Red Dead Online: How to Get the Elephant Rifle

Though much of your focus in Red Dead Online's new Naturalist update is on studying and learning to love your fellow creatures, there's nobody stopping you from turning them into trophies and barbecue. In that spirit, Rockstar has added a new weapon for that purpose. We'll show you how to get the elephant rifle here, as well as its limitations and strengths.

On this page:

• How to Get the Elephant Rifle in Red Dead Online
• How to Get Elephant Rifle Ammo
• Is the Elephant Rifle Good?

How to Get the Elephant Rifle in Red Dead Online

To get the elephant rifle in Red Dead Online you'll need to go to one of the game's gunsmiths, or use your catalogue by holding down left on the D-pad. The rifle itself costs $580.00 or 24 gold bars, assuming you don't have any discounts earned when buying it. Despite clearly being associated with the character, you cannot buy the elephant rifle from Gus, though you can shoot lots of animals with it and sell him the pelts.

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How to Get Elephant Rifle Ammo

The elephant rifle only uses a special kind of custom ammunition named nitro express, which can also be bought from a gunsmith for $0.40 per box of four shells, making it a pretty expensive gun to fire. However, as of yet we have yet to discover any other way to get a hold of this ammo, so buying it at a high cost is your only option.

Is the Elephant Rifle Good?

The Elephant Rifle is a very good option when hunting individual, highly dangerous or large animals, assuming you don't intend to sedate them. It has unrivalled damage able to kill any enemy on the first hit, but comes with numerous drawbacks that don't really make it viable in firefights. It can only hold two shells at once and you can only have 20 shells on you maximum, it has appalling recoil, poor range, and a unique feature wherein if you're crouched or behind cover when you fire it, the knockback will actually throw you prone for a second and you'll have to get back up.

For all these reasons, we can't recommend using the elephant rifle when fighting more than one enemy or animal at a time. But if it is just the one foe, you'll almost definitely kill them with the first shot, even if it's just a regular hit.

While you're out hunting, why not hunt down some of our prime Red Dead content? Check out how fans are reacting to a very unpopular character here, or see when the game had a sudden outbreak of clowns just here.