How BDO Workers work

This guide assumes you have are familiar with the Node system

Woodcutting and mining yourself is boring and a waste of Time. So you should hire some Workers to give you a hand! Workers are NPCs that you can’t directly control but they belong to you, meaning you can see them in the world doing things you ordered them to do. The worker system is one of Black Desert’s super unique features and is keep to success.

Workers can do things like mining copper ore to send to your city where another worker in the refinery copper to create other items. A simple example is using a worker to harvest Ash logs and then turning those logs into Fishing rods with a Tool Workshop in town. More complex examples would be building fishing boats that can take many real world days to complete.

Where to get workers

You need to find the Work Supervisor NPC in each Town (the icon on the map is a Pick-axe). In Heidel it’s south, next to where everyone is fishing:

Talk to him and choose Contract Workers:

It will cost 5 Energy to be presented with a potential worker. You can either hire the worker or spend another 5 energy to see another choice. (Pro Tip: You can use Alts to hire workers as they have a separate energy pool).

Types of Workers

There are 3 types: Humans, Goblins and Giants. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Goblins: Fastest Work Speed, Lowest Energy (must be fed food more often)

Humans: Balanced Work Speed and Energy Pool and has higher Luck for producing better goods later in the game.

Giants: Slow Work Speed, High Energy so they can do many tasks before being fed.

Workers will be tied to the city you hire them in and you cannot transfer them. If you want them to work far away from their home city it will take more real world time for them to complete tasks.

Once you have hired your worker, open the map and click on the city you hired them at:

Blue icons indicate buildings that you can invest contribution points into; grey ones you can’t until you invest in the previous buildings in the chain.

Building Types

Storage – Increase city’s warehouse space

Housing – Personal residence. You can place furniture here. You may only own 5 at a time.

Lodging – Increases max amount of workers you can have.

Workshops – There are dozens of different workshops that can produce gear, trade packs and other items. The workshops are the buildings that your workers use.

Purchasing a Building

Let’s suppose you want to make a Tool Workshop to make Fishing Rods. You click on a building that can make one, choose it and click on Purchase: Tool Workshop. (Pro Tip: In the city overview map there is a search option in the top right to find all the building nodes that have the buildings you want.)

Construction can take 1 to 20 minutes depending on the building you purchased. Remember that this only invests your contribution. You can always get your contribution back later but you will lose any money used to upgrade the building. Click on Manage Crafting to access the crafting menu.

Crafting with workers

Here you can choose the item you want to craft, which worker to use to craft it and how many times you want to repeat the task. Your worker will use resources in that city’s storage to complete the task. Remember that crafting in Black Desert is done in real time and ONLY while you are logged into the game.

After your workers finish the assignment they can be sent to repeat the same job or do another. Working spends their stamina which you can recover by feeding them beer! (and some other food items) You can access your worker list by clicking the pick-axe icon in the upper left of your screen.

Feeding your workers

You need food items like Beer to recover worker stamina and it must be in your inventory even if you worker is on the other side of the world. Click recover and then Shift + Right Click to use enough beer to completely replenish the worker’s stamina.

You can make beer in bdo yourself or buy it on the marketplace. We will cover more about cooking in our cooking guide but the market is another great place to buy beer.

Using workers to transport goods

Black Desert has localized warehouses. This means if you have items in one city you cannot access them from a different city. You could take your items from one location to another yourself OR just use the transport system! Transporting goods does not use a worker and thus does not use stamina. Open the city map and click Transport from your warehouse. (This can be done anywhere in the world)

Make sure you correctly choose the Destination, the items you want and choose Freight Wagon. The price will be significantly higher if you do not have nodes connected between the two cities. You also can’t directly pay with silver in your inventory. Instead you pay with city storage silver.

Now you just wait a bit for your goods to arrive! You can see the wagon’s progress on the map.