery Points, so feel free to spend them on each character however you see fit!

So, what do you do when you have Mastery Points to spend and no available skills to invest in? This is when Knowledge Points come into the equation.

Knowledge Points

On the left of the Mastery screen in the menu, you'll see a little graphic that displays a Japanese symbol and a bit of text that states "Next Rank in: X". Essentially, you need to improve your Knowledge Rank to unlock the next stage of each skill tree, with a grand total of six levels to progress through during the wider adventure.

You'll earn Knowledge Points that count towards your next rank-up by completing very specific activities in the open-world. These are Shrines, Kofun, Kuji-kiri, and Kata, and they are marked on the map with red symbols. Each time you complete one of these activities, you'll be handed a single Knowledge Point, and while amassing 10 points for the first few levels (and then 15 for the latter ones) might seem like a lot, these are typically very easy activities to complete.

Shrines, for example, either revolve around finding scrolls or praying at shrines, and both can be located by using Eagle Vision to mark nearby points with a little glowing white dot. Kata is a quick-time event for Yasuke, and Kuji-kiri is the same but for Naoe, and each generally will require a minute or two of your time if you're focussed and fast. Kofun are tombs to explore and these can require a bit more time and effort to navigate their twisting and dark halls.

Once you have acquired enough Knowledge Points to rank-up, it's as simple as returning to the Mastery screen to witness a quick level-up graphic and to then gain access to the next array of abilities and skills.

Also, don't worry about having to complete a very specific amount of Knowledge activities or tasks to earn the enough amount of Mastery or Knowledge Points for your character. There are way more activities in the open-world than you need to complete the progression in this game, so don't worry about reaching 100% to fully upgrade your characters.

Lastly, and bringing it back to Mastery Points, each of the skill trees have an overarching Mastery Passive that is advanced by spending points in each tree. For Naoe's Katana tree, this could be progressively increasing its overall damage, which as you can infer, is hugely useful, so again, focus your efforts and spec into the trees that suit how you like to play.