Red Dead Online's Best Money-Making Activity Is Not What You'd Expect

Red Dead


As everyone tries to puzzle out the Red Dead Online beta’s baffling economy where gold rings sell for less than beans and selling one deer carcass gets you more than looting a hundred bandits, it seems that one activity has emerged as the frontrunner for the best way to make money in the current state of the game.

This was suggested to me by a couple readers after my original article about the game’s economy problems, and after testing it out for myself, yeah, it’s probably the most “efficient” cash farm in the game, and one of the most convenient for a few reasons as well.

It's not bounty hunting or robbing or anything like that. It’s fishing. Specifically, salmon fishing.

There might be a better route than the one I used, but the process is the following:

1) You have to level up to rank 14 to buy yourself a fishing rod, which only costs about $35. I’d do this mainly by matchmaking for story missions which usually give a load of XP.

2) You then have to buy a lake lure, which you technically can’t get for $2.50 until level 30, but I used one of my 1.8 gold bars to unlock it now.

3) Go to O’Creagh’s Run, a lake in the north east of the map, west of Annesburg. Fish there at the dock. There’s a stranger there who turns out to be the one-legged hunter Arthur meets in the campaign who will give you “good guy” missions, but ignore him, he’s not part of this.

My salmon spot


4) Catch 10 salmon with your lake lure, which is the maximum amount you can carry. This spot will only give you salmon and nothing else.

5) Ride back to a butcher. I picked Valentine but none are particularly close, and sell those ten salmon for $4.25 each, netting you $42.50 per run. On the way back you can try to snag a deer or something to throw on your horse for an extra ten bucks if you want. I'm going to see if I can find a closer salmon spot, but for now this is what I'm doing.

I tried to fish in other spots, but either my lake lure didn’t work, or if it did, I was running into even more economy problems as someone didn’t apparently bother to do much math here. I started fishing off the southern coast of the map and was catching 14 pound monster sturgeon where every catch was a legendary fish-level fight that left my hands in cramps. But I discovered they’re so big they don’t fit in your satchel (but 40 pounds of salmon does…), so you have to sling one, and only one, over the back of your horse. Then I discovered even a three star sturgeon sells for FOUR DOLLARS at the butcher, 25 cents less than the salmon. So yeah, don’t do that.

Fishing has the added bonus of being the biggest, easiest boost to your health XP, so doing this farm should also max your health eventually, as well as max bond your horse pretty quick. What it does not give you compared to other activities is any gold like missions, nor does it give you any XP like hunting, outside of challenge completions. But for cash? I really don’t see any other better options.

Red Dead


So, why is fishing better than other options, at least for grinding out cash for the uber-expensive items in the game? Let’s go through the others:

Story Missions net you a lot of XP, but you can earn like, $4-9 for a 10-20 minute mission, and with matchmaking you really never know which one you’re going to get.

Stranger Missions have absolutely garbage payouts of $2-6 most of the time, not to mention they disappear once you’re done and you have to ride cross map to the next one.

PvP and races are pretty fun, and yet their payouts are terrible for the most part. Even if you’re placing in the top all the time (which is far from a sure thing), you’re not going to be keeping pace at all with fishing.

Hunting is not bad but also pretty random. A perfect whitetail buck will get you about $15 from the butcher, but finding and killing those is a lot more work than going to X fishing spot where you know unlimited salmon will be. You also run the risk of people seeing you riding around with a presumably worthwhile corpse, killing you, and taking it, which happens somewhat frequently.

Treasure maps are literally the most valuable items in the game, but you have to mainly get those from gang hideouts which are tough to solo effectively, and also hard to find as they appear at random in the wild, even if you know the general locations where they spawn. The maps can show up on corpses in the camp, but even they’re not guaranteed to be there. If you can find one, you can net yourself a half a gold bar and $50-100 instantly, but I don’t think there’s a really good way to actually “farm” these right now, so far as I can tell. You can also get them from stranger missions and challenge completions sometimes.

Red Dead


I know there’s some sort of “sheep farm” going around where you’re supposed to go to a sheep pen, murder all the sheep then sell all their corpses and parts to a very close butcher. This is A) pretty dull, B) pretty rude and C) you can run the risk of a witness wandering by to get you in trouble.

My only words of caution for fishing are to NEVER let your line break, as you’ll lose your lure. When you auto-ride to and from, you will sometimes get ambushed by bandits, so be careful. Pack snacks for you and your horse as doing anything for a long period of time in this game will drain all your cores (there’s a cooking fire near the butcher in Valentine and the stable nearby sells hay for 25 cents that fully restores your horse). Cast your line out midway if you can to make the reeling-in shorter. And prepare to have your thumbs destroyed from reeling fish after fish.

With the help of this farm, yesterday alone I bought a Lancaster repeater, a new horse stable slot and a $350 perk upgrade, so it’s definitely helped. But even if fishing is relaxing, after like, the twentieth run of this, it’s pretty dull and no, this has done nothing to convince me that the game still doesn’t have serious economy problems even if this one specific farm is halfway decent at generating cash. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but until fixes are made, fish away. Just remember that there’s still no guarantee this beta is going to save your progress when all is said and done.

