Unfortunately, being an outlaw is expensive, as the daily camp and stable fees will quickly eat through any money you’ve earned up by robbing folks and completing stranger tasks.
Money is fairly tough to come by in this game as well. Randomly murdering every NPC you come across isn’t usually a viable option. You’ll net very sad amounts – like around 9 cents a pop – that just aren’t worth the attention you’ll receive.
Hunting and looting corpses are the obvious ways to earn, but that’s mostly just chicken scratch since there won’t be enough animals or dead bodies available to make real money quickly (with the few exceptions noted below).
Raiding other player camps is lucrative, but risky. If you want a low-risk, high-reward way to earn cash fast, use our Red Dead Online fast money guide we’ve got here.
Farm The Emerald Ranch Animals
This is midway between a clever way to earn money for an unscrupulous thief and an outright exploit of the system that will likely be patched. Emerald Ranch has a large stockyard area filled with animals that are easy to kill, because they are corralled in a pen and can’t escape.
Head over to our short guide on the exploit to see exactly what you need to do.
Hunting For Pelts In The Wild
If you want better pelts than what you can find from the poor corralled animals at Emerald Ranch, bow or knife hunting can potentially yield more money more quickly – if you find the right animals and get perfect pelts.
By skinning perfect pelts from three star pronghorns outside Blackwater, its possible to make up to $180 an hour if you get lucky. Be sure to keep in mind the type of ammo / weapon needed and the star rating for each creature, as poor pelts are easy to come by by don’t yield much money unless you are quickly farming large numbers of creatures like with the method above.
Have you found any other surefire spots for great pelts in the wild? Let us know where to look and we’ll get this sectino update!
Quick Join Story Missions
Most of the various activities from stranger quests or large scale events net small amounts of money, and we want to avoid that. The real cash is to be found in completing story missions.
While this works better with a posse you trust to blaze through the missions, you can do this with random players to get some quick money as well.
While in free roam mode, tap the left d-pad button (don’t hold it down or it will pull up the catalog). If the Free Roam menu, choose Quick Join and then Story Mission On Call. Choose a mission and wait for three other random players to be slotted in.
Since this system puts you in a mission with other players, note that you may see things later in the story than you’ve currently experienced while playing solo, so there are spoilers there!
Continue to play successive on call story missions (but don’t repeat the same ones as they don’t have cash bonuses) because the later missions supply several hundred dollars each.
Reset Your Character Repeatedly
This nifty little system is slightly time consuming, but if you want a bunch of money and don’t mind playing the same missions a few times over, it can be extremely lucrative.
First, make any character you want (sticking with all the base options is best so its quickest) and play the first six story missions of the free roam mode. This will get you around $400 and nearly a full gold bar.
If you want an extra $100 and another gold bar, play that character until hitting rank 10, which automatically unlocks a treasure map.
Next, delete the character entirely in the Player menu and start over with a new character. The game keeps track of how much money you had, so you can repeat this process several times until you have as much money as you want, then continue on with the character you actually want to play.
Go Trout Fishing
When you hit rank 14, your character will unlock a fishing rod (or if you’ve managed to grind enough gold nuggets, you can buy one for four gold bars early).
If you can get one gold bar, you can order the lake lure (unlocks normally at rank 30) from the catalog, which makes it much, much easier to catch fish. From that point, it’s simple to make plenty of money by fishing.
For the most money, though, set up camp at the lake at the south end of Valentine, which has Steel Head Trout. Place your camp there and put up your white flag so other players can’t kill you, then collect as many fish as you want!
Sell them in stacks of 10 at the butcher in Rhodes for more than $40 per trip!
Have you found any other ways to quickly grind large sums of cash while exploring the wild west? Let us know and we’ll get your method added!
You can also check out our growing list of Red Dead Online guides here:
Fixing the Red Dead Online not working error How to form a posse How to get gold bars (kind of) fast Unlocking fast travel
