Rations in Assassin’s Creed Shadows are essentially health consumables, and you will be needing a lot of them as you fight your way across the map. While Yasuke starts off with five ration slots, Naoe has just three, making it necessary to both increase total ration capacity, as well as enhance their efficacy.
This guide is everything there is to know about increasing and upgrading rations in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
How To Increase Rations
In order to maximize your ration capacity, you will have to seek out food vendors. These scattered NPCs have a rice bowl and chopsticks icon over their heads. Interacting with each of them for the first time will unlock a codex entry and an extra ration slot. Note that slots require an increasing number of food vendors in order to be unlocked, so the first one will require a single vendor, then second ration will require two vendors, and so on.
Food vendors can easily be found in most inhabited locations, and are readily visible on the map using the legend or at the closest zoom level.
How To Upgrade Rations
In order to enhance the efficacy of your rations, you will need to construct two distinct rooms in your Hideout. Begin with the ‘Iron Hand Guild’ questline in Izumi Settsu, in order to be able to build the Zashiki for the initial 20% increase to health restoration.
Next, embark on the ‘People of Yamashiro’ questline in Yamashiro to unlock the construction of the Tea Room, for an additional 20% increase to ration efficiency. Unlocking all 16 food vendors and building both of these special rooms will fully upgrade your rations, and also unlock the Suture Self Achievement/Trophy.
Finally, another 20% upgrade to ration efficiency can be applied through an engraving on gear, for ration healing. This should be a last resort, as there are far more critical and useful engravings to be applied to otherwise limited slots.
Upgraded rations will come in handy, and even be necessary, towards the mid to late game as the regular ration will not fully restore health by that point.
How To Restore Or Refill Rations
Refilling rations will be necessary as you consume them to restore health lost during combat. Though rare, the nearest source will usually be the corpses of enemies you have slain. Then there are the ‘refill ration’ containers that are conveniently located in major combat locations.
Kakuregas, including the one in the Hideout, will be the most reliable sources for refill ration containers. Finally, food vendors can also restore your rations, but this is less than convenient, as you will have to navigate all the way to them each time.
That is everything there is to know about increasing and fully upgrading rations in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.