This week marks the beginning of Red Dead Online’s Blood Money update. For a while now, most of the jobs in this online cowboy simulator have focused on pleasant affairs such as hunting animals, hunting criminals, gathering herbs, or making moonshine. Those are some fine ways to spend your time as a white-hatted cowpoke, but there haven’t been many opportunities to profit from some good old-fashioned western crime.
The Blood Money update aims to change that by introducing a way to make some serious money by becoming the kind of outlaw the Red Dead series is known for. Here’s what you can expect to find when the update goes live.
Crimes & Capitale
This update introduces a new character: Guido Martelli. He’s the right-hand man for Angelo Bronte, who you may remember as the well-connected crime boss from the fourth chapter of Red Dead Redemption 2’s single-player campaign. Martelli’s role in this update is to hire your online outlaw avatar to recover a form of black-market currency known as Capitale. These private bonds have fallen into the hands of individuals who don’t fit into Martelli and Bronte’s more sophisticated world of crime, so they want them back.
Blood Money adds special crimes for you to commit that will earn you Capitale. These crimes are missions given to you by minor characters from the single-player campaign such as Sean MacGuire, James Langton, Anthony Foreman, and Joe. These reprobates will show up as a dollar sign on the map and can be found in different locations across Great Plains, New Austin, Saint Denis, and New Hanover, respectively.
As for what these Crimes entail, you can look forward to stagecoach robberies, hold-ups, kidnappings, and all sorts of unlawful activities. There are also three multi-part Crime Contract missions that will be available when the Blood Money update drops: The Jed Phelps Contract, The Railroad Contract, and The Bluewater Contract. Three additional Crime Contract missions are expected to release sometime later.
You can either choose to take on these crimes yourself or enlist up to 5 others in a posse to take back Martelli’s Capitale. You can also find Capitale all around the map in chests, secret stashes, side missions, the corpses of your enemies, and other nooks and crannies.
Martelli's Opportunities
Recovering enough Capitale will eventually allow you to receive one of Martelli’s Opportunities, which are a series of missions designed to ruin the reputation of a Lemoyne Senator who is interfering with his criminal aspirations. These involve stealing valuable gems known as the Jewels Of The West. So far, only one of these Opportunities is available, which involves stealing an emerald from a train. Two more Opportunities should be arriving shortly after.
To start these Opportunities, you’ll need to earn enough Capitale. Once you have a certain amount, you can fork over that Capitale to begin the mission on one of three difficulties. Standard costs 15, Hard costs 20, and the Ruthless difficulty will set you back 25 Capitale. As you might suspect, the tougher and more expensive difficulties will net you the best rewards for the mission.
Other Bloody Extras
In addition to all these neat Crimes and Opportunities, the Blood Money update will bring The Quick Draw Club, which is a new version of Red Dead Online’s Outlaw Pass. Instead of a single pass, it will be a series of four passes that can be purchased for 25 Gold Bars each. There will also be new clothing, items, and NVIDIA DLSS support for any eligible NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards.
So if the idea of making some money by being a black hat-wearing varmint sounds like fun to you, load up Red Dead Online and start blasting.