Black Desert Online In-Depth Processing Guide:
Processing in BDO is a great way to gain a ton of passive income but at first glance can be very daunting. There are many different forms of processing that can branch off to many different life-skills available to you in BDO. This guide aims to provide a step-by-step instruction on how to get into processing and describe several different types of processing as-well.
Processing Knowledge:
To open the GUI for processing press the “L” key (default). This will show you the different types of processing you can do in BDO; ranging from Heating (Ores), Chopping / Lumbering (Chopping logs into planks), Drying (for fish and other items), Grinding (Grinding grains into flower), Shaking (Turning flower into Dough), and Filtering (Turning dirty water into clean water).
In BDO, you cannot go into end game processing right away. To make Steel for example, you are going to need heating knowledge level 2. The best way to get into a specific trade of processing it to open your black spirit (“,” comma by default) and press on the “Guide” Tab.
Once the GUI opens, there will be options for “I’d like to learn about Gathering/Processing” or options as shown below! This will set a waypoint to a chain of quests that you must do in order to progress in the processing tree.
I personally recommend getting the knowledge for Heating or Chopping right away as this will power boost your processing exp for the corresponding trade (heating and lumbering) and have more of an impact to for you in the long run; especially if you want to get into the life-skill: trading.
Workers:
BDO allows you to hire workers to do your bidding. They will harvest materials for you in exchange for beer. (A guide on how to make worker feed can be found here: ………….) There are two ways to get a worker, but luckily, they are both located on the same NPC across the BDO world. Every city you can think of will have an NPC that you can hire workers from. To find the closest worker supervisor, click the magnifying glass at the top right of your screen (next to the map)
Then hit the worker option in the GUI:
This will auto-path you to the closest worker supervisor where you can spend in-game silver for workers OR you can use energy to roll for them.
These are the two buttons you will be using the most when it comes to getting workers. Contract workers is the option where you roll for workers using energy. Worker Exchange is the option where you buy workers from other players using in-game money. (This option is relatively expensive but do-able if you don’t have a lot of energy).
You can only get a certain number of workers per city, but you can increase that by buying lodging from certain houses on the world map. The example below shows what you need to achieve per city if you have wanted a strong worker empire. Those little white / blue houses are the houses you can see in your world map (click on a city). Lodging will add workers and will continue to do so as you level it up. (This will require Contribution Points “CP”)
There are different tiers of workers that range from Naïve (gray) à Basic (green) à Skilled (blue) à Professional (yellow) à Artisan (orange). (worst to best) You obviously want to work towards getting a full artisan worker empire but get anything skilled or above to start out
Our dedicated guide on Workers in Black Desert can be found here https://bdo-fishbot.com/bdo-workers/
Also not forget to check out our super-indepth guide on how to make beer to feed your workers .
Once you have gotten a few workers, you can start getting passive materials while you progress in the game!
Nodes:
Nodes in Black Desert are a vital part to every master processor. They allow you to utilize your workers in which they harvest the resource located at said node. If you open your world map (“M” by default) you will see points that connect every region. These points are called nodes. If you click on a specific node, you will see that most of them will come with 2 or 3 extra sub nodes that hosts the specific
To invest in the resource nodes, click on the
Corresponding sub node. On the top left, you will
See a button that says invest contribution.
Once you invest contribution, you can
Send workers to collect resources for you. The closer
Your workers are to the resource node, the faster
It will obtain it.
The best resource nodes to get would be
Iron / Coal / Timber of any kind. Let that stock up
While you progress in the game.
A more in-depth Guide about how exactly the Node System in Black Desert is working you can find in our How to BDO Node-System Guide
Processing Gear – Silver Embroidered Craftsman’s Cloths:
With the release of Manos Gear and Life Mastery, life-skilling has become a lot easier and more time productive. For processing for example, you can process a bunch of material all at once, consuming 10x the amount of materials for 10x the amount of output. This saves a lot of time and makes life-skilling a lot more viable for money income / time. As a new player, you will not be focusing on getting Manos Gear as those are considered the “Boss type” gear of life-skilling. You can start out simple and just get Silver Embroidered Craftsman’s Clothes. These are enhanceable BUT BE WARNED… these are treated like accessories so if you enhance them be prepared to lose them… unless you are RNG carried ?. Enhancing the Silver Embroidered Clothes can be a pain in the butt but the result of having a +3-craftsman clothes vs a base is significant (in terms of exp gain per craft). The base silver embroidered is 5% while +3 is 20% processing EXP.
If you are taking the route of pay to convenience, then you should invest in the Venecil Dress (Female Characters) or Karki Set (Male Characters). This is a very beneficial item to have in your arsenal. This allows you to process directly from the storage resulting in longer processing sessions. Although this results in longer processing sessions, you can boost the effect of the pearl item by investing in more weight for your character. This is beneficial for a multitude of reasons; One of which boosts the time of processing sessions by x3.
(Process button appears with costume on)
Leveling Up Processing:
In BDO, getting to Artisan 1 should be a priority when starting to process. Artisan one allows you to generate more output with the same amount of input at previous levels; meaning that you can potentially make money from buying stuff off the market, processing it, then reselling it. To level up processing quick, I suggest heating up some Steel. Some people might say to make Flax Fabric but one reason why I don’t necessarily do that is because Steel can be used to make Trade crates, which are used in the trading life-skill.
To make Steel you must:
- Get some heating knowledge as learned above, level 2 or 3.
- You must process iron ore into melted iron (pressing “L”, go to heating, then select iron ore).
- Get the coal you have been gathering with your workers and combine the two (melted iron and coal) with heating.
This will result in Steel which will net you 800 XP per craft compared to the 1,000/per from Flax Fabric. You can potentially start with flax due to the weight it has and the simplicity, but Steel will net you more in the long run, the only downside is that you can’t afk as long due to hitting the weight-limit very fast.