Red Dead Redemption 2 How to Level Naturalist Fast and Easy

You need a Varmint rifle
You need to buy a full stack of sedative 0.22 caliber bullets for Varmint rifle that can be bought for only 8 dollars from Harriet (I prefer her tent by McFarlane Ranch)
At least 20 dollars for fast travel but keep in mind stable and camp upkeep taxes too

You do not need to use any kind of tonic during your hunt (no health damage and no dead eye needed)

You don’t need to repair varmint rifle, after doing this for a few hours I noticed that it takes the same amount of shots to down animal no matter how badly damage the rifle is. So feel free to have it at 0 condition when sedating animals.

You don’t need to buy the advanced camera and the advanced bow to complete this role

(Provided you already have the role that costs 25 gold bars, varmint rifle and a full stack of sedative ammo) Upon start of your game session you will be greeted with this menu. 

You need to start your game in New Austin. Once in game you need to press “L” which will open the online menu for you. You need to scroll all the way down until you see “Online”. Press Enter or click on “Online”. There you will see Social Matchmaking – change it from ON to OFF. Great.

The reason we did this is because the game will sometimes have trouble spawning wildlife around you when there are many players around. And when a session starts, all players are usually clustered together. The Idea here is to start your session in New Austin and then fast travel far away from it, to the other end of the map, and with Social Matchmaking disables people will stop spawning around you. It helps with animal spawns and lets you evade cheaters, and griefers, and competition too.

Now, find the nearest fast travel post and pay anywhere from 11 to 8 dollars to fast travel to Emerald Ranch. Once there go to the animal pens, nearby the fence. There should be Cows and Oxen, some Alpine goats and !most importantly! Sheep. Loads of Sheep.

Never open or even touch, or go through any gates and if did go through close them. Because if you do that animals will run off and you will lose some of them, or all of them.

Proceed to empty your varmint rifle with sedated bullets on all animals around. They are stuck in pens, have nowhere to run, it is really easy to shoot them all with hip fire, no need for paint it black. Or you can aim down sights. I just do whatever I feel like. Then don’t forget to collect samples from sedated animals.

You should sedate a few cows, a few goats if you are lucky to see them and always try to get 10 sheep. Sheep are easy, they usually spawn in large groups. If not enough animals spawned for you, you can ride around the area. Not too close to pens so you do not see what’s going inside but not too far that you have trouble coming back.

If you are looking for another Ranch you can go to my waypoint, here in the center. 
It only has cows and there is a gate missing. So make sure to stand by the gate hole to scare cows from leaving and use scope on your varmint rifle to shoot them from afar. I had so many cows spawn for me and they take about 10 shots to sedate (maybe a bit less, sheep take 3-4 shots, rarely 2) so that by the time I was done shooting them all some of them recovered. Anyway, now go back to Emerald Ranch pens and get the rest of the animals, make sure you leave with 10 sheep.

Buy fast travel from Emerald Ranch to McFarlane Ranch (7$) and ride to Harriet. Sell animal samples, restock on sedative ammo. You should get around 900 role xp per run if you did good. The sheep themselves give you from 570xp to 620xp for the full 10 stack. (I do have 15% xp bonus from the Outlaw Pass, so get it too, you will be able to level it with XP from the role and it will help with the role as well, besides you will make 40 gold bars back)

This is how much I usually get per one run. Sometimes I can get more. It is very time efficient. 

Rinse and repeat. Should not take too much time. Eventually someone might make their way to Emerald Ranch. But with Social Matchmaking off they won’t stay there for long. Or you can just start a new session in Austin.

If you are lucky you will get a message about a legendary animal nearby. It will be marked in form of a small yellow question mark that will pop on and off. Use legendary animal secretion, mount your horse, pull varmint rifle out and gun that guy (sedate) down. That is some nice extra role xp for you.

Have your shack placed in New Hanover. That way you can do a moonshiner run every 3-5 rounds you do this. If your wagon is large then can get around 200$, besides the fast travel and ammo cost is covered by selling animal samples.

Do a run, come back to the shack to start brewing another and on your way to fast travel, visit the ranch and get some more animals sedated.

Yes, absolutely. You do not need to do anything else besides hand in the samples to Herriet in order to gain XP. You do not need the camera.

There is score counter in compendium but even if you 100% any specific animal, you can still collect new samples from it and hand it in for XP. You do not even need to re-set the entire section in compendium to do that (although re-setting gives you rewards)

You get 620XP for a full stack of 10 sheep. If you wanted you could just deliver sheep 64 times and you would be level 20 in this role. But I suggest collecting other farm animals and taking part in events to keep things fresh. Maybe get a legendary from time to time.

Do you need to grind to level 20? Nah. You can grind to level 7 to get access to level events and level 7 poacher encounters for additional things to do and role XP. That is milestone one. Or you can grind to level 18 to get the extra space for tonics. With all 4 roles maxed out I can boast 40 normal tonics and 30 level 3 tonics on me at a single time. Useful. Getting levels 19 and 20 is just for the tokens which are numerous as it is. So you can let the role level itself passively after level 18 and leave your varmint in the weapon locker.

– During Protect Legendary Animal events, if you die but wait until the end of the event in spectator mode you will still get rewarded with Legendary Animal sample

– During Animal Taming events you do not actually have to do anything, it is a group effort and you get rewarded with the samples the group gets, however best player gets more.

– If you are hunting with a friend you can lasso a large animal like moose or deer and hold them in place while your friend is pelting the animal with sedatives

– If someone has collected samples from that animal you can collect them as well. In fact, as many people as there can be, can collect 1 sample from the same animal

– In order to have the trapper craft you trinkets and clothing you first have to “sell” the crafting materials to him