How to get gold medals in RDR2: requirements for all 104 missions

Every story mission with a medal has one to five optional objectives: finish within a time limit, land a number of headshots, keep your accuracy up, don’t heal, stay undetected. At the end the game grades you with bronze, silver or gold.

• Gold: all requirements met.
• Silver: some of the requirements met (more on the exact threshold below).
• Bronze: you simply finished the mission.

The key rule: every requirement has to be done in a single run. Unlike GTA 5, you can’t get the time on one replay and the accuracy on another. Each new attempt wipes all the checkmarks.

Three more things to know before you start:

• Requirements are hidden on your first playthrough. The checklist only appears on a replay, in the mission journal and in the Story menu. You can still meet the requirements blind: if you know the list in advance, the game will count them.
• Replay: Pause → Progress → Story → chapter → mission. The game also offers a replay right after a mission ends.
• Your loadout is fixed on a replay. The game hands you its own set of weapons and a horse, there are no tonics, and consumables are scarce or missing entirely. So a replay is usually harder than the first playthrough.

Hence the tip that PowerPyx, Fandom and rdr2.org all give: make a manual save before every story mission. If you miss gold, load your save: you keep your own weapons, horse and tonics. The one limitation: missions that run back to back with no break can’t be saved separately this way.

Medals don’t depend on Honor: no source links the two, and there are no Honor requirements in the objective lists. Built-in cheats disable trophies and achievements, so earn your Gold Rush medals without them.

In the standard edition of RDR2, 104 story missions have a medal. That’s the count from PowerPyx, Fandom and rdr2.org, and it’s what you get if you add up the missions chapter by chapter. GTABase says 105: it adds High and Low Finance, the Rhodes bank robbery with Charles. That mission is only in the Special and Ultimate Edition.

The achievement needs 70, so the standard edition gives you a buffer of 34 missions. You can leave the hardest ones alone. Whether High and Low Finance counts toward Gold Rush has never been directly confirmed, and it’s also unknown whether the mission exists in the PC version. Better not to rely on it.

Two missions sit in the replay menu under a different chapter from where you play them. That’s Murfree Country is listed under Chapter 5, and Icarus and Friends under Chapter 6, even though you play it in Chapter 5. Our tables follow the replay menu.

Sources disagree here. Fandom and GamesRadar say silver is awarded for half or more of the requirements. GTABase says at least one is enough.

For the achievement the difference doesn’t matter. Gold Rush only counts gold; silver adds nothing.

The simplest way to judge difficulty is by the number of requirements. This is our assessment, not an official ranking: 11 missions have just one requirement, and none of them involves shooting. It all comes down to pace: skip what you can, don’t get distracted and stick to the marker.

Other easy picks are missions with two requirements and no gunplay: Polite Society, Valentine Style; Eastward Bound; Simple Pleasures; Farming, For Beginners; Old Habits; Trying Again; Honor, Amongst Thieves; Archeology for Beginners. A Quiet Time has three requirements but no shooting either.

Eight missions have five requirements each. Almost every time it’s a mix of a whole-mission timer, headshots and a no-healing rule. One mistake and you start over.

• Old Friends (Chapter 1): Kieran within 45 seconds, 3 enemies with a single use of Dead Eye, 15:30, 15 headshots, no healing.
• Who the Hell is Leviticus Cornwall? (Chapter 1): save Lenny, guards within 1:30, no damage in the shootout, 10 headshots, no healing.
• Pouring Forth Oil IV (Chapter 2): guards before Sean fires, the baggage car, escape within 1:30, 10 Dead Eye kills, no healing.
• Sodom? Back to Gomorrah (Chapter 3): every safe, 5 headshots during the escape, Downes Ranch within 1:55, accuracy of at least 70%, no healing.
• A Short Walk in a Pretty Town (Chapter 3): Dead Eye, pistols and revolvers only, 4:30, 20 headshots, no healing.
• Horsemen, Apocalypses (Chapter 4): the boat before it lands, pistols and revolvers only, accuracy of at least 70%, 15 headshots, no healing.
• Urban Pleasures (Chapter 4): every person at the station, 10 lawmen from the trolley, none on the wagon, Lenny’s dynamite, no healing.
• Visiting Hours (Chapter 6): two guards from the tower, the boat within 2:45, 9:00, accuracy of at least 80%, no healing.

Some four-requirement missions are just as tough because the bar is set very high:

• Most headshots: Favored Sons, 35; My Last Boy, 30; The Sheep and the Goats, Paradise Mercifully Departed and Banking, The Old American Art, 25 each.
• Highest accuracy, 90%: Advertising, the New American Art – II and No, No and Thrice, No.
• Shortest timer: 4 seconds to free the workers in Savagery Unleashed.
• Zero mistakes: destroy the ship without missing a shot (Hell Hath No Fury), crack the safe without a single error (Banking, The Old American Art), finish the whole mission without taking damage (American Distillation).

PowerPyx calls Gold Rush the hardest trophy in RDR2 precisely because of missions like these. But thanks to the 34-medal buffer, you can skip most of them.

Eight requirements explicitly call for Dead Eye. Go into these missions with a full Dead Eye meter, and remember there are no tonics on a replay.

According to Fandom, only a shot into a living enemy counts as a “hit” for accuracy. A second shot at a target that is already falling, or a shot into a body or the scenery, counts as a miss. So in missions with an accuracy requirement, don’t fire “just in case”.

1. Go for gold on your first playthrough. That way you have your own weapons, horse and tonics. On a replay you get a basic set.
2. Manual save before each mission. If you fail, you load your save instead of starting a replay.
3. Don’t restart from a checkpoint in missions with a no-healing requirement. According to Fandom, restarting from a checkpoint fails that requirement.
4. Eat in advance. For no-healing missions, Fandom suggests fortifying your Health core with food beforehand, for example Minty Big Game Meat.
5. Skip cutscenes in missions with a timer. Fandom warns that in some missions skipping a cutscene actually fails the time requirement, but doesn’t say which ones.
6. There are 14 stealth requirements. “Undetected” or “stealthily” objectives appear in Chapters 2–6: Paying a Social Call, The Spines of America, Friends in Very Low Places, Blessed are the Peacemakers, American Fathers II, Archeology for Beginners, Honor, Amongst Thieves and others.
7. Missed missions can be made up. According to PowerPyx, after the finale some missed Honor missions show up in the journal, and they do award a medal. The Lending a Hand trophy doesn’t count this kind of replay.

Heads-up: some requirements give away what happens in the mission. If this is your first playthrough, it’s better to open the tables below one mission at a time.

Some story missions have no medal. Usually these are the first parts of two- or three-step jobs, where only the next part awards a medal, plus a few Honor missions.

• Chapter 2: Pouring Forth Oil I and III; We Loved Once and True I and II; Money Lending and Other Sins I and II.
• Chapter 3: Money Lending and Other Sins IV; The Course of True Love I; Advertising, the New American Art (Part I).
• Chapter 4: Money Lending and Other Sins V; Lost and Not Quite Found; Fatherhood and Other Dreams (Part I); American Fathers I.
• Chapter 6: The Course of True Love IV; Money Lending and Other Sins VI and VII; Mrs. Sadie Adler, Widow (Part I); Of Men and Angels.
• Epilogue: The Landowning Classes, The Best of Women.

Stranger missions, gang activities and hunting requests don’t have medals. The exception is High and Low Finance from the Special / Ultimate Edition. For the full story in order, see the RDR2 missions page.

Below are all 104 missions with a medal and their gold requirements. The numbering is ours; the order within each chapter follows PowerPyx. Other guides may number them differently because Chapters 2–4 branch. Mission names are as in the game, in English. “No healing” means not using any items that restore health: food, tonics and so on. “Pistols and revolvers only” means sidearms only.

Special / Ultimate Edition: High and Low Finance (the Rhodes bank robbery with Charles): complete within 5:45 and take no damage during the escape.

• PS4 and Xbox One (2018): 104 medals, Gold Rush for 70. On PlayStation it’s a silver trophy.
• PC (2019, Steam, Rockstar, Epic): the same achievement with the same description. Sources list no differences in medals.
• PS5 and Xbox Series: there’s no separate version; the game runs via backward compatibility, and the medals are the same.
• Special / Ultimate Edition: plus the High and Low Finance mission, 105 in total.
• Mobile and Netflix: RDR2 isn’t available there, only the first Red Dead Redemption.
• Red Dead Online: there are no story mission medals; Gold Rush applies to story mode only.

All the game’s achievements are collected on the RDR2 trophies page, and what counts toward 100% is in the RDR2 100% completion guide.