Outside of ranking up over time and acquiring new card abilities, Red Dead Online gates off certain content by requiring you to acquire and spend gold bars.
The currency is used to unlock items like new outfits, better horses with upgraded stats, and the fast travel system. While several gold bars are easy to come by just by finding the right locations in the base game, the online version makes you work a lot harder for them.
Below we cover exactly where to go to turn nuggets into the coveted Red Dead Online gold bars.
Important Note: You can currently only play Red Dead Online if you meet certain criteria. You can find those criteria here.
Some users are also currently experiencing problems connecting to the online version — check out our guide to resolving that problem here.
How To Get Gold Bars In Red Dead Online
Since the online mode is technically still in beta, this is all very much subject to change. Currently, 100 nuggets are automatically converted to one gold bar.
However, almost anything that requires gold bars demands a steep price. For example, you need 18 gold bars to get the horse from the catalog in the image above. You need 112 gold bars to unlock fast travel (unless you want to wait until Level 65 to get it). Obviously, you’ve got some grinding to do.
To make that grind easier, here’s where to go to get gold nuggets:
- Stranger missions
- Story missions
- Competitive challenges
- Horse races
- Multiplayer series modes
- Treasure maps
The fastest ways to get gold bars in the early-game are by completing both story missions and stranger missions. Unlike Red Dead Online‘s multiplayer modes, these are often linear and filled with easy-to-kill NPCs.
The time on each type of mission varies, as do the rewards based on how you performed. Typically, you’ll get between 1-4 nuggets per event or MP series.
On average — getting the lowest reward and taking about 10 minutes per event — you can expect to get one gold bar per 7-8 hours of play. Clearly, that’s a pretty slow progression, particularly if saving up 10-20 gold bars.
After missions and MP events, challenges, horse races, and treasure maps are all toss-ups for best ways to get gold bars and gold nuggets. Challenges can be very time consuming, while horse races are hit and miss depending on your horse.
Treasure maps are hard to find and often seem to come at random. You do get one in the first mission and another when you hit rank 10, however.
Gold bars will also be available to buy directly with real-world money when the in-game store comes online (presumably next week).
Need help figuring out how to posse up, complete missions, or increase your wanted level? Head over to our growing Red Dead Online guides hub for more.
