I bought a copy of Black Desert Online when it released, which I think was back in 2016 – and I played it for a month (maybe?) and I got to level 18 and then I forgot about it. That’s pretty much how it goes with me and games. I finish very few, I stick with even fewer. Anyway, back in January I heard that you needed to migrate any old accounts over to Pearl Abyss or they’d wipe your characters. It was a big debacle even though I wasn’t actually playing at the time and I probably didn’t really need to migrate my level 18 sorcerer over.
Of course I did, and then promptly forgot about the game, again. Some of that isn’t my fault, seeing as I have 5mb/s download speeds a game like BDO (41 gigs give or take) takes me an incredibly long time to download. Their launcher also doesn’t let me set the speed of the download, which means I have to wait until the house is asleep and not using the internet in order to download anything. This is why I prefer to download things on steam, where I can set the speed so that it’s a rate that doesn’t actually interrupt the family using anything but still lets me download 24/7. Anyway.
After almost a week of downloading during the nights / evenings, I managed to get the entire game. I logged in – and I’m COMPLETELY overwhelmed and lost, more so than with ‘regular’ games because this one is pretty far out of my comfort zone. The only thing I could remember from when I played last is that you can fish while AFK.
So that’s what I did. I filled up my bags with useless level 1 fish and I stood there admiring the beautiful game while I played but didn’t play at all. I decided it would probably be best if I looked up some videos on how to play, and maybe starting over wouldn’t be too bad of an idea, either. They do have a bunch of very nice returning player / new player servers that are meant to get you caught up, so I created a guardian on one of the ‘season’ servers, and we’ll see if I can get into it at all. I certainly wouldn’t hold your breath, but stranger things have happened.
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
If there’s anything BDO-related I could help with – like questions or tips on what to try next – feel free to ask me here or in-game (family name Cornoviana). I’d love to help if I can. I picked the game up again about two years ago now and I’ve been playing semi-casually ever since so I have a decent grasp on a lot of the basics and maybe some more in-depth knowledge on some of the “life skills”.
Life skills are the whole reason I wanted to play! My family name is Reveurs I believe! I’d love any resources, beginner information, how-to, the whole bit!
There’s so much :) Hope you don’t mind a bit of an info dump.
There’s a really useful discord server for life skills: https://discord.gg/xFxfRfvT . It has resource channels and discussion channels for each of the skills plus some related subjects.
EvilDoUsHarm has a nice YouTube channel for guides and update info. Here’s his beginner cooking guide https://youtu.be/21uG3DwfKLg . He mentions BDODae.com, but currently I’d use BDOlytics.com instead because it pulls in current prices from the in-game central market.
Two guide sites I use a lot are grumpygreen.cricket and blackdesertfoundry.com. GrumpyGreen has more of a life skill focus. Here’s their beginner processing guide: https://grumpygreen.cricket/bdo-processing-guide-t2/ And here are Foundry’s guides on the current Season: https://www.blackdesertfoundry.com/season-servers-guide and on the Guardian class https://www.blackdesertfoundry.com/guardian-class-guide/
The best database for looking up info on just about anything is bdocodex.com – items, recipes, NPCs, quests, etc. They’ve been having server issues the last couple of months unfortunately, but if you can’t connect to them you can try bddatabase.net instead – very similar but a bit less well-maintained.
Finally, there’s a really nice map site at https://www.somethinglovely.net/bdo/ . And it also has some resources for horse training and trading.
I think you’re on the right track with the season character. It’s a good idea to have at least one character with higher combat levels, so I’d recommend working through the main story quest with her as far as you can go before the current season ends (Sep 29). You can do just about every life skill on characters without much in the way of combat skills, so no reason why you shouldn’t start with life skills on your other character in the meantime, or on a new character (Shai has some nice synergies with Cooking and Alchemy). If you’re happy with where your Guardian gets to by the end of this season you can copy her combat level and combat skill points onto another character that’s under level 25, which would give you two characters at the same level.
I’ve sent you a friend request in game. Hope that’s OK. You can get to the Friends screen by pressing N or by hitting escape and searching for “Friend” (no quotes but does need the capital F). I’m on eastern time. I’m usually online, but AFK overnight and semi-AFK for big chunks of the day. The Friends feature is a bit underused but they’ve added some more functionality to it lately so hoping I wouldn’t miss something if you try to reach me that way :)
Oops, my paragraphs didn’t come through! That’ll make things a bit hard to read :(
I’ve put basically the same thing up on google docs here
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CU-J4PZjRGp6ALOTnf4RIZfRnvg-KjgXK6-yZnjL1Fc
Wow thank you SO much, I actually found EvilDoUsHarm’s channel yesterday and started off with his Beginner / New Player Life Skills Guides, I am also often afk so I completely understand! Probably why a game like this appeals to me so much, my littles tend to be demanding and random ;) Also your paragraphs showed up just fine!!
Thank you again