Red Dead Online Gold guide - How to quickly earn Gold Bars to buy Permits, Cosmetics, and the Outlaw Pass

Dollars and cents aren't the only currency in Red Dead Online, no sirree. Gold Nuggets and Gold Bars are the coveted riches you're really after, and as you'll no doubt have already discovered, they can be pretty hard to come by in large quantities. But fear not, for our Red Dead Online Gold guide will walk you through everything you need to know about these luminous bars of monetary delight, from what you can spend them on to how you should go about getting your hands on them!

• Red Dead Online Gold Bars & Gold Nuggets
• Earning Gold in Red Dead Online
• How to buy Gold Bars in Red Dead Online

Red Dead Online Gold Bars & Gold Nuggets

First off, you'll doubtless want to know why exactly you should care about all this Gold malarky. What exactly can you do with the premium currency of Red Dead Online once you've got it?

• You can spend Gold to purchase a variety of unique cosmetic items, from weapon skins and attire items (both for yourself and your horse) to new items for your Camp.
• You can also purchase Red Dead Online's Outlaw Pass (their version of the Battle Pass) for a grand total of 35 Gold Bars, which will allow you to start accruing levels and earning cosmetic and cash rewards with each new level. As is customary with most games' Battle Passes, completing the entire thing will earn you your 35 Gold Bars back, giving you extra incentive to grind through the Outlaw Pass.
• Aside from the Outlaw Pass and cosmetic unlocks, you can purchase up to three Permits in order to unlock specialist role routes and activities for your character. These three roles are Bounty Hunting, Collecting, and Trading. Each permit costs 15 Gold Bars to purchase.

Earning Gold in Red Dead Online

Almost all of the set activities and events available in Red Dead Online's massive open world will net you a small number of Gold Nuggets upon completion. It takes 100 Gold Nuggets to create a Gold Bar, so this is generally a slow method of earning the Gold you need to purchase anything worthwhile - as it clearly Rockstar's intention.

The fastest method of earning Gold in this manner is to play lots of PvP activities, because no matter the playlist or mode you enter yourself into, you'll come away from it with slightly more Gold Nuggets than you had before; and as soon as one is finished you can just queue up for the next one, so there's very little downtime where you're not actively earning more Gold.

You can also complete events, missions, and activities in Free Roam, but if you were to do this (and you cared about earning Gold fast) I'd make use of the fast-travel options as much as possible to minimise the amount of time spent galloping from one place to the next. Though that is a shame, because the galloping from one place to the next is probably my favourite part of Red Dead Redemption 2.

How to buy Gold Bars in Red Dead Online

Clearly, Rockstar wants Red Dead Online players to purchase Gold Bars from the Rockstar Games Launcher Store, in order to bypass the extended grind of earning one twelfth of a Gold Bar at a time for hours and hours and days and days on end. If it doesn't get your feckles up too much to do this (if you understood that reference, you're an excellent person), then here's what you need to know about the pricing of Gold Bars in Red Dead Online:

• 25 Gold Bars cost £8.99/$9.99 (that's £0.36/$0.40 per Gold Bar)
• 55 Gold Bars cost £18.49/$19.99 (that's £0.34/$0.36 per Gold Bar)
• 150 Gold Bars cost £44.99/$49.99 (that's £0.30/$0.33 per Gold Bar)
• 245 Gold Bars cost £69.99/$74.99 (that's £0.29/$0.31 per Gold Bar)
• 350 Gold Bars cost £89.99/$99.99 (that's £0.26/$0.29 per Gold Bar)

In order to purchase Gold from the Rockstar Store, you can either head into the Online menu and select Store, or simply hit the Home button on your keyboard, which is the hotkey for bringing up the Rockstar Overlay; and then click on the Store tab. Once you've reached this tab through either of the previous methods, you can select the transaction you'd like to proceed with, and soon thereafter you'll have enough Gold Bars to purchase whatever it is you'd like to do in Red Dead Online, whether that's purchasing a Bounty Hunting permit or just getting your hands on that really dapper hat you've had your eyes on for the past several days.