Role discussion/review: The Trader

The trader role is the second one I unlocked, and the first one I finished. It's a challenging one in some ways because of the glitches and bugs that have been rampant in the game recently, but despite that, I was able to complete it easily enough before that became a major, major issue; I mostly haven't been as successful with it since.

Trying out my new MacBay coat up at the Millesani claim. This doesn't have anything to do with the trader, but what the heck. More images is always good, and I don't need too many of all of the outfits.

That said, the instance of bugs and glitches that would impact trader progression seems to have dramatically lessened after a series of updates and patches, and I don't hesitate to recommend getting into the role at all. The trader is one that has some fun elements, but it does get to be monotonous after a while. That said, it's still worth doing, because the payoff is pretty good. In fact, just this morning, I dumped a bunch of donations on Cripps' table and did a run from my camp up near Emerald Ranch to Saint Denis, where I killed about five or six NPC raiders and made $625 dollars. I had enough after that to go pick up the remainder of the trader outfits that I still hadn't bought yet, and even one of the moonshiner outfits, which are the last ones I need to buy. You can see my character sporting these new threads in this post.

A quick word about the outfits for the roles. Because they don't break down into constituent parts, which at first frustrated me a fair bit, they can add a lot of texture that would be difficult if they were all separate elements. They can, therefore, make outfits that look quite a bit better than they would otherwise. However, that's no guarantee that they actually, in fact, do look better. As I said for the bounty hunter outfits, they are a mix of both really cool and really silly design cues. The little capes or mini-ponchos on the bounty hunter being the most notable example here. In many ways, the trader outfits look a little better; they have a kind of buckskin and leather trapper look to them. See my pictures of my character in them, although due to bad weather in game, I ended up having to take them later in the evening than I would have liked, so the lighting isn't always great.

And that's really the gist of the trader role; it's not really well named. The main activity that traders do is hunt animals; shoot them and bring them to Cripps at your camp, who renders them into "goods"--whatever that is (tanned hides, I think is mostly what it is). Once you have some made, preferably a full wagon load, because taking only a handful isn't worth the time, you make a delivery to a buyer somewhere on the map. These delivery missions involve driving a wagon full of bags, crates or boxes, and are potentially open to attack by other players--although that's only happened to me once. It was frustrating, but when I went back to camp, I could start the delivery over again, at least. Also, when you arrive at your destination, your buyers are often under attack, so you need to dismount from your wagon and shoot some NPCs before pulling it in. The trader is a fairly lucrative business; like I said, if you grind enough animals to be able to do a full large wagon load to a distant buyer location, that's $625 bucks. However, as camp disappearing glitches and poor animal spawn rates in the past have dogged the game, I've gotten used to not bothering to grind this role much anymore, and now mostly casually bring in animals when I'm conveniently close to my camp and they're spawning. After doing a few, I usually go do something else, and if I make a delivery after many hours of play, that's fine. There are slightly faster, and more importantly, more reliable ways to make money. It really blows to have spent a bunch of time hunting, have your horse loaded up with some pelts and carcasses, and roll back to camp only to find that it's disappeared and you can't give Cripps your stuff.

The nice thing about the role is that unlike the trapper and Pearson's camp upgrades in single player, one-star animals are still worth turning in. Better quality animals, of course, are more efficient in terms of getting your count of "goods" up faster, but it's more efficient hunting to just blast everything you see with your bolt action rifle with express ammo, which will tend to mean more lower quality donations to Cripps' outfit.

Having the trader role enabled also means the addition of two things to your camp; Cripps' butcher table, and a pallet where he builds up the goods as he makes them. You can get a quick at a glance idea of how close he is to being ready for a delivery by looking at the pallet; if it looks like he's got nearly a wagon load on it, you're probably almost ready to go.

One of the trader role outfits and a decent view of the trader tent.

In addition to making wagon deliveries and hunting lots and lots and lots of animals, the trader role also has another type of mission. In order to tan and preserve animal hides, Cripps needs "supplies" which are vaguely defined, although some kind of tanning fluid is obviously one of them (although bags of... whatever is another.) In order to give some variety to this, there are a number of different types of missions you can undertake, and you'll need to do it every so often or his work will shut down. Going and stealing a wagon of supplies is the most straightforward; you show up where suppliers are and gun down the other guys who have it, and then drive it back to your camp. This can be difficult if it's the tank wagon full of fluid, because it's very difficult not to damage the wagon and end up bringing a less than optimal size load in.

Other times you go to one of Cripps' buddies who has a wagon he'll give you if you bring him a specific type of animal, which always seems to spawn near where he's waiting. Why this guy doesn't just shoot the buffalo, or a couple of wild turkeys, or whatever it is that he wants that are hanging around a hundred yards or so away from where he is on his own is beyond me, but the point, again, is to add variety to the missions. Sometimes, you go to where some buddies of Cripps' are who are under attack and help them defend their campsite. If you do, then you can take the wagon as a gift.

Other than the tank wagon, the most difficult, but sometimes the most fun is robbing a train. For whatever reason, I always seem to have to do this when the train is up in the northern regions where the tracks run through the mountains and are kind of inaccessible, but that's probably just my bad luck. In any case, for some time, I always did these missions, because it saved money and I'm a cheapskate, plus it gave me both role XP and of course regular XP (and Outlaw Pass XP, which I still needed at the time.) But there is another option where you just buy a batch of supplies for $20, and they'll show up in your camp in a few minutes and Cripps will get back to work. I've now gotten to the point where I automatically do this. Doing the missions for resupply would be great if I wasn't doing something else, which I usually now am, so to save time, I consider it part of the cost of doing business, and I'm OK with taking four or so $20 payments out of my net profit in order to save time for every 100 goods delivery. My engagement with the role is much more passive now that I've maxed it out. It's still worth doing because sometimes you just like hunting animals, sometimes you get attacked by bears or cougars or wolves and have animals anyway, and after all, the payout is pretty big. But it's not worth putting a lot of time and effort into it now that I'm done with it. It's not so fun and exciting that I'd do a lot of it for its own sake now that I'm finished.  But at a certain phase in my character progression, this was one that I spent a fair bit of time on, I enjoyed it still long after I maxed out the role, and it was one of my best sources of income back when I didn't have a lot of good sources of income yet. In spite of the fact that the role hasn't aged terribly well once you've been done with it for a while, it's still a success and a worthwhile endeavor. It's much less frustrating than the bounty hunter ended up being to do, and it pays much better. Of course, the caveat here is that the disappearing camp and lack of animals made it even more frustrating when those glitches blocked your progress, but that didn't really turn into a major issue for me until after I'd already maxed out the role. It probably contributed a fair bit to my loss of interest in the role too; if I hadn't had that happen, I'd probably still be a bit more aggressive about grinding out hunting, at least, if not doing resupply missions. If the bounty hunter desperately needed the legendary bounties to not be a tedious grind, this one not only doesn't have anything equivalent, but it also doesn't really need them as badly either. Keep in mind that the legendary bounties were added slowly over time as part of the drip feed of weekly new content. The trader role, on the other hand, is successful enough to stand alone without needing drip feed updates.

The level one trader outfit looks surprisingly good, at least in this color, with the Pittman tricorner hat, brown Tappscott gloves and my brass spectacles. I call that outfit my Colonial and I might use it for a while as a default hot weather outfit. 

The role, as all of them do, also provides a convenient source of gold bars as part of the daily challenges; I always have three daily challenges associated with this role. Some of them aren't really reasonable for being done easily, but some of them are really easy (like eat three camp stews) and some of them, if they line up with being on on a day when you've got a delivery to make, can be convenient too.

As with the other three original frontier pursuits roles, there is a camp theme associated with the role that you can buy, as well as a specific Cripps outfit. The moonshiner offered neither of those, but the moonshiner isn't really associated with your camp, so that's probably why. I'm really curious to see what the new batch of roles that'll get rolled out over the next year or two end up being like. Other than that, what else does the trader role give you? As with the bounty hunter (and all of them really) the twenty role levels are divided up into four tiers of five levels each. There are rewards for every level that are automatic, and then there are rewards for each tier that you have to first unlock with your role unlock tokens, then buy with either money or gold. And, the final top tier horses and another cosmetic item are part of the tier system, but you can't just be in the top tier, you actually have to have maxed out your levels all the way to 20 to unlock them. Anyway, let's go through the list. As you'll see, compared to the bounty hunter, there are more unlockable items and less "free" items in general. Although given that much of the free items for the bounty hunter were cosmetic gun tricks that you really only do when you're standing around not doing anything, in practical terms, they're probably not all that different, except this just has more unlockable items.

Another of the pretty good looking outfits in front of my trader tent.

Tier 1: Novice
Level 1: Two role unlock tokens
Level 2: Two role unlock tokens
Level 3: Two role unlock tokens (this is a bit sparse of a start on this role)
Level 4:  Invitation to participate in trader events. There was one of these for bounty hunter, and when I made that post, I didn't know what it is. It turns out, though, although I hadn't paid attention, that when you sometimes get those free roam invites to events, that some of them are related to your role, and if you don't have the role, you don't get the invite and don't know about those. So, this allows you to participate in the Trade Route event when it comes up on the event schedule. I did some of these when I was fairly early in the game, and they're kinda fun sometimes. I don't normally do them now, but if I get to the point where I don't have much else to do, I might start it up again. I don't normally like much Pvp, but these structured events aren't so bad. I've never actually done the trade route event, so I don't know how it works, though. Also, two role unlock tokens. I can see myself forgetting to note that, so I'll say up front; every level of every role automatically gives you two role unlock tokens. Many levels give you only that, but even the ones that give you something else also give you two role unlock tokens.
Level 5: Two role unlock tokens.
Tier 1 unlocks:

• The Fletcher Saddle ($525) I already discussed my saddle strategy at length, but this is the second saddle I got, I think, and as soon as I had it, I put it on my Kladrubar and used it a lot. It's a good looking saddle, but none of the role saddles really give you the stamina drain improvement and speed and acceleration improvement that the Nacogdoches does, so I probably won't really use it much anymore.
• The Monterrey ($250) The tier 1 trader outfit. It's pretty plain, so I doubt I'd wear it ever, and the hat is actually really bizarre and ugly, so I don't think I'll use that either. Other than because I'm naturally kind of compulsive about collecting things and because I wanted to have all of the outfits for character selfies for this post, I'd probably not have bothered picking this up at all, and even if I did, it'd be a very low priority.
• Stew pot ($650) This is a camp upgrade that allows Cripps to have stew always ready to eat at your camp. Even without this, you can get stew at the Blackwater and Valentine camps, and I think a few other places here and there on the map. But it's nice to have your own personal pot in your camp. I eat at least a bowl of it every time I spawn, and every time I'm in camp, which has cut down tremendously on my hunting or fishing for game meat to eat (which I still have for when I'm injured or are away from my camp for several days of in-game time and my cores start to fall.) You can use different recipes to to get improved stew that gives you gold cores. Mostly it takes big game meat, but if you're like me, you get attacked by enough packs of wolves just riding around that if you stop to skin them and put the best quality one on your horse to take back to camp, you not only have materials to donate to Cripps without having to take time hunting, but you've also got plenty of game meat to make improved stew with. I actually stopped doing it when I was having too many camp glitches, because I didn't think it was worth it if I wasn't going to be able to come back and still eat another helping of improved stew later because it would reset, but now that I'm not having camp glitches anymore, maybe I'll start up again. Starting your play session with gold cores, and being able to refill them every time you come back to camp is a pretty nifty thing, and certainly worth it. Plus, it creates another fire, which makes your camp easier to spot at night, and I actually kind of like a camp with lots going on. Makes it look more like a home of sorts. Although it's kinda pricey, I recommend this item, and I've heard other players consider it one of the more under-rated game items in general.
• Goodman gunbelt ($100) Not my favorite of the gunbelts; it has a lot of cut leather fringe on it. I can't remember off hand which of the single player challenges had a gunbelt that looked very similar, but it was the hunter, or whatever it was called, I think. That said, I do have one of these. 
• Kladrubar black and white coats ($150) These basic tier 1 horses are very large. While not fast, they have incredibly good health and stamina and their demeanor in the face of danger is really good. You should be warned that the breed, which comes originally from the Czechs, is considered a bit funny looking by some; there's a ridge or hump of sorts along the face that gives it an unusual profile. I actually quite like this horse, and I use it a lot. A bit less now that I'm spending most of my time on my horse traveling, because of its slower speed, but it's still a really good horse, and I think it may well be the best horse to take into combat if you're doing a mission where you can plan ahead for that. Of course, the tier 1 aren't as good as the later ones, which is a bit of a shame, because pure black and white are good looking horse colors. That's why the Arabians come in those colors, for instance. I'm not saying that they're my favorite colors, but again, I'm always frustrated that there isn't some way to level up your different coat colors to all have tier 3 stats. Every horse of the breed should have the same potential, otherwise all you'll really see most of the time are the top two colors. I dislike the semi-enforced conformity of appearance.
• Filigree Buckle (4 gold) A pretty sweet looking belt buckle for your gun belt. Not as cool as the Viper buckle from the bounty hunter, but still pretty good. I really should use a bit more variety in my buckles for my outfits. I usually don't even think about changing it.
• Hammer ($75) A basic tool like this is ridiculously overpriced at this cost, but let's be honest; it's not about being a basic tool, it's a melee weapon and money siphon to keep players having something to spend on. I don't use melee weapons all that often, but this is a cool one. I have seen videos of guys who do legendary bounty missions trying to just use the hammer, for instance, and I think that's actually pretty cool.

The top tier trader outfit as the sun goes down. And my trader horse Little John behind me. 

Tier 2: Promising

Level 6: An upgrade to the amount of ingredients your satchel can hold, plus two role unlock tokens.

Level 7: Awareness skill page which allows you to identify rival trader missions you can interrupt at a greater range. Be honest, though--this is Rockstar specifically encouraging griefing, and it sucks. Luckily, I think most players ignore this facet of the trader role most of the time, but every once in a while you'll run across some douchebag that wants to steal your wagon from you, and his posse of layabouts. When that happens, the game blows. Plus two role unlock tokens.

Level 8: Canine warning skill page, in which you can train your camp dog to warn of incoming raiders. My camp has literally never been attacked, which I think is another griefing activity, so I don't actually know much about how this works or why it's a good thing. Plus two role unlock tokens.

Level 9: Two role unlock tokens.

Level 10: Two role unlock tokens.

Tier 2 unlocks:

• The Sunderland (348.25) A pretty nice improvement over the Monterrey. This is actually a decent outfit in its own right, and has a decent hat. A bit plain, but not too bad.
• Medium Delivery Wagon ($500) This allows you to make deliveries of up to 50 goods at a time (as opposed to 25, which the small delivery wagon you start with allows you.) While this seems fine, it actually sucks. I think I only used it once or twice before I unlocked the large delivery wagon, and then this became pointless. Unfortunately, it's a prereq for buying the large one. Nice, one Rockstar. Way to stick it to us.
• Weapons Locker ($575) Another camp upgrade you can buy that puts a little case next to your camp. When you start to get a lot of weapons, it's nice to keep some in your locker so that your weapon selections on your weapon wheel don't take a long time to scroll through, but you can also not have that problem by just not buying tons of weapons. I admit that I do use this, and mostly I've just put my older, cheaper weapons in here that I don't bother using anymore because now I have better ones, but it's a bit pricey for what is a very minimal luxury.
• Tapscott Gloves ($100) These are the only role gloves that you can buy with cash instead of gold, so they were the only ones I had for a while when I thought my gold was too precious to spend on gloves. They look pretty cool, but because I had them way before I had most of the other gloves that I have now, I'm kinda over them honestly, and don't use them much. But that's not really fair to them; they are a good looking pair of cavalry type gloves with a pattern on them.
• Lance Knife (5 gold) A "bespoke" reskin for your hunting knife. I actually haven't bought it yet, although I keep meaning to. One of these days I'll remember. It's a bit pricey, and I wish it was cash instead of gold or I would have done it long ago.
• Trader Camp Theme ($700) Not my favorite of the camp themes, but all of the role camp themes are better than all of the other non-role camp themes, let's be honest. I'll also admit that part of the reason I don't like this quite as much is because there's piles or buckets or whatnot of bloody animal offal right outside your tent. I know, I know--it's not a real tent, and even if it was, it's not like I'd actually be sleeping in it, but the fact that there's no way any normal person would be OK with that is a turnoff on the theme for me, I admit. Anyway, look at the images to see what the tent looks like, at least, with this theme in place.

Tier 3: Established

Level 11: Efficiency Skill Page increases the amount of material that Cripps is able to get from perfect carcasses. Nice, I suppose, for those who hunt carefully with bows and stuff, but I don't turn in enough perfect carcasses for it to really make much difference. That said, you don't have to buy it, you just have to hit level 11, and you get it anyway. Plus two role unlock tokens.

Level 12: Two role unlock tokens

Level 13: Materials satchel upgrade, which increases the amount of materials you can carry. Plus two role unlock tokens.

Level 14: Two role unlock tokens.

Level 15: Two role unlock tokens.

Tier 3 Unlocks:

• The Worthington ($446.75) Another step up from the past outfit, both for the outfit itself, and the hat which I think will get a decent amount of usage from me. It's a good looking hat.
• Kladrubar Cremello and Gray coats ($550) The Cremello makes this horse look an awful lot like Buell from single player, but of course, hardly anyone gets him because he's a mid tier horse. I'll try to stop... ahem... beating a dead horse on this issue. Personally, I wouldn't have bought either of these colors either, but I know my daughter really likes the Cremello. She'd buy it anyway, but her progression in the role is so slow that she still hasn't unlocked it.
• Shoulder Waves and the Beaded (2 gold) The trader haircut and beard/mustache set. The mustache in particular is really big and poofy and has beads tied into each end. The haircut is a slicked back long hair look.
• Large delivery wagon ($750) Allows you to make deliveries of up to 100 goods. Plus, it looks notably larger and is covered, which is nice. Its super important to buy this as soon as you can, because it only takes a couple of deliveries to pay for itself, after which you're making much more profit from this whole operation.
• Goodman holster ($75) The off hand holster to match the gunbelt unlocked earlier on. While I tend to think that it's a given that I'll carry two guns, there are aesthetic reasons not to, and honestly, I usually use my bolt action or my Lancaster much more than my revolvers or pistols anyway. If you don't have an off hand holster, your longer coats will actually hang down like they're supposed to in front rather than being swept back to make room for you to draw your gun.
• Hunting wagon ($875) A wagon that you can take around with you and load more animals into it than you can on your horse. It's actually a pretty good deal if you plan on using the trader quite a bit to grind for money, because otherwise you're too limited in terms of what you can actually bring back to camp. Unless the animal spawns are so incredible that you're literally hunting just a few hundred yards away from camp, of course.
• Rawback Ring (4 gold) I kinda like these little cosmetic things like this, although of course, the rings are almost impossible to see except maybe on the closeup of your hand as you're opening the catalog or skinning an animal. Plus, I almost always wear gloves. That said, I still get these anyway.
• Pump action shotgun variant ($450) I have a pump action shotgun, but I almost never use it, and I don't keep it equipped; it's in my weapons locker. That said, if I used this more, I'd certainly go for this variant. It actually looks really good.

I should probably take this. It's too dark. A trader outfit for me and for Cripps.

Tier 4: Distinguished

Level 16: Protection skill page teaches you to reduce the chance of raids on your camp. It must work; I've never had my camp raided ever, either with or without this skill. Plus two unlock tokens.

Level 17: Two role unlock tokens.

Level 18: Two role unlock tokens.

Level 19: Two role unlock tokens.

Level 20: Two role unlock tokens.

Tier 4 Unlocks:

• The Tyringham ($545) An interesting role outfit. The hat is kind of ugly, but the outfit itself is a kind of weird rustic luxury. I actually kind of like it. As an aside, as with the Carthage (bounty hunter outfit) you actually get a "secret" ring as part of this, which like the hat is usable without wearing the entire outfit.
• Hat Tipping ($200) An emote. A friendly one, so more generally useful than the one that the bounty hunter gave us, although I still prefer my go-to of thumbs up to this.
• Kladrubar Dapple Rose Gray and Silver coats ($950) My first really good horse, I think (although I ended up maxing out trader and collector right about the same time.) It's still one of my favorites, although as I've said, it's a bit on the slow side. That said, it has max health and stamina, and is great in a fight. If you're not racing, then this is the best horse in the game. But because traveling across the map is an important part of what you're doing, getting max in health and stamina is sometimes not worth the compromise in speed and acceleration. These two coats are a kind of not quite black and not quite white, which is interesting since black and white are the tier 1 colors for this horse breed. For quite a while, I thought maybe I'd get a second one of the other color here, but I'm not interesting anymore in having two of the same breed, plus the Breton steel gray is almost the same as the dapple rose gray. Although the default mane and tail color on the Breton is white, while here it's black.
• Brass Spectacles (5 gold) Must be level 20 to unlock. I love these. I only have one pair, in brass color, but I use them on most of my outfits. If I'd started the game early enough to have gotten the first outlaw pass two, which had the steel spectacles, I'd probably use them and not have cared quite as much about these, but I didn't so these are my basic glasses.

Another shot of the weird graveyard up by the Riggs Fort ruins.