After almost 8 years, Red Dead Redemption 2 players discover there is a small steamboat in the game

Some games are so huge that missing content over an entire playthrough is easy. You can spend years in a world, earn the platinum trophy, ride thousands of miles, and never glance at the river next door.

And there, it turns out, a small steamboat has been chugging along the whole time, and you can take it for a spin yourself.

The game in question is Red Dead Redemption 2. A short clip recently appeared on Reddit showing a player hijacking a small steam launch and steering it confidently across the water.

The reaction was nearly unanimous. Some commenters with hundreds of hours and a platinum trophy assumed they were looking at a mod, others suspected AI generation, and one admitted to putting in more than 2,000 hours without ever seeing anything like it.

There is no mod here, as the boat is part of the base game. These vessels travel along the river near Saint Denis and also turn up by the docks in Annesburg. They are easy to spot if you look at the water. Getting aboard is harder, since the boat doesn't sit at a pier but follows its own route.

The easiest way is to meet it head-on in a canoe or rowboat, predict its path, and jump onto the deck.

According to the wiki, the small steamboat is the fastest vessel the player can drive in Red Dead Redemption 2. Bigger ships exist too. They can't be piloted, but you can hop onto them from the steamboat and ride along as a passenger.

The same limits apply here as with any other vehicle. Wander too far from shore and the boat starts to sink, and "too far" in practice means not far at all. Sailing off the edge of the map isn't possible.

The discovery is especially handy for anyone hunting the legendary fish near Sisika Penitentiary. The canoe trip there and back is long, the current keeps trying to carry the boat off, and sometimes it sinks halfway.

It's also clear why so many players missed it. The story only has you use canoes and rowboats, and there isn't much to do on the water. Veterans also recall the first Red Dead Redemption, where John Marston drowned in nearly any body of water deeper than knee-high.

That reflex still seems to keep some fans away from rivers. The sharpest observation in the thread was that Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in October 2018 and is now almost as old as the first game was when the sequel launched.