Red Dead Redemption 2 Guide: The Filed Filed West

When The Game of 2018 is finally defined, you may already have it or wish for it, deferring the pleasure until the moment you find suitable. But no matter whether you own the game or plan to have it, you may feel different ways about it. Either you want to explore all its corners and its holes yourself. Or you want to succeed, wasting no time. That’s when you will need a Red Dead Redemption 2 guide, written by those who’s already been there.

So let’s talk on important matters of survival at the edge of centuries. How one should treat people, which horses are better for particular tasks, how to earn quickly and make as few enemies as possible, or how to do whatever may turn out useful. We’ll try to structure the guide, but the world of RDR2 is complicated, so some of these sides may interfere, making the final picture layered.

Another thing we will concentrate on is being not so dryly informative as the official guides are. We will stick to undocumented or hidden tricks as well. There’s been a lot of tricks the developers preferred not to reveal; so here we are.

General Red Dead Redemption 2 Guide

First of all, we don’t mean to get every little thing covered. There is a whole game wiki resource, and it still lacks a lot, so players contribute to it. We’ll turn on the Dead Eye mode and concentrate on the essentials. A quick overview will give you hints on features you either will need most of the time or may miss while chasing your primary goals.

Keep Good Shape

Though there are many both literate and illiterate people in the West, all of them tend to judge the book by the cover. So make your cover perfect. Watch yourself: shave, take showers, watch your clothes, and so on. Keep yourself in good shape for yourself first then for the others: you should watch your weight as well because it matters.

Throughout the game, you need to keep track of his abilities, displayed as cores. The abilities display his current conditions. There are three of the cores you need to observe constantly:

•         Health. Your general health, in fact. To keep it high, you must wash and shave periodically, change your clothes and watch the vital parameters, that is, weight and temperature.
•         Stamina. Your energy level, your readiness to act.
•         Dead Eye. In a gunfight, you can activate this feature to slow down time and take your time to aim better.

If you’re riding your horse, you see two additional cores, displaying health and stamina of your horse. The same parameters are indicated by bars.

So what’s the difference? If explained in short, the bars indicate your current condition of certain qualities, and the cores display their long-term condition. For example, you may spend your stamina on current actions, and it will recover as time goes. The current condition is displayed by the bar. But the speed of recovery changes too, and it’s shown by a core.

To keep your cores on a high level, you should keep yourself in good shape. To keep your bars high, you must train the specific abilities. For example, running a lot will increase your stamina bar. And be sure to have enough various clothes for different kinds of weather, to get neighed too cold nor too sweaty. And (it’s never too often to remind) always find time for bath and barber!

Another way to up your cores is getting the right equipment. You unlock extra bars by completing challenges, so they’re worth your while. But we must warn you that getting an extra bar requires completing all three of the challenges bound to it.

Hunting is a good way of making your living, but the game is not equally worth your efforts. Learn which animals are the best to hunt and specialize in them; but if they’re too rare, don’t neglect a lower class. You can use your gun to shoot them or your horse to chase them. Your lasso that can be a very effective hunting tool as well, but some animals (like alligators). Fishing is fine too, but be sure to select the right kind of bait and the right time to go for that.

Fights and Weapons

Of course, you can just buy yourself a better gun. But if you want it even better, you can go to a gunsmith and customize your weaponry, either in terms of improving them or just making them up to highlight your style, by carving or varnishing. If the practical effect is more important, the gunsmith can offer a better grip, barrel, or a wrap to make it more durable.

Shooting and using your fists is cool, and don’t forget other tools, like a lasso. It’s as good for capturing humans as it is for animals.

In gunfights, you better not neglect Dead Eye. That’s the time-slowing feature that can make you the best gunfighter in the West. Keep your eye on the cores to be sure about this ability. Particularly for Dead Eye, there are some tricks to keep it high:

•         Kill. The more people you shoot, the more powerful your Dead Eye is. But do it wisely, because otherwise you’ll be reported and wanted for the crimes you commit.
•         Evolve your Dead Eye by selecting the right diet. For example, there is Dead Eye Tonic, doing just what it says on the tin. But gin works similar magic, though a bit less.

Dead Eye will let you take a good aim before you shoot, so it would seem to those around you that you take no time for aiming at all.

As for the weapons, there are 13 revolvers available, 9 rifles and repeaters, 6 shotguns, and one Browning mounted the weapon. There are also 16 melee weapons (including knives, hatchets, even a dagger), five thrown weapons, and also a lasso, a throwing knife and a bow.

Some of these weapons can be simply purchased at a store, but others are unique and legendary, and you can only get them while completing missions. There are many unique items, like shotguns, revolvers, even hatchets, knives, a tomahawk, and a pirate sword. The way to get them is to fulfill missions; that’s why it is so important to miss none.

If you’re not into unique item hunting and feel good with regular weapons, don’t neglect missions and challenges. Each one you complete unlocks new weapons and ammunition you now are able to purchase whenever you see a trapper store. Completing all of them unlocks a special Legend of the East outfit that dramatically increases your stats.

Horses

When speaking of RDR2 as a “GTA of the Wild West”, they usually mention cars replaced by horses. So it is, but horses are much harder to hijack. You need to calm a stolen or a wild one down before saddling it up, otherwise, it may be as dangerous as a gunfighter. Watch the horse’s health and stamina via cores and bars (more on these below, in Keep Good Shape). Don’t sweat it and don’t forget to feed it from time to time, according to indicators. And it’s not all about the horses.

If you want to succeed, you must become an expert in horse breeds, because there’s no single perfect breed. Each one has its highs and lows, so it’s better to choose different ones, according to the type of your mission.

There are some general breeds with types within each. Here are some of them:

•         Arabian horse. The White-Maned is rather easy to catch (and it can only be caught in the wild). Later you’ll be able to buy Black and Rose Grey Bay-Maned Arabian horses. But they are very, very expensive.
•         Turkoman horse. These are slower to accelerate, but once accelerated, they ride quite fast. But what they excel at is Health. Turkoman horses differ in color, but basically are the same. They’re cheaper than Arabian ones, but more expensive than most other breeds.
•         Missouri Fox Trotter. This is quite a balanced breed, both good for work and race. Like Turkoman, these horses share the same stats, regardless of the appearance.
•         American Standardbred. A good average choice, just what the name says.
•         Morgan. These horses excel at nothing, so they are very affordable.
•         Nokota. The breed worth your attention is Nokota Reverse Dapple Roan, a very fast one, though it’s not cheap.

Other breeds offer nothing extraordinary, so you better watch the stats of any particular one.

Whatever breed your horse is, you need to strengthen your bond with it. There’s nothing outstanding it requires. You just have to ride it often, clean and feed it when it’s time to. So the horse becomes a part of you, and the stronger is your bond, the less probable it is to kick you or to throw you down. And the most important thing is that a well-bonded horse is able to fulfill more various maneuvers, becoming highly controllable. What you get the most use of is calling it from a further distance, but it can also stop or change direction quickly, and do other tricks. The bondage level is accessible in player stats. While a well-bonded horse is hard to obtain, it makes sense to bring it to town to heal when it’s wounded.

At stables you can buy different items, like saddles, horns, stirrups or saddlebags, and do the grooming. You can as well keep your horses there, buy new ones, or sell both stolen ones and ones you own legally. It’s been said that a stolen horse is cheaper than a bought one, and this statement works both ways: you cannot sell the ones you hijacked for a good price (though you’ll sometimes run into exceptions).

Wild horses can get broke to saddle, but it takes an effort. It seems easy to use your lasso on them, but approaching them slowly and acting kindly works on horses better. Keep cool if you fail to ride it from the first time. Let the horse calm down, and then repeat.

Moral and How It Pays

Being a gangster doesn’t automatically make you a bad guy (your protagonist is one, anyway, and you still enjoy playing Arthur Morgan). So you can be nice and polite as well as harsh and mean. Both ways have their pros and cons.

Being a good guy means manners and tips. Say howdy to people you meet, help strangers up if they’re falling at the road, turn down rewards you’re offered for your good deeds, and don’t overuse your fists, let alone weapons. You’ll still be a criminal, but a gentle criminal gets away easier and buys what he needs cheaper.

Well, you can as well enjoy being a badass. You kill in a more violent way, your journal is bloodier to read, and you’re seen as a menace. Isn’t that a reason to visit The Wild West?

Making Money

Well, we’re all here to chase a buck, that’s right. But the methods you can use are different. It’s like the moral side of this life, you know. Being nice pays. And being mean pays too, but in its own way. So there are two extremes you can select your position between.

Living on the bright side means that you prefer decent ways of making money (that doesn’t mean you’ll chicken away from a gunfight of any other mess).

•         You can hunt animals (like a wild boar or an alligator) and bring them to the butcher. More common animals cost less, and sometimes it makes more sense to consume them for dinner.
•         Bounty hunting gets you money quicker, though at greater risks. Visiting a sheriff’s office is not what outlaws do often (at least, at will), but do they really care?
•         Someone bitten by a snake or caught in a bear trap will reward you if you get them out. The reward will be indirect, but it comes suddenly and may be greater than you expect, like any weapon in the store for free. As we said, it’s the margin with profit on one side and morals on another.
•         Gambling is legal in Old West, so make use of it.

The dark side includes some violent methods, but the money you get doesn’t tell the story.

•         Looting corpses is not what a good mom teaches her son, but it pays too. Fences will readily buy the stuff the dead don’t need anymore.
•         Robbing folks. These bastards often have something precious you don’t have, and, Lord, is it just? So you can catch lonely strangers outside or raid stores or bars. Burglary also pays, as they always have something valuable in their houses.
•         Robbing trains. There’s no good western story without a train robbery, and it’s big by definition. Just put on your mask, hop in, kick off the guards, and just go through, collecting their money.

There are other ways you should acknowledge. Corruption is everywhere. Robbing wagons is an integral part of what your gang lives on. But you better know what game is the best, so why not bribe a post officer, so he tells you which fish is the biggest?

When you have stolen or just found something worthy, bring it to the fence. They act quite openly in this world, so it’s no problem to find one.

One of the most pleasing moments is replayability of any single mission. Even if you have already completed it, you can uncheck it in the list and replay again (and be re-rewarded, too).

Encounters

We have already mentioned the moral side of the game. But it can be pragmatic, too, to make deals with the people you meet. To see if there’s someone in need around, you can just watch the sky to see if there’s a smoke rising. Find that fire, and the people around it may offer you some profit. At least, you can shoot them for fun, anyway; you’ll have to restore your moral status after that, but you know how.

Some encounters have no practical meaning, but they can show you the other side of this world. Reminders of the first installment wait for you in the most unexpected places (so if you haven’t played it for long, you better refresh it before exploring the Game of 2018).

Finally, this world is full of mystic and mysteries. Just visit any place that seems mysterious, and there might be something from other dimensions. You don’t even have to go deep into abandoned houses or caves. The ghost train can be seen right on the track in the morning. Some of these tell their stories; some keep their secrets and disappear. But you’ve never been promised all the answers, have you?

Some Advice

•         If you have paid for the game, you may afford a companion mobile app for an extra $10. In free version, it shows your journal, stats, location on the map and so on. You can make your gaming core process simpler by connecting your device to your console and using it for displaying your location, cash status, attributes and so on. The paid version also contains the complete official Red Dead Redemption 2 guide, the same version as the printed one, with interactive menus.
•         The unnecessary mission can be the biggest fun. But these side missions can expire if you advance in your core mission too quickly.
•         Don’t always rush. This game is a graphical masterpiece, so take your time and enjoy it. Besides that, as we have said, too much hurry can result in missing a good side mission or even all of them.

Conclusion

If you think we’ve missed something, you’re right. The grandest game of 2018 just can’t be fully covered in such volume. But you can get most of the info you need directly from the game itself. Here is just a little help on how to behave. So we went without figures and complete stats on weapons, horses and other stuff because it’s found in the game. It’s rather an instruction on how to get the most kicks out of it.