Red Dead Redemption 2 guide: How to find badgers

Finding a three-star badger in Red Dead Redemption 2 can be laborious. It took us hours of experimenting, but we figured out a reliable way to locate badgers.

To get a Perfect Badger Pelt, you need to find a three-star badger. Finding badgers is difficult enough. Finding a ★★★ badger is an exercise in patience and perseverance. In this guide, we’ll show you how to hunt badgers and find a Perfect Badger Pelt (and eventually craft your Legend of the East Satchel for a greatly expanded inventory).

Where to find and hunt badgers

Red Dead Redemption 2’s map icons show a handful of places to find badgers. As far as we can tell, you’re just as likely (read: unlikely) to find a badger in any of those locations. (They spawn rarely, no matter where you are.)

After hunting in multiple locations, we settled on an area in The Heartlands, which is southeast of Valentine in New Hanover. We’ve highlighted it in our maps below.

Grid View

• Badger location maps from Red Dead Redemption 2 Rockstar Games via Polygon
• Badger location maps from Red Dead Redemption 2 Rockstar Games via Polygon

We chose this location because it’s a an open area with gentle sloping hills and sporadic vegetation, which makes finding tiny badgers easier than it would be in heavily vegetated areas.

Here’s how to find and hunt a badger:

1. Make a camp anywhere in the area. (We chose a location near the Oil Derrick, which you can see in the header image above.)
2. Sleep until night. (We can’t say for certain that badgers are nocturnal animals, but we sure didn’t find them during the day.)
3. Mount your horse.
4. Equip the Varmint Rifle.
5. Roam the area (highlighted in our maps), using Eagle Eye to search for animals and animal trails.
6. When you see a badger, chase after it and shoot it. (You don’t need to use Dead Eye. One shot with the regular lock-on will do just fine.)

On average, we found one badger every night. A few in-game hours after the sun came up (so, a few real-world minutes), we headed back to camp and settled in for the day, resuming our hunt the following night.

We found our three-star badger at about 5 a.m., during sunrise.

A few things to keep in mind, since hunting for long periods of time causes your brain to invent weird conspiracies (so we’ve heard):

• Hunting is easier at night because the effects of Eagle Eye are more pronounced. It’s easier to see glowing animals in the distance, for example.
• Feel free to gallop around the map. You won’t spook your (potential) prey unless you’re super close, and that’s unlikely.
• We found plenty of deer, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, pronghorns and rats in the area, so if you’re looking for any of those animals, this is a good place to farm.
• Badgers are the worst.