How to easily farm lawmen and bounty hunters

Crime does pay! Your easy money guide to outrageous fortunes!

Introduction

This is an easy, repetitive, boring, and pretty safe way to earn lots of cash while killing a tall pile of lawmen and bounty hunters.

What You Need

Before you start, you need three things:

1. A fence in Emerald Ranch. Help Seamus steal the stagecoach from his cousin. The cash from each kill is miniscule. You are after the luxury items. Seamus is just up the road from where you’ll be operating.
2. A Lancaster or Lichtfield Repeater. Both guns reload quickly and keep your enemies at bay.
3. A Springfield rifle or better with a medium or long scope to snipe nearby targets along the trails if you need the law’s attention.

Getting It Done

First, you’ll need to invade the farm near Emerald Ranch with the broken-down barn and small farmhouse. They have wheat growing in one field and another crop growing in an adjacent field. There are some cattle and a horse as well. Kill only one farmer after you’ve grabbed your repeater and rifle. The survivor will get law enforcement’s attention.

Use high-velocity ammo only and equip the bandolier. The bandolier will hold 300 repeater rounds. That’s more than enough ammo to do what you need to do.

The house has a kitchen, a short hallway, and two bedrooms. One bed has a guitar lying atop it. You want to make your defense from the other bedroom. That room has two doors. The one leading outside is locked. Before the law reaches you, close the door that leads to the other room and keep the door closed in the room you defend from as much as possible. This will block anyone from shooting at you from the front lawn and slow the intruders down enough to keep them from swarming you.

Two waves of lawmen will first appear. Stay crouched near the bed where the small table sits. This will allow you to keep the door closed and avoid almost all the gunfire from outside. You may need to adjust your position slightly to remain hidden. After you finish off the second wave, loot the bodies and dump them outside on the porch. This keeps your interior nice and organized; looting piles of bodies is a breeze if you keep the cadavers inside to a minimum. After the lawmen are killed, save the game and sleep on the bed with the guitar. In the morning, you may encounter one or both owners in the hallway or kitchen. Remind them why they shouldn’t enter a house with a pile of corpses outside, especially if the bodies were lawmen or bounty hunters. The only thing you need to do is step outside. The bounty hunters will show up immediately. There are six men and possibly two dogs in a single wave. The dogs will get the men inside the house quickly. Otherwise, you literally have to stand up and shoot at the bounty hunters to get them inside the building. If your bedroom door is closed, the dogs won’t attack you. They just disappear after the intruders try to enter your room. Shoot, loot, save, sleep, step outside in the morning, and repeat the cycle.

At some point, you can only loot cash. That means that your satchel is full. When that happens, leave the house without dumping the bodies outside and climb on your horse. Head to Emerald Ranch and sell your luxury items to Seamus. You should be able to earn about $300 or more.

Clean your repeater and stock up on high-velocity ammo. When you return to the farmhouse the next day, the new owners will have cleaned your base of operations and naively assumed the worst is over.

Filling The Legends of the East satchel will net you about $3000 if you elect to pay your $1500 bounty afterwards. That's just in cash and luxury items alone. You'll have tons of extra medical supplies you can offload. It took me about three straight days of gameplay using this method to max out my capacity. Along the way, I learned some peculiar things about the game engine. A typical wave yields nine bodies. A pile of nine bodies will yield about seven lootable corpses. Two just disappear. If you kill off a wave without looting the bodies immediately and leave the house to kill off a straggler or loot a body out in the yard, you'll return to find only three or four lootable corpses where there was eight or nine before. It's rare to be able to loot all nine corpses from inside the house. You can loot all nine if you kill them before they pile up inside, but that means fighting outside. If you are going to do that, raising money this way is stupid.

I had to kill about 500 people to achieve the $4500 maxed out result. I died twice during my 3-day operation. One time I got careless, but I consistently saved the game. Another time, the lawmen opened the locked bedroom door that leads outside and they swarmed me. That was the only time over dozens of waves that door was ever unlocked.

Crouching in the far end of the hallway with a specced-out automatic shotgun is another good option. Use the slugs. Dump the bodies in the bedroom you won't be sleeping in.

Saint Denis offers a similar hunting ground along the dock area, but it isn't as good. The lawmen can shoot you through the wooden fence, but they never scale the fence. They usually swim under the docks and climb a ladder. The loot is questionable sometimes; the bodies may yield only cash before your satchel is full. Your stolen goods fence can be difficult to reach and may require hiding in the slums to avoid the law. Use the rolling block rifle for long-range work. It's silly to have to shoot twice. Hunting in the Heartlands is the best tried-and-true method there is.

Why does the crazy guy who relishes killing always arrive last? Shouldn't he be the first one through the door instead? Still, you'd have to be crazy to enter the farmhouse alone after the rest of your party gets torn to shreds.