I’m playing Grand Theft Auto V right now on my Xbox 360. Sure, it’s a violent and sexist story about some bad people and their criminal activities. I’m fine with that – it’s a fantasy for adults, and I take it the same way I take Scarface, Boardwalk Empire, or even The Sopranos. It’s an exaggerated world to visit, not a realistic guide for how to live life.

OK, with that out of the way, here are some ways I’ve found to quickly level up each character to 100% in all skills.

Warming: SPOILERS AHEAD! I’m not giving away anything about the story or the plot – heck, I’m only a short way into it myself. But I like to get “ahead” of games, in the sense that if gathering up skills will help me play, then I want those skills right away. Then I never have to stop the flow of the game just to go work on those skills. So my goal was to get all my characters up to 100% on all their skills as fast as I could. There are lots of online guides for leveling up, so I’ll focus on the ones that gave me the most trouble.

Stealth: The game advises doing stealth attacks on pedestrians to raise this skill, but that’s ridiculous for several reasons. First, it’s incredibly slow because people run away, so you spend more time chasing down victims than whomping them for points. Second, the cops are often alerted, so then you have to spend a few minutes driving around to lose your wanted level. Just to get one (or two) stealth attacks! I tried to do this one by the books, I really did, but I play games for fun and this wasn’t any fun to me at all. So I cheated this one. The says you can also level up stealth by walking around in stealth mode. So I found a nice open piece of famland in Grapeseed (highlighted in red). I entered stealth mode, and put a rubber band around the left thumbstick, pulling it down and to the right, so my character stealth-creeped in the tightest circle he could. An hour or two later I came back and his stealth was at 100%. This works for all three characters.

Lung Capacity: Easy but boring. Go to any water. Dive. Stay under until the oxygen bar flashes. Swim fast the to the surface, and your character will gulp some air. Then dive again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s mindless. A good way to go is to mute the TV and put on music, or put the game into picture-in-picture in the corner of your screen while you’re watching something else. Just keep a tiny bit of attention on that oxygen bar and your fingers will get into the rhythm, and it becomes a kind of Zen thing. Click, wait, pull, press, repeat. If you stay down too long your health will drain very fast, and you can die. If you can get to the surface before then, stay there for a short while until your health recharges itself, so if you slip again later on it doesn’t necessarily mean death. Note that your character can pull out his phone and do a quick save when your head is out of the water.

Stamina: Another time-consumer. I used the same rubber-band trick as for stealth, only instead of entering stealth mode, I made sure the rubber band pressed down the A button to make him run. Your character will stop running if he bumps into an obstacle, so pick some clear land and let him run in circles for an hour or two. I used the same farm that I used for stealth. Come back, you’ve maxed out stamina.

Strength: A total mess, because they want you to do this by either beating up people or by playing sports. Beating people up is slow – you need to land 20 punches to get a measly 1% of increase. And like all the other activities that involve hurting pedestrians, after you punch one person the others all run away and usually call the police, and now you’re driving around for a minute or two to lose the police. Trying to land a lot of punches on a lot of people is very tough, slow work. And playing a round of tennis or golf takes a loooong time, and though some people have reported seeing great gains in strength, I got only very small bumps from playing a lot of these sports.

But someone online found that punching cows counts just as well as punching a person. Punch (or kick) a cow and it goes down, and you can hit it three more times until it stops mooing (any punches after that don’t do you any good; you’re just beating a dead… cow). So from each cow you can get 4 punches, and no police! Sounds great.

I went back to my favorite farm in Grapeseed (the one I used for stealth and stamina) and beat up cows for a long time. A big downside, though, is that cows are like pedestrians: most of the others nearby will run away from you after you beat up one of their buddies. If you run around the farm randomly, new cows spawn, but I found myself spending much more time running around to find cows than I spent beating them up. Then I wandered over the southeast fence to find another farm, shown here in red, where there were more cows and pigs inside some big enclosures (on the southwest edge of the farm, shown here in black). Pigs are only good for 3 hits before they stop squealing, so that seemed like a slower way to build the skill. And like the cows, the pigs ran out of the enclosure as soon as I beat one up. But then I noticed they’d respawn.

And I got an idea for a sneaky trick, which I now share with you.

Get a vehicle – a normal-sized car will do – and drive it parallel to the front of the enclosure. The enclosures I’m talking about are the open-air buildings with pens on the sides and a gate in front.  Park your car right in front of the gate. You don’t have to be paper-thin close, just closer than the width of a pig. Go slow, park carefully, and you’ll be fine. Now hop into the enclosure and start beating up on pigs. They won’t be able to escape, because you’ve blocked the gate, and each time you kill a pig a new one will spawn to take its place. It gets kind of gross because after a while the ground is covered in dead pigs, even while you’re beating up the live ones. If that bugs you, hop in the car, drive around Grapeseed for a while, then come back to the farm. The dead pigs will be gone, and you can get back to your nasty, strength-building, pig-punching ways. It’s still a long boring slog to get your strength up to 100%, but this is much, much faster than any other method I’ve read yet on the web.

Michael’s Special Ability: This totally flummoxed me for a long time. The game says that driving fast and getting headshots increases this ability, but driving fast just refills the meter, it doesn’t increase your actual ability (that is, the length of your filled-in bar on the stats menu). I spent probably a good half-hour zooming up and down the highway on the east coast of the map, and I never saw this meter budge a single pixel. What you want is to get lots of headshots while Michael’s special ability is engaged. If you try this with pedestrians on the street you’ll find the cops come after you right away, and then you’re spending all your time running away. I found a more efficient way to quickly level up Michael’s special ability: get the police to come to you.

Hijack a sports car and drive fast until your special ability meter is full. Then go to Rob’s Liquors in Morningwood, shown here in the center of the bull’s-eye. Enter the store, aim the gun at the clerk, ransack the cash (why not?), step outside to get two stars, run back inside, and hide just outside the door to the back room. When the police arrive, equip your favorite precision weapon, go into special ability mode, and then pick off each cop with a headshot, one by one, as long as you can. Getting headshots while your special ability is enabled will increase your ability fast, and also recharge your meter so you can fire it up again later. And if your health drops below 25% along the way, you skill level increases even faster. I filled up just over one full bar in a single standoff, which got me up to 100%. I eventually got shot and sent to the hospital, but the financial cost was well worth finally getting this stat maxed out.

If you need to repeat this a few times, make sure you have enough ammunition so you won’t run out. I also recommend picking a store that gives you lots of cover inside, and not much exposure to the outside. I looked at a few 24-7 convenience stores, but those big plate-glass windows out front were too exposed for me. An Ammu-Nation looked like the best place, since there’s just the one door and no windows, but I was never able to pull out a weapon when in there. Rob’s Liquors seemed like a good compromise, and it worked very well for me.