Tip: Never Log Out

If you've been to the docks in Velia or Hiedel, you probably know that AFK fishing is pretty popular. However, you may not realize that many of these people are after more than just fish. You see, Black Desert wants you online. All. The. Time.

Next time you're ready to walk away from the computer, you might want to consider minimizing BDO, instead of logging out.

Why?

Workers

If you have workers gathering resources or crafting, and you log out, they'll continue working until they finish their current task. However, they won't start a new task! If you have a lot of short tasks queued or a lot of workers with queued tasks, you may be missing out on a lot of worker time.

Farming

Did you know your crops only grow when you are logged in? That's right. When your character vanishes, your crops all go into stasis until you return.

Energy

This is probably the most obvious item on the list, but your character recovers energy much faster when they're logged in. Ten times faster, in fact.

Not only that, but you can put your character to rest in a bed to further increase your energy recovery. A bed bought with silver will boost your energy regen to twenty times the offline rate. A cash shop bed will grant you 30 times the offline rate.

Some people love the AFK features of Black Desert, and some people hate feeling obligated to be online all the time. Personally, I'm on the fence. It's nice to come back to a little extra money after being away from the game, but it also makes it feel wasteful to just log out at the end of a night, without bothering to set up a character fishing.

One final word of warning: if you do keep your character logged on all the time, be sure to at least switch characters once a day, or the game may not give you your 100 daily loyalty points. It's easy to forget about them when you don't have the icon blinking at the bottom of your screen.

Tip: Selling Items

There are a few different ways to sell different items in Black Desert Online. Knowing the differences can make you a lot more money.

Trade Items

These are bought and sold by traders. Fish and some items dropped by monsters are trade items, and can only be sold to traders.

For trade items, it's important to connect all the nodes between the place of origin, and the trader you're selling to. If they're not connected, your base price will only be 30% of normal.

You can raise the price even more if you sell far away from place of origin, and if you do the "bargaining" game (which is mostly luck, as far as I can tell).

Vendor Trash

These are junk items. They say "can be sold to a vendor for a low amount". And that's pretty much all they're good for.

Marketplace Items 

These items have a "Marketplace Information" section in their description, with a HIGH and LOW sale price. These items can be bought and sold on the Marketplace (a.k.a. auction house). All equipment falls into this category.

Exchangeable Items

A certain amount of these items can be turned in to an NPC for a reward. Sometimes it's more money than they'd normally sell for. Sometimes it's other items, some type of experience, or knowledge.

Many of these items even have several different NPCs that want them, and different items to exchange for.





Right-click one of these items to bring up a mini-menu that lets you target the exchange NPCs, or track the amount of the item that you've collected.

This way, when you're trying to farm enough of the item to turn in, you get an easy counter right next to your mini-map, so you don't have to keep opening your inventory.















Bonus Tip: Want to know more about an item? Just Shift-left-click on it to bring up its wiki entry.

Tip: Converting Silver to Gold

Unlike many MMOs, money actually weighs you down in Black Desert Online. As your wealth grows, you may start to feel like your silver coins are taking up too much of your carrying capacity. This especially becomes a problem when you have a lot of silver in one town that you'd like to move to another.

However, there's an easy solution. Silver coins can be exchanged to gold ingots and back again. These ingots weigh less than their equivalent in silver. Talk to any storage manager and select "Currency Exchange" to exchange your silver for gold, then move it where you want it, and exchange it for silver again.

Be aware, there is a 0.1% conversion fee. (For example, you pay 100,100 silver for 1G, but selling 1G only gets you 100,000).

Gold ingots come in several sizes.

• 1G (100 thousand silver coins)
• 10G (1 million silver coins)
• 100G (10 million silver coins)
• 1000G (100 million silver coins)

Tip: Convert Potions

Ever find yourself with a stack of potions that are too weak for your level? Don't toss them. They can be upgraded into better potions!

You can exchange 2 beginner potions for 1 small potion at Lara (General Goods Vendor) in Heidel. This works for HP and MP potions.

Other potions can be upgraded 3:1 by using the Processing life skill, through simple alchemy.

Tip: The Best Ways to AFK

For better or worse, Black Desert Online is a game that wants you logged in as much as possible. It has several features that give you advantages for staying online, even when you're away from the keyboard.

So how do you get the most of your AFK time? Well, you have a few options.

Fishing

AFK fishing is built into the game, making it the most popular AFK activity among players. However, it's not entirely obvious to new players how it works. 

You have to equip a fishing pole and stand by the water, just as you would for normal fishing. Cast as normal. Then...just walk away. You'll get fish on the line, and eventually, if you don't do the fishing mini-game, your character will reel in the fish for you. AFK fishing is quite a bit slower than "active" fishing, so you won't catch fish as quickly when AFK.

Just like normal fishing, AFK fishing will use up the durability of your equipped fishing pole. It will eventually need to be replaced. You'll also want to have your inventory as empty as possible to hold all those fish.

When you first start, there is a check box to "Throw away useless items caught during auto-fishing," which you can use if you want to keep more inventory space open for better catches.

Resting

Your character can sleep while you sleep!

You can build a bed in a house you've designated as a residence. Using the bed will cause your character to rest (but only if they're logged in). Resting will improve your energy regeneration rate.

Beds bought with silver will give you energy regen of 2 points per 3 minutes.

Beds bought from the cash shop will boost your energy regen to 3 points per 3 minutes.

Crafting

Maybe your energy is full and you have lots of raw materials. Well, in that case, you might want to start your character on a production task, like heating ore, or a crafting task, like cooking a hundred plates of fried fish, or mugs of beer. You can never have too much fried fish and beer.

Of course, the larger your maximum energy, and the more energy and materials you have, the more effective your time will be.

If you're able to check in periodically, you can also alternate between crafting and resting in a bed to speed energy recovery.

Running

Any time your character runs, it will slowly level up your stamina. Thanks to the auto-run-to feature, it's easy to run your character around quite a bit without having to interact much with the game.

On the world map, pick a location that's far away from you, then right-click to set it as your navigation target. Exit the world map and press "T" to auto-run to your target. Now you can also walk away and do something else for a while.

If you'd like to automate the process even further, you can use macros or clever gamepad tricks, like the stuff described here. However, this is technically against the terms of service, so do this at your own risk! (Note: The A and W keys together will run you in a circle when you're holding a fishing rod.)

In some other regional versions of BDO, a feature has been added that allows you to set multiple navigation targets in a loop, but this feature is not currently in the NA/EU version. It is possible that it will be added in a future update.

More Running

Leveling your strength is similar to leveling your stamina. Instead of just running, however, you need to run around with trade goods in your inventory.

Unfortunately, trade goods make you a target for bandits. These are the little black and red icons on your world map, and if you run into their area with trade goods, they'll pounce on you, and when you come back to your keyboard, you'll be sad.

For this, you pretty much have to use macros or hardware shenanigans to level while AFK, at least for now. When the auto-looping features from other versions get added, this will be much easier.

Eating

Your maximum health is leveled up by eating cooked foods. The most effective way to level it up is to eat 30-minute foods every 30 minutes.

First, you'll need a supply of this type of food in your inventory. Again, you will also need a software program that can emulate mouse clicks. Open the inventory and set the auto-clicker program to click the food every 30 minutes.

This is a bit wasteful compared to simply using the food in the course of your normal play, but if you don't mind the cost, it will level your health quickly.

More Tips and Tricks

By the time this post goes live, readers who opted for the Conqueror's pre-order package will be playing the game! I hope the servers are running smooth as butter for you.

Whether you're already playing or waiting impatiently, we're all itching for as much info as we can get. So I've grabbed a couple useful videos from around the community to scratch that itch.

First up, Njoy32Gaming has 29 tips for beginners, in only 5 minutes:

If you've got time for something a little longer, take a look at Paindog's "Things I wish I knew before playing Black Desert Online."

I found a few good morsels in these videos. Hopefully you did too. For all you Conquerors out there, have fun playing! I'm only moderately jealous. The rest of us will join you soon.

What to do in the First Few Hours of Black Desert Online?

With the NA/EU launch approaching, I thought I'd share some tips for your first few hours of Black Desert Online, based on my experiences in closed beta 2. BDO is a fairly open sandbox game, and it has a few unusual mechanics that you are mostly expected to just figure out as you play. This may feel disorienting for players who are used to Western theme park MMOs.

I plan to do some more detailed guides shortly after launch, when I can actually verify things and take screenshots on the live client. But for now, here are six tips for getting the most out of your launch day.

Make some alt characters.

Whether you're the sort of person who likes to try every class before committing, or the sort who picks a character and sticks with it forever, it's useful to have alts right away.

The main advantage you will get when first starting out is energy. When your account is brand-new, your maximum energy is very low. (Your account has a max energy value that is the same on all your characters, and it increases as you gain knowledge.) So, at first it will be fairly easy to run out of energy.

Energy regeneration is time-gated, but having alts can help. If you burn through all your energy on your main, you can switch to an alt and use their energy. Just be aware that energy regenerates much slower for offline characters. While you're playing, your energy regenerates 1 point per 3 minutes. Offline characters only get 1 point per 30 minutes.

You can also make good use of your alts by spreading them out in the world a bit. Unlike many MMOs, the towns in BDO have their own warehouses, stables, etc. If you left an item in storage halfway across the world, it can be a long walk to retrieve it. However, if you have an alt nearby, you can make it a one-way delivery instead of taking your main there and back again.

Alts can also be useful for buying nodes. You might be off doing quests on your main character and gain a contribution point. But you want to spend that point connecting a far-away node. Luckily, your contribution points are shared across characters, so you can use a nearby alt to grab that node.

Do every quest you see, especially your Black Spirit quests.

You may have seen people talk about how grinding in specific locations is the fastest way to level in BDO. This is true, but quick leveling isn't everything.

Quests give you a lot of good stuff. They refill your energy and grant experience toward contribution points, which you will need to connect nodes, use workers, and buy houses. Your Black Spirit quests will get you potions, skills, additional inventory space, and an easy first mount.

Spend energy carefully.

When your account is new, your max energy is low and there are lots of things to spend energy on. You can gather, purchase or upgrade nodes, use workers, or play the conversation mini-game with NPCs. Even using world chat costs energy!

So, until you have a high max energy (and maybe a bunch of alts full of energy too), you'll want to think about what you spend it on. If you really want to build up your empire of workers, you may want to save it for node and worker management. If you'd rather just dabble in crafting, you may want to spend it on gathering. Or maybe you want to bump up the amity of a particular NPC so you can unlock their bonuses.

At the start of closed beta 2, not knowing what I was doing, I made the mistake of wasting all my energy "greeting" NPCs. All this does is raise their amity a point or two. It is much less efficient than the conversation mini-game. So don't be like me: use your energy carefully, at least until you have enough that you don't need to worry about running out quite so easily.

Another easy mistake: training skills outside of town. It's not obvious, but this uses energy. If you go to the skill trainer instead, there's no energy cost.

Explore.

Whenever you're in a town or city, seek out all the NPCs with icons over their heads. The quests are worth doing, but even just talking to them is beneficial - you'll gain knowledge, which increases your max energy by one, and gives you more topics to talk about in the conversation mini game. Plus, if you like getting into deep fantasy worlds, you'll find that there are actually a lot of interesting connections between the characters, and they occasionally give you useful advice or information.

Explore out in the wilderness, too. There are nodes everywhere. Chances are good that if you see an empty space on the map, there's a node there to find. You may find farms or other gathering spots with a particular food that you'll want for cooking or crafting later. If nothing else, the world is gorgeous, and you might just find an amazing view.

Figure out your skill combos.

If you do your Black Spirit quests, you'll get an introduction to combat early on, but it basically just has you hit a couple of keys without explaining what they do. And honestly, you can just spam any skills you want for the first few levels and have little problem killing things.

Around level 10, once you've acquired a few skills, it's worth going through them and figuring out the combos and when they're useful. Which skill can you use to regenerate your mana? Which skills are ranged, and which ones are melee? Which ones are area-of-effect?

You can bind skills to hotkeys to use, but you shouldn't! Skills activated via hotkeys actually use more resources than the same skills activated with key combos. Memorizing the combos takes more work than traditional MMOs, but you'll get used to it quickly. And BDO's excellent keyboard layout for the key combos keeps all the keys you need very close at hand.

Sell items to the right person.

Very early on, you'll start picking up different kinds of items, and it's not necessarily obvious what you should do with them, or even that they're different.

Vendor trash is the easiest type to deal with. These items have no purpose, and can simply be sold to any NPC with a shop. These items descriptions say something like "this can be sold to a vendor for a small amount".

Some items can be sold on the auction house. These have a low and high price listed in the item description in red and green. They can be put up for auction in a town. Usually, even the minimum auction price is many times higher than the price you will get for selling to a vendor. This includes equipment, although it will have to be repaired if it is damaged.

Trade goods are items that can be sold to a trader. There are a number of factors that go into the price you get for trade goods, and I'll probably do an in-depth post in the near future.

Finally there are certain "exchangable" monster drops. These are typically dropped by a specific monster type, and you can trade a certain number of them to a specific NPC for a reward, such as a consumable, or a lot of silver. The item description will say how many you need, who will exchange them, and what reward you will get.

Saving these items up and trading them in is typically much more profitable than just selling them to a vendor. The items that can be exchanged for silver usually give at least double the silver than if you had vendored them. The down-side is that you have to collect enough of the item to do the exchange.

Have fun!

Hopefully you found some helpful information here. Come back soon; I'll be posting frequently as soon as we're able to get on the servers and play. In the mean time, have fun!