October 2021

Top Notch Character Creation

stargrace October 22, 2021 No Comments

Black Desert Online has some of the best character creation I’ve seen in a long time – with some faults. Number one, all of their player characters are human, and while you CAN add less desirable features, the game aims for what society as a whole thinks is “beautiful” and it can be difficult to create a vision of your own.

You can add as much or as little colour as you want, detailing even the iris on the eyes – but the body slider is fairly limited and even all the way to the right, for females at least, you’ll still be quite slim, or at least muscular without any appearance of fat.

Where I think BDO really shines in terms of characters is their NPC. Mob encounters are amazing, there are tons of races, a plethora of villagers, every town and every district has a distinct feel to it and you can immediately tell the area of Grana from Calpheon, as an example. I absolutely love it.

The Benefit to Starting Fresh

stargrace October 20, 2021 No Comments

I have two Black Desert Online accounts, and they’re both very different. I don’t really have time to keep up with two in a game that really encourages you to stay online (even if it’s AFK) 24/7 so I decided that I’d let one rest until it qualifies as a ‘returning’ account again which grants me access to the Olvia servers that have a very nice bonus – and I’d continue playing the ‘newer’ account.

There are a whole lot of reasons for this decision but the biggest one is that newer accounts simply get MORE. They get more of everything. My older account created back in 2016 already had some hours played on it, so they don’t qualify to get the ‘you’ve played 15 hours, have a treat’ bonus that everyone else gets. They also don’t count for the daily login ‘Rookie’ rewards which is from an event that is running right now. The thing is, the event already ran to conclusion last month, and I qualified for it then, too. So this is my second time running through those particular rewards. The qualifying factor is you have to be playing an account where you have logged in after creation within 720 days. Older accounts won’t qualify for that.

The rewards are nothing to sneeze at, either. They include a lot of inventory space, and special bonuses like pets. Coupons for the pearl shop, and buffs.

The only thing my older account had going for it was that I had three level 58+ characters, and the new account has a single 59 character. My crafting was never that high, though I did have a nice amount of energy and contribution points. Those things are all fairly easy to catch up on though and getting buffs and inventory spots is a lot more difficult. The decision to swap accounts came pretty easily, and (so far) I don’t have any regrets. The older account will still be there, after all, just waiting for me to pick it up again.

Happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Getting into the Horse Game

stargrace October 19, 2021 No Comments

It happened. I finally got two coursers (the gold icon indicates this) with the appropriate skills – a male and a female. I used the horse calculator to work out what levels I should have them at (a combination of 29/30 for the best results) and I set them to – er – work, and waited 2.2h for a foal.

I had a low chance of a T8 result, and almost equal chances of a T7 or a T6. My RNG luck held true as it always does, and I ended up with an ebony black T6 female. I’m at least happy to have a female, males have two breeding chances, and females have only one so I wanted to replace the T5 I had just used and this will work well for that. I decided to explore the imperial market, and I sold my level 30 female for 30,000,000 silver. Not a huge amount, but it was enough for me. I also earned some currency that I can trade in for goodies.

Now I’m working on leveling that T6 horse and hoping for another courser so I can breed that with the T5 male who has one chance left. I do also have a T8 female, but I’m reluctant to breed that at the moment. It’s also not a courser, which I might work on changing. You can get tokens that allow you to RNG another skill in order to make that happen. They’re usually sold in the pearl shop, but as is the way with this game, they lure you in with a handful of freebies.

The breeding process was fairly painless but does require navigating the stable UI quite a bit. You need to register your male horse for breeding and lock it to only you so that other people don’t rent it out. That’s right, if you get a good horse you can rent it out as a stud. This does take your breeding slots though. Anyway, you set it to you, then you go back to the basic stable UI and select the female, and then do your thing. I followed some guides out there (there are plenty) and 2.2h later came back to a foal. You also have to make sure you have room in the stable for the new horse, which is not too bad when you can rent lodging to expand those slots and there’s various buffs and scrolls that can increase the slots temporarily as well.

End goal? Get a dream horse. That’s a LOT of work and RNG though, so we’ll have to see how it goes.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Let’s Learn another System – Farming!

stargrace October 18, 2021 No Comments

Yesterday I learned how to package up my goods and take them to the imperial folks for some nice money, and today I decided it was well past time I learn how to farm. Black Desert Online gives you multiple ways of gathering resources, everything from finding the plant out in the world (if there is one) and simply gathering, to buying it from the central market from other players, or even setting up your own farms where you can grow the stuff yourself.

In order to grow a farm you need to rent some fences. They take 10 contribution points. I went and visited Flaviano in Heidel, and rented from him. Then you need some seeds. I went to the big city of Calpheon and purchased from the seed vendor there. I want to grow pepper.

Now, the game makes this as complicated or simple as you want. There’s fertile land overlays, there’s water overlays, there’s weather. Ideally you want to find the perfect spot to grow your crops using all of these overlays to math it out. I decided for my first farm of pepper I didn’t care about any of that, and I placed my plot down alongside my AFK horse rout which is on the outskirts of Heidel.

You physically place your fence plot, and then plant your seeds. You can see it in the world. As far as I know, no one else can interact with it (or see it) besides you. Then you wait while your seeds grow. As they grow, they’ll need some care. You don’t HAVE to care for them, but you’ll get experience and ideally better crops, if you do care. They need to be pruned, they get pests, and all that good stuff. Pepper takes 8h20m to grow, and right now I’m checking them every 30m quickly just to pick the pests and what not off, and I’m training my mount in the meantime.

Apparently you don’t want them to grow past 120% because you’ll get poor returns, but again you can make it as complicated or simple as you want. You can water them and fertilize them and pick the perfect spot and baby them – or you can just let the plants grow. I plan on making fried bird with the peppers, hopefully to turn in to the imperial folks for some cash.

In the meantime, it’s just neat to be learning yet another system in game, and hopefully making some cash from it. I’m thinking one day a week is enough, but it will depend on the returns I get.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!