When you’re workers are doing stuff, you need to be online. They don’t complete things while you’re offline, which helps account for the numerous AFK fishing people out there. The game really doesn’t want you to log off. In some ways this is a fantastic idea, it makes the world look constantly vibrant and filled with players even if they’re not actually doing anything or active, because they just never log out. In other ways this is a weird awkward system.
My workers finally finished the 28 steps required to create a raft license. I turned in my quest, got some experience, and set out on the open water as soon as I could. The cute little otter NPC who resides on the docks of Velia gave me a quest to head out to an island and visit some family members of his, so that’s where I went. Once there, that otter gave me another quest to gather him some fish, so I set out to do just that. Of course I never caught any of the fish that he wanted because that’s how my luck in video games goes. Like Stardew valley, for example. I had been catching loads of sardines, no problem. Then one day I got a quest for sardine. Not a single one to be found. You can apply that lesson to pretty much any video game I’ve ever played.
I find the raft very lovely, though I’ve heard many others complaining about it. I don’t find it slow at all, and after the awkward handling of my first wagon, and my first donkey, I think that it handles rather well. Better than either of those other mounts so far.
Now that this major craft project is completed I have to decide what I want to work towards next. Completing quests in my journal? Staying in Velia? Moving on to the next town? Linking more nodes? Simply exploring? I also need to decide what to do with my Velia workers in the meantime. One is still out collecting potatoes, but I have two others free. The shipyard does let me make a ferry, do I want to make that as an upgrade to my raft? Or I could free up those houses I bought for something else, or I could swap them to a different function. There’s always so many choices to make – the joy of sandbox games.
If you’re playing Black Desert Online these days what have you been up to? How do you spend your time? Let me know in comments!
I think the raft moves at the same speed as swimming, although with the huge advantage of not using stamina or killing you. It handles very well and looks great in motion. It is, however, of very limited use as far as I can tell, because if there’s a way to call it to from one wharf to another I haven’t been able to find it. My raft is moored in Velia and I can only really take it out from there and take it back when I’ve finished. I think I could leave it in the water, then travel to another wharf and have it recovered but I haven’t tried that yet and even if it works it would be awkward.
Like all BD systems, though, it’s opaque and I may be misunderstanding something crucial.
I’ve recently arrived at Velia myself, and am level 12-13. I plan to stick around for a while around Velia, exploring and finding all the farms, working on crafting quests, and taking to NPCs to bump up my amity. Eventually I’d like to see the rest of the game world but there’s a ton of game systems I want to figure out first: workers, node management, cooking, housing, etc. Hehe.