Mechanics

The four systems we cover here have almost nothing in common mechanically, but they line up neatly on one question: how many other people have to be in the room before the thing works. Ability cards run entirely out of your own pause menu. Feud and Parley cannot even appear until one particular stranger has shot you several times over. A posse is built for between four and seven of you. And the moonshine shack is a small business with a cook, a partner and a delivery route, none of whom are you. Read them in that order and the game's multiplayer layer stops looking like a single lump.

On your own: ability cards

You get four card slots, and the split is fixed: one holds a Dead Eye card that only fires while your Dead Eye meter is full, the other three hold passive cards that work all the time. Nothing goes into a slot until you have bought it from the Abilities tab of the pause menu, and once bought you can swap cards from the Weapons Wheel mid-fight. Every card climbs through three tiers, and our tips and tricks guide adds the detail that the XP you earn while a card is equipped is what pushes it up those tiers.

Our Ability Cards page lists six Dead Eye cards and eighteen passives, and laid out by rank they form a ladder with a pattern. A Moment to Recuperate is yours from the start. Focus Fire and Paint it Black are free only if you chose them at character creation; the other one costs $50. After that, something new unlocks at every even rank from 10 to 50 with just two exceptions, rank 12 and rank 42. Rank 10 hands you two passives at once (Come Back Stronger and Horseman), rank 48 does the same (Hangman and Winning Streak), and the three late Dead Eye cards sit at 24 (Slow and Steady), 44 (Quite an Inspiration) and 50 (Slippery Bastard).

Three of those cards quietly assume you are not alone. Focus Fire shares its damage bonus with teammates, Quite an Inspiration shares its healing, and Take the Pain Away at rank 34 only triggers when somebody revives somebody. A solo player can equip them, but the second half of each effect never fires, which is the first hint that the rest of this guide exists.

One enemy: Feud and Parley

Free Roam lets anyone shoot anyone, and because a player you kill spawns back near you, one person can keep killing another almost indefinitely. Rockstar's brake on that is a prompt that appears after the same player has killed you four or five times. Pick Parley and neither of you can hurt the other for ten minutes, which our Feud and Parley page suggests using either to talk it out or simply to ride away untouched. Pick Feud and the two of you get a one-on-one that nobody else can join. Whichever you choose, you are locked into it for its duration. It is the one system on this page you cannot start yourself; it only exists once somebody else has made it necessary.

A few friends: posses and their camps

A posse is the game's word for a party, and there are exactly two kinds. Both are created from the Player Menu (left on the d-pad), where you set the type and the privacy options, and both fill up through the Invite to Posse option in the same menu. A posse can fight another posse in Posse Versus or take on AI opponents as a group.

The camp is what makes a posse more than a friends list. Our Posses page puts wardrobe changes, weapon and tonic crafting and fast travel at the camp, and Cripps is the man who dresses it in a theme such as Military or Wanderers. Our tips guide covers the same ground from the other side: you plant a camp by holding the White Flag, and fast travel only comes once the camp has been upgraded. Cripps matters for a second reason, which is that he is also the person who opens the door to the last system here.

A payroll: the Moonshiner role

Moonshining is gated behind the Trader role. Reach Trader rank 5 or finish a Sell Mission and Cripps introduces you to Maggie Fike at Emerald Ranch, who offers a choice of five shack sites and then sends you to rescue Marcel, the cook, and to borrow some moonshining equipment from another operation like yours. Marcel then shows you the Engine Room and its distillation tools; the ground floor of the shack is a front for what goes on in the basement. From there the business is a loop: pick a moonshine type and a flavouring at the table beside Marcel, run the supply missions that feed it, and drive the batch to a buyer without breaking bottles or losing an argument with a roadside checkpoint. Our Moonshiner Business page prices a batch at roughly $30 to make against a $50 profit.

The two still upgrades come from Maggie and are the whole difference between a shack that pays and one that does not: weak moonshine is worth about a hundred dollars a shipment, the Condenser lifts you to Average and Polished Copper to Strong, and our stronger moonshine guide adds that flavourings raise the sale price on top. What goes into each flavour, and where the eighteen ingredients grow or sell, is the subject of our items guide.

Quick answers

How many ability cards are there? Our page lists twenty-four: six for the Dead Eye slot and eighteen passives. Where do you buy them? From the Abilities tab of the pause menu, and only a bought card can be equipped. Can you change cards without opening the menu? Yes, the Weapons Wheel carries the same slots. Do you need a posse for the Moonshiner role? Nothing on our page asks for one; it needs Trader progress and 25 gold bars, though the camp you share with a posse is where you find Cripps, who starts the whole chain.

Where the money for all of this comes from, and which paid jobs can be run twice, is covered in our story missions and Call to Arms guide and in the wider Red Dead Online guide, which sorts every price in the game by whether it is asking for rank, dollars or gold.