Red Dead Online – Making Friends & In-game Text Chat

A simple guide on how to get together, play together, make friends and have fun.

Adding and Messaging

All credit goes to ZER0_K%!

You might be wondering how is it possible to add a player you met to your social club friend list, how to communicate with them. Even if you have a microphone this might prove useful for you if you want to see what others write you.

That is right. Even though RDO doesn’t have a public text chat, you can still send private message via in-game embedded social club. (Social Club opens with Home button located above the arrow keys on your keyboard)

To begin, open player menu in-game via “L”.

Select a player you’d like to befriend and press enter, left mouse button or whatever controller button you have to confirm.

Add the player to your friendlist if you like, via the in game add button.

Now, if you want to message then you have to choose “View Profile” which is going to take you to Rockstar Social Club.

Here you are going to click on message.

And fill in the message you’d like to send.

Getting to Know People You Meet

You don’t have to make friends right away. You can check people out, hang out with them before adding even if you miss the opportunity to do so right away.

That is right. Anybody you meet during an event, showdown, anyone you group up with or do any other kind of together activity whether it is a free roam mission, a type of pvp, a co-op mission, anything.

Often you will not spawn in the same lobby with people you played a few minutes before or they might leave hastily. If you want to get to know them better do the following:

Open your player menu via “L” and get back into “Players”. This will greet you with Nearby players again. However, if you pay attention, you can actually change tabs in this menu with “Q” and “E” using keyboard or whatever your controller supports. It has 4 tabs: Nearby, Crew, Friends, and Recent players.

The menu is useful if you want to get together with your guild, friends or make new friends.

Navigate to Recent.

Click on the player you’d like to hang out with and either strike up a chat, add them or even JOIN them in-game. You can just straight up play with them even without adding them to friends (maybe they do not know how Social Club works so it is a good chance to hang out with them anyway, or let them know).

Now, this system is not perfect. People only stay in recent tab as long as you play the game. So for example, you meet a player A, and you run the game for 3 hours, even if they exit the game for an hour and come back, you can Join them or send them a message via recent. If you shut down Red Dead then all players will be gone from your recent tab.

Also, when using Posse Up feature from Online Main Menu to join a random group of players, they will not be added to recent unless you start an activity together or you can just leave and quickly rejoin the posse and they will appear in recent tab. I don’t know why it works this way, seems like an oversight.