RDR2 Honor: how to raise it, lower it and what it changes

Honor in RDR2 is a hidden score of everything Arthur does. The meter is visible in the pause menu: the white left side is honorable, the red right side is dishonorable. According to guides, there are 8 ranks in each direction, from −8 to +8, and one rank is roughly 40 Honor points.

Key details:

• Honor counts the deed, not the witnesses: a crime committed in a mask or with nobody watching still lowers it.
• In story missions, killing lawmen and looting bodies doesn’t change Honor: the game doesn’t punish you for what the script requires (according to Gameranx).
• If you help someone and then rob or kill them, you lose more than the bonus you got.

The table follows rdr2.org; the 10/25/50% discounts and outfits are also confirmed by Screen Rant and Gameranx. Rockstar has no official table.

Low Honor brings no discounts of its own. Guides disagree on loot: Screen Rant says bodies more often drop Dead Eye tonics, alcohol, tobacco and throwing weapons, while Gameranx says there are no bonuses for being dishonorable. The noticeable difference is elsewhere: passersby report you more often, lawmen are tougher and bounties build up faster.

Honor also affects small things: character reactions, entries in Arthur’s journal and even the music in some scenes.

1. Greet strangers in busy towns like Saint Denis and Valentine. Slow, but safe and endless.
2. Help in random encounters: a snakebite victim, a broken wagon, an ambushed traveler. This is the biggest “harvest” in the wild.
3. Release fish after catching them: a small bonus every time.
4. Donate to the camp tithing box and give money to the poor.
5. Bounties: do bounty hunting missions and pay off your own bounties at the post office.
6. Surrender to the law if you get caught, instead of shooting it out.
7. In duels, shoot the gun out of your opponent’s hand instead of killing them.
8. Do camp chores and choose the merciful options in Honor missions (Money Lending and Other Sins, The Course of True Love and others).

To avoid sliding back, wear the bandana only when you need it, don’t loot corpses outside missions and don’t take other people’s horses.

Lowering Honor is easy: any crime against civilians does it.

• killing or injuring passersby, companion animals or horses;
• robbing people, stores, stagecoaches, trains and homesteads;
• looting bodies outside story missions;
• stealing horses and wagons.

Why would you? Some players go the red path on purpose to see a different ending or to earn the Extreme Personality trophy for maximum or minimum Honor. A cheat won’t help here: trophies are disabled while it is active.

Arthur’s story has four possible endings. Two things decide which one you get: a choice the game offers near the end of Chapter 6, and your Honor level, high or low. Two choices times two Honor levels make four different scenes. We won’t describe what they look like.

Practical tips:

• What counts is your Honor at the end of Chapter 6, so you can still fix it late in the game.
• Make a manual save before the mission “Our Best Selves”: it is the point of no return until the end of Chapter 6.
• The “Do Not Seek Absolution I–II” missions in Annesburg open only at Honor rank 4 and disappear after Chapter 6.
• The epilogue is mandatory and starts the same way whatever ending you get.

The list of chapters and missions is on the RDR2 missions page, and an overview of each chapter is in the RDR2 walkthrough.

Enter them under Pause → Settings → Cheats, with all the punctuation. While a cheat is active the game doesn’t save, and trophies and achievements are disabled. So the honest route to the ending you want is regular play, and cheats are for experimenting. All 37 codes are on the RDR2 cheats page.

Honor discounts go well with saving money: how to earn more for new purchases is covered in our guide on how to make money in RDR2, and the basics are in RDR2 beginner tips.