Red Dead Online is basically an entirely separate game to Red Dead Redemption 2. This means that even if you have finished the lengthy campaign in the single player portion, you can find yourself needing some guidance in the Online portion of the game. That’s where this guide comes in.

HONOR

Much like in the original game, and in the single player portion of Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online has Honor. It works reasonably similarly in Online as it does in the single player mode, but here’s a quick summary:

• Honor is your “morality standing”
• Honor determines the kinds of quests you get—more honor means you get quests like defending processions from thieves and bandits, while bad honor means you find quests on the wrong side of the law (like robbing a store)
• If you have bad honor, you are marked as an outlaw, and other players can try to hunt you

You can check your Honor by pulling up the menu, going to “Player”, and then going to “General” and then “Statistics”.

If you want to reset your honor, you need to go to Old Man Jones in Armadillo and pay him 3 Gold Bars, and he will reset your Honor for you.

HORSES

Much like honor, horses in the game also function similarly to the single player component. This means:

• You can buy a horse from a stable
• You can sell a horse at a stable (go to “Manage Owned Horses”, and sell from there—make sure to note that this is permanent!)
• You can insure horses from the stable. Your first insurance is free, but you will have to buy it subsequently. Insurance means your horse will never die permanently, and will be restored to you even after a fatal accident

Remember to set your horse to Private so other players can’t steal it!

Red Dead Online is the online component to Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s got a lot of nuance to it. It’s basically like an entirely different game, included with Red Dead Redemption 2. If you play Online, you’ll want your hands on some cool weapons, ways to manage health, and some good loot. We deal with some of that in this guide.

GETTING HEALTH CURES

If you’re only looting bodies, you might find health cures hard to come by, and there’s a reason for that—they’re often hidden away on shelves and in drawers and cupboards in buildings. Make sure to loot those.

A free health cure can also be found in the Medical Car at the back of the train in the mission Kerosene, Tar, and Greed. Do note that you need to be dishonourable to be able to play this mission (but once you have, you can replay it as often as you want, and farm health cures that way).

BOW AND ARROW

I’ll be blunt: you can’t get it without buying it. Simple.

To buy it, you need:

• To be Rank 10
• $125 (so you can buy it from the Gunsmith)

BARD’S CROSSING TREASURE CHEST LOCATION

Once you reach Rank 10, you get the Treasure Map from the Post Office. Follow it to the Yellow Circle, then go to these three locations to search for the chest specifically (using Eagle Eye will highlight it):

• On the shore of the island in the river, find a fallen tree next to some rocks. The chest may be below the rocks.
• Go straight west of Flatneck Station. When you encounter a rocky region, find the tilted rock. The chest may be under it.
• Find the cliff towards North of the tracks. The chest may be located here.

Alternatively, you can use the video below to check out where you can find it.

Red Dead Online has a pretty brutal economy, where the money you get in game is in line with the money an outlaw in the Wild West in the late 19th century would have gotten, but things cost more in line with how much they cost today.

So, you want to earn a lot of money, obviously, and you want to earn it as fast as possible. In this guide, we share a lot of tips and tricks for making a lot of money upfront.

Play PvP. Play solo games in PvP, especially the larger versions of all modes. If you’re good, you will be making, on average, $10 per 4 minute game, which comes down to $150 per hour.. Make sure to play solo games over team games, since team games have lower payouts.

Play PvE. You can also leverage the co-op feature of the game to earn a lot of money. The starting activities and missions don’t quite give you a lot of money, but late game ones do—what you can do is once you have completed the intro, pull up random matchmaking for missions, and hope you are matched with a player further along in the story than you are. You will certainly earn more money this way than you would doing the grunt level stuff.

Do the yellow missions. This is the slowest way of earning money, but really, simply doing the story missions will slowly continue to give you a stockpile of money too. So just, do the yellow missions.

Horse racing. You need to be really good at horse racing to try this one (I’m not), but if you are, you can get up to $50 an hour by participating in horse races.

Red Dead Online is basically an MMO, but like all online games, it has some built in anti griefing mechanisms. Like any good MMO, it also has ways for you to grow and develop your character further than what you start out as. In this guide we deal with both of those things.

FEUD AND PARLEY

One of the best mechanics in Red Dead Online is feud and parley. Basically, when you or a player end up killing one another a number of times in a row, the game gives the victim the option either to Parley or to Feud.

• Parleying is pretty simple: you and the other player are forced to talk. No, really. For 10 minutes, you’re locked with each other and you have to talk it out. Apologize, taunt each other, do whatever. You’re meant to work out whatever is causing you to be hostile to each other.
• Feuding requires both players to accept, and basically forces you into a gunfight (with respawns on), while you go at it with one another. It’s a pretty neat way to let some steam off.

ABILITY CARDS

Ability Cards must be purchased from the main menu. Once you purchase them, you can slot them into your Ability Card loadout. Ability Cards can be passive, meaning they give you general perks and bonuses, or they can be active, meaning they kick in when you do a certain thing (for example, a DeadEye Active Ability Card will only kick in when you enable DeadEye).

Once you level up, you get the ability to equip more Ability Cards, so it’s not just a question of buying them, you do need to grow your character to be able to equip some of the higher tier cards as well.

Red Dead Online is now live—well, at the very least in beta it is. If you’ve played Grand Theft Auto Online, you have some idea of what to expect (though hopefully Rockstar are better prepared off the bat this time than they were back then). So, join as you jump into this bold new frontier, this guide is here to help you with your Red Dead Online journey.

TIPS AND TRICKS:

• Prioritize building up your DeadEye skill. DeadEye is extremely helpful in Red Dead Online, because actual shooting in Red Dead is a bit underwhelming. So build it up as much as you can from the get go.
• Your horse. You want to a) set it to private (so no one else can steal it); you do this in the Options menu. And b), you want to insure it, so that if your horse “dies”, it really just faints, and comes back to you.
• Bonfires heal you. Red Dead Online is the Dark Souls of Red Dead games, because resting at a campfire recharges your core.
• Ammo can be bought in mission lobbies. You don’t actually have to go to the gun store to buy it each time.
• Buy the horse brush. You don’t have one to begin with, and need to get it from the catalog.
• Make sure to redeem your pre-order bonuses. They’ll be in the catalog, and they’ll be free.

FREE ROAM

Free roam is just you playing around in Red Dead Online’s open world, coming across Free Roam missions or events. However, much like in RDR2 proper, you can’t just access the free roam to begin with. Instead, you must first complete the game’s introduction section, which can take up to an hour, before you will be given access to the free roam.

CAMP

Players get camps in Red Dead Online. If you play solo, you get a Player Camp, whereas if you are a part of a Posse, which is this game’s equivalent of a guild, you get a Posse Camp.

Once you raise the White Flag at your camp, you can rest there, access your Wardrobe, craft, cook, get deliveries for items you buy, and even fast travel to them, after they are upgraded.

POSSES

Posses are groups of players who play together. There are two kinds:

• Temporary Posses, which are just ad hoc groups that you can create to play with friends for a single session
• Permanent Posses, which are persistent, and require currency to be set up. These are the game’s equivalent of guilds, and if you and friends are planning on playing through the game together in the long run, might be what you want to look into