I made my Red Dead Online fortune off the Trader role primarily. Sure, the Collector is the easier way to go if you really want to make fat stacks of RDO$ fast, but I’ve always really enjoyed the Trader.
When it comes to the Trader role in Red Dead Online, I’m a seasoned veteran. So I have absolutely no excuse to have made the worst delivery run of all time. Yet I did it.
My troubling tale begins one evening when I was doing some daily challenges in Red Dead Online. One of my Trader challenges was to deliver goods to a local buyer twice. That’s usually an easy enough challenge, and it can often be done within a few minutes.
Now, there used to be a bug that counted goods instead of deliveries, meaning your production could be at 2/100, and your delivery would still count as two full deliveries. I think a “full” delivery is supposed to be counted at 25 (meaning that with a bigger wagon, you can complete this challenge in a single run, even without the bug). However, you don’t need to deliver 50 goods to flip this challenge; you just need to either deliver more than 25 in a single delivery, or make at least two deliveries with at least one good each.
So anyway, I had 20 goods at my camp, so I figured, best-case scenario, the bug activates and this counts as two deliveries, and worst-case scenario is that it would count as one, then I’d go back to camp and grab one or two more goods and do it over again.
I didn’t consider the actual worst case, in which absolutely everything that can go wrong with a delivery run does, in fact, go wrong (with one exception: I actually didn’t run into any other players).
For some reason, the GPS wanted me to go over the freaking top of Mount Shann. I’ve gotten to the point where I generally just listen to the GPS when I’m navigating treacherous terrain (because cutting corners often leads to tumbling off some cliffside that you’d forgotten about), and the terrain in the Mount Shann area can be pretty rough. So I actually followed this bad advice, and…
Well, you can see what happened. What’s funny about this is that before I wiped out, my character actually fell out of the wagon one time — like straight-up just somersaulted out of it — which I’ve never seen happen before (it happens at about 2:32 in the video below).
If you wreck a delivery cart at some point in your Red Dead Online Trading career, know that you can actually reset your game and the whole delivery will reset, giving you a shot at doing it again. I didn’t do this, though, since I didn’t need the money; I just needed to tick the challenge. So I attempted to grab the sack of goods and toss it onto the horse that had been pulling the wagon before the disaster happened.
But the terrain was too steep. I managed to pick up the sack one time, but my character dropped it before I could get it onto the horse. If you don’t think this watch a bug, my character rocketed up into the air and the bag then glitched back to its previous location (this sequence of events starts just after the 3:20 mark in the video). I had to climb back to where the bag was, up to a rocky slope that’s apparently coated in Crisco cooking oil.
I thought my troubles had ended there. “I’ll make my way back to the base of Mount Shann,” I told myself, “Then just go around it.” The Little Creek River area, which is directly north of Mount Shann, is mostly flat. “I could cut across the shallow riverbed and be at Wallace Station in no time,” I thought.
But this was not so easy. The inhospitable slopes and cliffs of Mount Shann are quite treacherous, and I would have to navigate down them without tumbling and losing the goods into some crevasse where they’d be inaccessible.
I made it to the bottom without incident, though I’d picked up a couple bandits on the way down. Bandits aren’t much of a challenge in Red Dead Online, and there were only two, so I paid them no mind. I’d almost managed to lose them when I was approached from the other direction by a pissed-off grizzly bear (about 4:52 in the video).
Not wanting to fight the bar and the bandits at the same time, I booked it out of there. Keep in mind that I wasn’t on my own horse, but the horse I’d rescued from the cart incident. It didn’t have a lot of stamina, and it also had a tendency to fight me as I was trying to control it. The horse got stuck on a rock, and then smashed into a tree, sending me and my bag of goods tumbling into a grove of pines.
At that point, I didn’t have a choice but to try to bring down the grizzly. I grabbed my trusty bolt-action (my all-time favorite gun in Red Dead Online) and went to work. I put down the bear and figured I’d at least take home a bear pelt as a reward for this disaster of a delivery run. I skinned the bear and put its pelt on my own horse, then put the delivery bag back on the delivery horse. A bandit did attempt to shoot me during the skinning process, but a single shotgun blast was all it took to end that conflict once and for all.
The rest of the run went pretty smoothly, though the delivery horse ran out of stamina and I was approached by bandits one more time. I did make it to Wallace Station for the sale. My payout? Fifty bucks, and only 1/2 completion for the challenge.
Oh, and my game crashed when I uploaded the video, so I didn’t even get to keep the bear pelt.
At that point, I figured it was probably time to call it a night. I just didn’t have it in me to do another delivery run (or much of anything else in RDO).
I’ve posted the video below so you can witness this full delivery run in all of its belligerent badness. (The 3:00 is especially hilarious, as you can see my cart tumbling down the mountainside in the background.)