If you’ve played Weird West for a reasonable amount of time, you’ve probably seen the statement I posted above. “The Weird West ain’t kind to those who aren’t prepared.” A truer statement has yet to be made (at least as far as Weird West is concerned).
Thankfully, knowledge is power, as they say. Being prepared in Weird West is often a matter of knowing how to approach any given situation. So I’m going to give you a whole bunch of tips and tricks that I learned by playing the beginning section of the game over and over again and experimenting with different things in each playthrough.
Loot everything
If you’re anything like me, you don’t need to be told to do this. I’m the type of player who often finds himself over-encumbered in games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and even then keeps stuffing dinner plates into his armor. So when I realized that Weird West has treasure hidden in every corner of its world, I heeded the call and started looting until my pockets were near bursting.
Now, by “treasure,” I really just mean “junk that can be sold at the General Store.” But in the early portion of the game, you’re going to need every dollar coin you can find.
Sell your junk
To piggyback off that last point, you really need to sell your leftover junk when you can. Opportunities to sell things in Weird West are few and far between, so take advantage of them when they arise.
One important thing to know is that different types of vendors will buy different types of goods. Here’s a breakdown:
- General Store: Will buy various trinkets (such as cans, pens, dirty rags, etc.)
- Gunsmith: Will buy weapons.
- Tailor: Will buy vests and also weapons (for whatever reason).
- Doctor: Will buy potions. Will also buy those super-valuable Nimp Heads.
- Ore Buyer (at the Bank): Will buy nuggets and ingots.
If you rob one shop in Grackle, it should be the gun shop
If you read through the breakdown in the previous point, you’ve maybe figured this out already, but I’ll explain it anyway.
Grackle is the first town you’ll encounter in Weird West, and it includes absolutely everything a town should have. That means it has both a gun shop and a tailor shop. Since both shopkeepers will buy weapons, you can actually rob the gun shop without roadblocking yourself from being able to sell your extra weapons.
The shopkeeper here carries a ton of money on him (I think the amount is probably somewhat randomized, but I got almost $300 off this poor soul). I discovered this on accident when I climbed over the counter and dropped down the other side onto the shopkeeper, which knocked him out. So I did what any self-respecting loot maniac would do and I searched the guy’s pockets.
Even though I paid a $75 fine to stay out of jail when the law came for me, I still ended up with a hefty profit. On top of that, I sold all the guns I stole to the tailor and made even more money.
The cherry on top of all of this is that I came back a few days later, and the shopkeeper had forgotten about our little encounter completely (I must have bonked him on the head pretty hard…)
Build a posse
You can tackle the Weird West on your own if you’d like to, but the game’s difficulty is balanced toward posses You can recruit additional party members in town for a fee, though you can also get help after completing certain quests. Even though the $100 fee seems kind of steep in the beginning of the game, it’s well worth it. Besides, you’ll have tons of money burning a hole in your pocket if you’ve followed the previous tips in this guide.
On top of recruitable posse members, doing good for people (freeing them from cages, etc.) will sometimes cause them to be a “Friend for Life.” What this means is that when you’re in a hot situation, they’ll show up to help you out — at least until they’re killed off. This can oftentimes give you the edge you need to survive a tough firefight.
Heal everyone
There are multiple ways to heal yourself in Weird West, and you should know which one to use in any given situation. Here’s a rundown:
- Bandages – Heals your character only.
- Food/drink – Heals your character slightly, and also heals your posse members.
- Sleeping – Restores your whole party to full health, but passes time.
Sleeping does the highest amount of healing, but it also costs 8 hours. If you’ve got a ticking clock on your active quests, it might not be the best option. Also, you can heal your posse members by eating food or drinking beverages. This gives you a way to heal everyone without having to sleep.
Knowing how healing works will allow you to use the best option available to you in the moment.
Get a horse as soon as possible
In one of my more disastrous playthroughs, I decided to hold off on buying a horse. Those four-legged beasts seemed kind of expensive, and I was struggling to just stay alive, let alone save up enough money to make one of the more expensive purchases in the game.
But in a subsequent playthrough, I finally gave in. And holy moly, the horse is a game-changer.
Not only does the horse make travel between locations faster, it also decreases the amount of interruptions you’ll face along the way. This means fewer zombie attacks and robberies to deal with as you’re making your way across the Weird West. No, it won’t completely prevent those interruptions, but you will encounter fewer on horseback than you would on foot.
If your horse is available in a given location, you can also use it for a quick getaway. As long as you can interact with your horse, you can leave an area — even if you’re blocked from using other methods of escape (like approaching the edge of the map and pressing A).
On top of this, the saddle contains 32 additional storage slots, which allows you to loot more stuff before you have to race off to town to sell it all.
So don’t hold off on this; the horse is one of the most important early-game purchases you can make.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew
If you play a lot of MMORPGs, you’re probably in the habit of picking up as many quests as possible, then knocking them all out at once. In Weird West, you don’t want to do this.
In a lot of cases, side quests come with a time limit that begins the moment you pick up the quest. So if you pick up a whole bunch at once, you might not be able to finish all of them before they expire — and even if you do have time, you’ll probably find yourself in a situation where you have to stop looting because the trip back to town would burn down your quest timers too quickly.
So pick your side quests carefully. Only accept one or two at a time so you make sure you have ample time to complete all of them, while also enjoying the benefits of your trash-scavenging-and-selling empire.
Exploit NPC path loops
I find myself doing tons of bounties in Weird West. In doing so, I learned something interesting: NPCs have randomized pathways, but there are some paths in each location that the game tries to perpetually keep active.
As an example, the screenshot above shows an NPC working out of the back of a cart. What I discovered was that if I took out that NPC silently, another NPC would be assigned to that path. This means I could camp out behind a barrel until an NPC started working out of the cart, then sneak up behind that person and take them out stealthily. I would then carry them out to the edge of the map, slaughter them with the machete, then bury the body. At that point, I’d return to my hiding place and wait for the next sucker to show up — which kept happening until I was down to about four enemies (who would follow the bounty target around instead of going to the cart).
In many of the bounties I’ve done, I’ve been able to exploit this exact same game mechanic. It’s not always a cart that the NPC is working out of — sometimes there’s a spot they like to go to smoke a cigarette, and sometimes it’s a rooftop vantage point they like to scout from. For example, the rooftop location shown below (which is a common feature of early bounty locations) tends to be occupied in such a way.
So watch NPCs carefully. If you discover one of these NPC paths, you could take out an entire camp almost effortlessly, without ever arousing suspicion.
Return later to rob graves
Sometimes you end up with your pockets and your saddlebag completely full, and then you start finding really good items on the bodies of the guards you’ve killed. Instead of stressing out about which items to take and which to leave behind, simply go back to town and sell what you have on you. When you return to the same location, you’ll find a graveyard that’s filled with the bodies of the people you’ve killed. You can dig them up and rob the graves, which gives you a second chance at taking their loot.
Just know that some posse members might take issue with grave robbing…
Mine for ore
If you end up in one of Weird West‘s many mines, you can actually dig up ore — as long as you have a pickaxe in your inventory. I keep one in my horse’s saddlebags at all times, which allows me to have it at the ready in case I need it.
Also, you need a shovel if you want to rob graves, bury bodies, or dig up buried caches. The game is not subtle about this (getting a shovel is pretty much the first thing it asks you to do), but I figured I’d mention it here as an additional little note for the pickaxe section.
Both shovels and pickaxes can wear out and break, so it does make sense to keep more than one of each if you find yourself burning through them quickly. You can also sell your broken tools at the General Store, so even when broken, they’re not completely useless.
Smelt your ore into ingots
Want to increase the value of those nuggets you mined? You can visit the forge (the first one you’ll find is in the Blacksmith’s shop in Grackle) to smelt ore into ingots. It takes two nuggets to make an ingot, and the value of an ingot is more than double the value of a nugget.
For example, a copper nugget is worth $5, while a copper ingot is worth $15. If you sold two nuggets, you’d get $10, but if you instead smelted those two nuggets into an ingot, you’d get $15. As you can see, ingots are the way to go if you’re looking at maximizing your profits.
Blow up cracked rocks with dynamite
Yeah, this is a video-game staple, so it probably doesn’t need to be mentioned here, but I’m going to make this completely clear for anyone who’s wondering if these rocks can be blown apart. The answer is yes, they can be.
When destroyed, sometimes you’ll find hidden chests in the rubble, but sometimes you won’t. If you have a whole bunch of extra dynamite on hand, it’s usually worth blasting apart rocks just to see whether or not there’s treasure inside.
Bounties are a great way to improve your reputation
Okay, so I’m showing my bias with this last tip. I love bounty hunting in Weird West, so I’ve spent a ton of time on this aspect of the game. What I learned is that every bounty will improve your reputation by +5. That means you can do a whole lot of bad things and still keep your reputation sparkly clean if you do bounties in between those bad things. That gives you a reliable (and fairly quick) way to get yourself out of hot water.
