I have played 10 hours and I have only done 1 story mission yet. In that mission I took a wagon from camp to a town with a dude and 3 ladies. After the mission those people had abandoned me so I was stuck in town with no horse. So I didn't know what to do so I just jumped on a nearby horse and started riding it around town and we became bonded. Then I went into a building and when I came out my horse from camp was standing there next to my new horse. (?) I then jumped on my camp horse and went off into the wilderness and did a bunch of stuff. There is still an icon in town for that new horse that says "temporary horse".

So here is where it gets interesting. I catch another horse out in the wilderness and rode it enough to be lv 1 bonded. My camp horse is tied to a tree this whole time. I then went and did a side mission and when I came back that new horse I caught is gone, but the town still has my temporary horse on the map. My camp horse was still where I tied it to a tree which wasn't very far, luckily.

I have some questions about this. WTF? If I catch a horse in the wilderness and want to keep it, what I do? Especially if I don't want to abandon the horse that got me there. I am guessing I have to somehow lead it to a blacksmith? The blacksmith in that town just looked at me funny when I tried interacting with him, though. Will that temporary horse always just be wondering around that town? How did my camp horse teleport to me? I guess that one is special because it has my main saddle? Will it teleport around like that often? If I leave that horse somewhere or it dies do I lose all the junk in my saddle? I am so confused.

if you want to keep a horse, you have to bring it to a stable. to solve the temporary problem of not wanting to lose your previous horse, you can ahve the temporary horse follow you, at which point you either manually transfer the saddle, or do so at the stable.

@memu: don't worry about horses until you do the mission that unlocks stables. That's where you store all your horses. If you want to change your main horse out in the world you have to take the sattle off the old horse and put it on the new one. Idk what would happen to your old horse if you did that. Essentially if you found a wild horse you want to keep and your old horse...catch it, ride it to the stable and have your old horse follow you. Then store the new horse in the stable, leave, get on old horse, stable that one and switch to the new horse.

Yeah, that's pretty fucking bad. Not sure if there's and easier way to do it than that.

Also anytime you're on a mission where you have to get on wagon or can't ride your horse, tap up on the d pad as you're leaving and your horse will follow you the whole way.

You’ll have better luck if your remember that the frog is on the bottom of the horse’s hoof.

@memu: There's a bunch of story missions that introduce basic mechanics (like horse stabling or whatever). They're usually provided by people in your camp. Progress in a couple of those as soon as possible, it opens you up to how the game will work. The particular one that teaches you about stabling and stuff is a Hosea mission, I believe.

OK, so I actually just went through some Horse Fun tonight, and I actually think this is a really fun system that I (and I imagine a lot of other folks) are going to completely miss. Luckily for me, I've been spending so much of Chapter III wandering the wilderness attempting to complete Trapper sets, track down legendaries and find the unique side missions that I suppose I was bound to stumble into this eventually.

Like you (though...unlike you, due to time invested) I spent tens of hours wondering why the hell that grey horse head remained on my map. The only reason I'd even climbed atop a horse other than the thoroughbred I came across early on was I'd been trying to complete the Sharpshooter challenge to kill five birds while riding a moving train and my horse apparently got caught on some bridge geometry or something and got held up in the upper east corner of the map between the Grizzlies and Annesburg...while I was deboarding outside of Strawberry. So I came across a lone guy camping that had a little too much attitude and relieved him of his demeanor and his horse, riding it all the way across the map to my man George (Dickel) Rye.

It was a poor, poor horse, and so by the time I'd arrived we'd been through some brushing rituals, I'd fed it a lot of stimulants and foods to keep it sprinting back to my main man. George himself hadn't been brushed in some time and this was our first time being separated; not knowing how quickly his health core would decrease without me, I was in a mad dash. Being as the new girl and I had had a bit of a run together, she'd already hit level 2 bondage with me...but George was bigger, stronger, maximum bondage, held all my guns and had a coat I preferred, so I left her on the side of the road and away we went.

So, again, like you, I have this random horse icon just sitting up there outside Annesburg, and I'm clueless. Obviously it blinks whenever I whistle for George, but I can't figure why and start training myself to ignore it. At least, until I find myself back in the region with a task to skin three Black or Grizzly Bears and two Legendary animals marked on the map in close proximity. I whistle George over at one point and, two real life days and many, many in-game days later, here comes the old girl that reunited us in the first place. Not only is she back by my side, she stays there. I whistle, she follows. George follows. I'm in a very, very hunty mode and so here I am, suddenly flanked by my massive man and dainty dame. I'm throwing pelts on whichever can come up alongside me quickest when I realize it's not just the pelts - it's everything but the pelts - it's the carcasses. Before I know it, I'm carrying a cougar carcass on my side chick and a black bear pelt on my main.

And then the O'Driscolls show up, and they die, and old girl gets scared, and I'm desperate not to lose my perfect cougar pelt because, man, have I been struggling to kill a cougar without unloading half a Repeater clip into one, so I chase after her with a passion I could have never anticipated, only we never knew each other all that well so the horse I approach initially isn't her, it's one of the O'Driscoll's. Also a female, so it takes a moment to register as I talk her down and approach with a warm hand and comforting brush that this horse is bigger, stronger, and wears a saddle. I pat and I brush and I pat and I brush and we bond. The horse head icon on my map shifts from over there to right here, from the old girl to the new girl.

Just as we reach that special level of trust I look along the hillside and see old girl wandering about, in my mind feeling jilted but in the code likely just having traveled the decided amount of distance a horse with Level 2 bonding would travel from its master. I go give her some pats and brushings as well, say what I think are my goodbyes because I've clearly lost her due to the way the icons behaved...

I whistle to George to come on then, and new girl follows along in stead, and I think to myself how selfishly happy I am that I have a faster, stronger, more fashionable side girl now. But something's odd. I only have my main and my side marked on the mini-map, but old girl is tagging along. She's still level 2 bonded, new girl is only level 1, and new girl is getting startled by everything. So now I'm constantly petting and brushing all three of them, with oatcake feedings for days, and we're massacring this forest. Pelts galore, and eventually another perfect cougar on old girl's back, another perfect black bear's pelt on new girl's, and a legendary fish on my main. I see an elk across the river, my first three star elk of the hunt, and where just two hours prior I was still under the assumption I had the one horse, the one large cargo spot. Now I have three horses under my command, I have two large bits of cargo loaded, and I'd just found the trapper nearby. I am about to score.

...And then I whip around, and only George and new girl are grazing a few yards behind me. I'd been very adamant about whistling every so often, enamored with this novelty of the killing machine cowboy and his three four-legged wards carrying hundreds of pounds of bounty. Startled by another elk who apparently rushed my crew but backed off before it trampled us - this is my best guess - old girl had realized how replaceable she was - or how all of the past two hours had caught the three of us by complete surprise - and fled the scene. I whipped around with my Lancaster, my rolling Block, my binoculars. I whistled and whistled, but she wouldn't respond. After a few minutes, I resigned myself to the loss of a cougar carcass and whatever pelts she'd been carrying, trudged my way to the trapper and turned in what bounty I could.

I felt a sadness, and yet - to this day, I whistle like a mad man, and I march through the expanses of the prairies, the sludges of the marsh and the density of the forests with three horses by my side, George and now-christened Elaine and whatever random horse I come across first on my way to the hunt. I'm not sure why old girl left me, especially considering she waited so, so long for me to return, but she taught me a valuable lesson. Never hunt with a single horse when three will do, and never turn your back on the wild beasts who love you for who you are for too long.

So it seems you have to do that Hosea mission before horses and stables will work the way they do in the rest of the game. That is probably true for other stuff too. Essential those are tutorial missions but it doesn't tell you that. The game seems trying to hide game-type information from you to keep the world illusion more pure? After that Hosea mission it said I unlocked the "trapper" as well and then said I should someone name something like Pierson to learn about the trapper. I have no idea who this Pierson is and he doesn't seem to be on the map. I also have completed a side mission and the guy who gave me the mission is nowhere on the map for me to collect my reward. This is a weird game.

@memu: Is Uncle the first quest you did in chapter 2? There is a game braking bug that if you do that first several characters will disappear from camp except from story missions. People like Jack, John and Abigail apparently, maybe more. I haven't experienced it myself, but read about it. You should check it out!

@fetchfox: Oh, noes. Uncle was the first one I did. Thanks for telling me!

Should I start over? I have a save right at the beginning of chap 2. I think it wouldn't bother me to start over. I am in no rush to finish. It says I am at 22% but I only have done 3 story missions yet.

@memu: Check if the characters are gone from your camp. I also recommend googling the bug, for example "red dead 2 uncle mission bug". What you miss out on is camp interaction beyond the missions. I would start over, but it's up to you.

@memu: Pearson is the camp cook. Fat guy. He, as well as anyone else on the map at camp, won't be on the map unless there's a mission for them or a dot indicating that you have an item they asked for. Be aware that if a person isn't at the camp, it's more than likely that they're with someone else outside of camp for a mission that you need to go to so you'll have to wait (the game tries to make everything/everyone situated logically). As an example, there is a Dutch mission in chapter three and I wanted to give Bill some hair wax, but because Bill was with Dutch for the mission I couldn't find him in camp.

As for bugs, I haven't run into any as far as I understand. So far, the marked missions on the map go and come just depending on the state of the world or your actions in it and have always popped back up so far with some sleep or finishing a mission I'm currently in. I'm currently almost 50 percent the way through the story (last I checked, and a couple of missions back it said 44 percent). And if you so happen to get on a horse in the wild (which will happen in a mission), it will follow you if you get into its vicinity and you whistle when you're on your primary horse. The only time that happened was once, and that was recent. I've kept the same horse from the beginning of the game and sold the others. There's now a polka dotted horse that I told to scram before a mission, so now it's somewhere.

While no one aside from a random NPC tricking me early on tried to still my horse (which I shot to get her back), it is possible for someone to steal your horse. There have been multiple times where I'd leave it out in the open somewhere while I do something and no one has stolen it, but it's ideal to hitch it if you can find a convenient spot. There was also only one time where my horse went down in a gunfight; some woman was crying and then got up and held her gun at me as others came in on a horse. They were trying to steal from me and when I pulled my gun out to kill them, their firing back shot my horse to death; luckily I could revive it. Do as you please; I don't really have any recommendations as to how you deal with horses, but I've kept the first one from the beginning and it's been totally fine.