Black Desert Online Workers Guide

Introduction to Workers in Black Desert Online

Black Desert Online Workers Guide will help you quickly establish a strong foundation for your journey. Let’s dive in and get you on the right track!

Ahoy there, fellow adventurers! Tired of endlessly mining ore and chopping down trees yourself in the vast world of Black Desert Online? Well, let me tell you about a fantastic way to automate these tasks and even get items crafted for you while you’re off adventuring or simply relaxing: Workers. These Non-Player Characters (NPCs), though not directly controllable, can become the backbone of your resource gathering and crafting empire. They belong to you, and you can watch them diligently working on the World Map, bringing back valuable materials to your city’s storage. Integrating workers into your gameplay is a key aspect of many life skill activities and can significantly enhance your efficiency.

How to Hire Workers

To get started with your own workforce, you’ll first need to know how to hire workers. Most cities and some towns in Black Desert Online have a Work Supervisor NPC. You can easily locate these helpful individuals by looking for the pickaxe icon on your map or by using the convenient NPC Finder function in the game menu (ESC Menu > Function > Find NPC or the magnifying glass icon next to your mini-map). Once you’ve found a Work Supervisor, approach them and select the “Contract Workers” option.

Be prepared to spend 5 energy for each attempt to view a random worker. You’ll get a glimpse of their grade and stats. If the presented worker doesn’t quite meet your expectations, you can spend another 5 energy to “View Another.” For those with more specific needs, the “View Continuously” option allows you to set a minimum worker grade (like Skilled or higher) and automatically cycle through potential hires until a worker of that caliber appears.

Just remember that hiring workers is based on Random Number Generation (RNG), so the race and grade of the worker you get are not guaranteed. It’s generally a good idea to aim for at least Skilled (blue grade) workers as they tend to have better starting stats. Keep in mind that to hire workers in a different town, you’ll first need to have gained knowledge of the Work Supervisor in that particular location.

Acquiring Lodging for Workers

As you start building your worker empire, you’ll quickly realize that each town initially offers only one free worker lodging. To employ more workers in a specific city, you’ll need to acquire additional lodging. This is done by purchasing lodging property within that city using your hard-earned Contribution Points (CP). To see which houses offer lodging, open the World Map (M), click on the desired city, and then select “Lodging” from the dropdown menu. Houses that can be used for lodging will be highlighted with arrows. It’s crucial to understand that lodging is city-specific; for instance, lodging you’ve acquired in Velia cannot be used to house a worker who will be working in Heidel.

Understanding Worker Races and Grades

Black Desert Online features different worker races, each with their own distinct strengths and weaknesses. Goblins are known for their fastest work speed and movement speed, making them excellent for quickly completing tasks, though they typically have lower stamina. Humans offer a more balanced set of stats between the speed of Goblins and the stamina of Giants.

Giants, on the other hand, boast high stamina, allowing them to work for longer periods before needing to be fed, and they can also carry more resources, though they are generally slower. Some sources also mention that Giants have a talent for “Production Increase.” More recently, workers from the Land of the Morning Light have been introduced, possessing unique stats and talents that cater to the specific nodes in that region.

Beyond race, workers also have five different grades that indicate their rarity and overall strength. These grades are visually represented by the color of the worker’s name:

Naive (white), which are Giants with the lowest stats;

Normal (green), the most common with lower stats;

Skilled (blue), which show significant stat improvements at level 30 and can be traded on the Worker Exchange;

Professional (yellow), boasting even higher stats and being rarer to obtain, with Named Workers falling into this category;

and finally, Artisan (orange), the best and rarest tier with the highest stats, typically obtained through worker promotion, with a very low chance of hiring them directly.

It’s also worth noting Named Workers, who are Professional grade NPCs you can hire by earning 500 amity with them and spending 500,000 silver. These unique workers come with an extra skill but cannot be promoted to Artisan and are bound to a specific node mentioned in their contract.

Assigning Workers to Tasks

Once you have a few workers under your command, you’ll want to put them to work. There are two primary types of tasks you can assign: gathering resources from Production Nodes and crafting items in Town Workshops.

For Production Nodes (gathering), the first crucial step is to connect the nodes between the city where your worker is located and the specific resource node you want them to work on. This involves investing Contribution Points (CP) with the Node Managers of each connecting node in the network. You’ll need to invest in both the main exploration node and its associated sub-node, which is the actual production node. Once the nodes are connected and invested in, open your World Map, click on the sub-node (you can see what resources it offers by hovering over the icon), and a window will pop up allowing you to choose which of your workers you’d like to send.

Select a worker and then be sure to click the “Change” button. Here, you can set the number of work cycles you want the worker to perform. For continuous work, it’s best to set this to the maximum amount. Finally, click “Start Work.” Remember that only one worker can be assigned to each node at a time. The resources your worker gathers will be automatically deposited into the storage of the city where that worker was originally hired. Workers will continue toiling away until their stamina runs out. If the storage in their affiliated city becomes full, they will unfortunately stop working.

The second type of task involves Town Workshops (crafting). To utilize these, you first need to purchase a house in the desired town and designate it as a workshop. The necessary materials for crafting must be present in the storage of the same town where the worker you intend to use is located. To assign a worker to a workshop task, open the Worker List, select an idle worker who resides in the same town as the workshop and the materials, and then choose the specific crafting task you want them to undertake. Set the number of items you want crafted and click “Start Work.”

The finished crafted items will then be placed in your town’s storage. It’s important to note that if you want a worker in one town (say, Heidel) to use materials stored in that town’s storage to craft an item in a workshop located in a different town (like Velia), both towns must be connected via a network of nodes.

Key Worker Stats

A worker’s efficiency and effectiveness are determined by their key stats. Work Speed dictates how quickly a worker can complete a single unit of workload for a given task. This stat is influenced by the worker’s race and any relevant skills they may possess.

Movement Speed determines how fast a worker travels between their home city and the work node they are assigned to. For workers assigned to gathering nodes, a higher movement speed is almost always beneficial as it reduces travel time.

Luck is a more debated stat. While it’s often speculated that higher luck increases the chance of obtaining better or additional items (often referred to as “lucky drops”) when a worker completes a task, this hasn’t been definitively proven with in-game math.

Finally, Stamina represents the amount of energy a worker has to perform work cycles before needing to rest and be fed. Each completed job typically consumes 1 stamina.

Worker Experience and Leveling Up

As your workers diligently perform their assigned tasks, they gain EXP. The amount of EXP earned is related to the duration of the job. As they accumulate enough EXP, workers will level up, reaching a maximum level of 40. Upon leveling, their base stats like Work Speed, Movement Speed, and Luck can potentially increase. Furthermore, every five levels (at levels 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35), workers have the opportunity to learn a new skill.

At specific level milestones – 10, 20, 30, and 40 – workers become eligible for a Promotion Test. To initiate a promotion test, open the “Promotion Information” tab in the Worker List. Here, you’ll see which of your workers are ready for promotion and how many attempts they have remaining. Clicking the “Promote” button will send the worker off for an 8-hour promotion test during which they cannot perform any other tasks. It’s important to understand that promotion is not guaranteed to be successful.

However, a successful promotion will increase the worker’s grade, leading to improved base stats. Each worker rank has a maximum of four promotion chances based on the levels they’ve gained under your employment. Workers purchased from the Marketplace might have anywhere from zero to four promotion attempts available. Even after reaching level 40, workers continue to accumulate EXP up to 100%, and this accumulated EXP can then be used for skill exchanges.

Worker Skills

Worker Skills play a significant role in their overall effectiveness. All workers start with one randomly assigned skill and gain an additional skill every five levels, potentially reaching a total of ten skills by level 40. The skills learned are largely random, making it a bit of a pursuit to obtain workers with your desired skill sets. These skills can provide various benefits, such as increasing work speed, movement speed, luck, or granting special processing abilities for crafting specific items.

One universally useful skill is “Delivery,” which is automatically learned by all workers upon reaching level 1 (or sometimes mentioned as level 40). This skill allows you to designate a specific storage location where the materials gathered by that worker will be automatically sent upon completion of their task, greatly aiding in storage organization. If you have a worker at level 30 with at least 20% EXP, you have the option to reroll one of their skills. This is done by going to the Worker List, selecting the worker, and pressing the skill change button.

You can then choose the skill you want to replace and confirm the change, which will grant a new random skill but will also reduce the worker’s current EXP by 20%. For crafting workers, skills like Advanced [Item] Production Skill (for Artisan grade) and [Item] Production Skill (for Professional grade) are highly valuable as they allow the worker to process additional items at once (4 for Artisan, 2 for Professional) while still requiring the materials for the multiplied output. Similarly, Advanced [Crate] Packing Skill (Artisan) and [Crate] Packing Skill (Professional) increase the number of trade crates a worker can produce simultaneously.

Other skills like Craftsmanship, Leg Work, Lucky Guy, Wings, Quick, Simple, Work Supervisor, Blessed Hand, and Masterly Skill provide direct increases to the worker’s core stats. Finally, Thrifty skills offer a percentage chance to recover a portion of the materials used during crafting.

Feeding Workers and Managing Stamina

Just like any diligent worker, those in Black Desert Online need sustenance to keep going. Each time a worker completes a job cycle, they consume 1 stamina. When a worker’s stamina reaches zero, they will cease working, and their icon in the Worker List will turn red. To get them back on the job, you need to feed them specific food items to replenish their stamina. The most common and often recommended worker food is Beer. It’s relatively easy to craft, with a recipe of 5 Grain, 6 Water, 1 Sugar, and 2 Leavening.

While Beer restores a smaller amount of stamina compared to other options, its low cost and the small increment of restoration (2 stamina each) make it highly efficient, as you’re less likely to waste stamina by overfeeding. Other worker food options exist, such as Oatmeal, Fish Fillet Chip, Cheese Pie, and Freekeh Snake Stew, which restore varying amounts of stamina. However, using food that restores a large amount of stamina on a worker who has only used a small amount can lead to wasted stamina points.

You can either purchase worker food from the Central Market or craft it yourself if you have invested in the Cooking life skill.

To feed your workers, open the Worker List, click the “Recovery” button (or “Recover All” if you want to feed multiple workers), and then select the type of food you wish to use. After feeding them, it’s always a good practice to click “Repeat all” to ensure your workers resume their last assigned tasks.

Worker Exchange

For those looking to expand or refine their worker force quickly, the Worker Exchange offers a convenient way to buy and sell workers with other players. You can access this feature by speaking to any Work Supervisor NPC and selecting the “Worker Exchange” option. When browsing the exchange, you can see details about each listed worker, including their level, current location, grade, type (race), individual stats, learned skills, the number of remaining promotion attempts (if they are not Artisan grade), and the seller’s asking price. If you decide to purchase a worker, make sure you have sufficient available lodging in the city where that worker is currently located.

The price of a worker on the exchange is automatically determined by the game based on factors like their level, grade, and the skills they possess. For example, a level 1 Skilled worker might have a base price of 100,000 silver, a Professional 1,000,000 silver, and an Artisan 5,000,000 silver, with prices increasing significantly as the worker’s level goes up. You can also register your own workers for sale on the exchange, provided they have full stamina. When considering buying a worker, pay close attention to their skills and the city they are currently affiliated with.

For any worker below Artisan grade, be sure to check how many promotion opportunities they still have. The Worker Exchange can be particularly useful for acquiring workers with specific skills that you’ve been struggling to roll yourself or for quickly obtaining higher-grade workers. However, it’s worth noting that some unique workers, such as those from the forests of Kamasylvia, cannot be listed on the Worker Exchange.

Firing Workers

Eventually, you might find yourself needing to free up lodging space or simply wanting to get rid of a less desirable worker. To fire a worker, open your Worker List (either via the World Map or the ESC menu under the “Life” section). Select the worker(s) you wish to remove, ensuring they are not currently in the middle of a task. Then, click the icon that typically shows a person’s silhouette with an “X” or a button labeled “Fire Selected.” A warning window will appear to confirm your decision, as firing a worker is irreversible. Once fired, the worker will be removed from your employ, and their previously occupied lodging space will become available again.

Advanced Topics for Optimizing Your Worker Empire

For those looking to truly master the worker system, there are some advanced topics to consider. Node Connections are absolutely fundamental, not only for enabling your workers to travel to and gather resources from production nodes but also for allowing inter-city crafting. Remember, you must establish a network of connected nodes by investing Contribution Points with the respective Node Managers. The “Previous Node” button on the World Map can be invaluable for visualizing which nodes you need to connect to reach your desired production node.

Optimizing your worker empire involves carefully considering the worker race and their skills in relation to the specific tasks and nodes you assign them to. For gathering, movement speed is generally always beneficial, while work speed becomes more critical for nodes with higher workloads or when you want to minimize the number of work cycles. Utilizing external spreadsheets and calculators created by the community can be incredibly helpful in determining the most efficient worker setups for various scenarios.

Efficient worker stamina management is also key to maximizing productivity and minimizing wasted resources. Pay attention to how many tasks a worker can complete before their stamina depletes and choose the appropriate food to restore just the right amount. When it comes to worker skills optimization, aim for skills that directly enhance work speed and movement speed for your gathering workers, and prioritize relevant production or packing skills for those assigned to workshops.

Don’t hesitate to strategically use the skill rerolling feature on your higher-grade workers to try and obtain more desirable abilities. Finally, while this guide has covered the basics, keep in mind that there are also unique worker types available in the Land of the Morning Light region, each with their own distinct talents and potentially different rules regarding where they can be assigned to work. Delving deeper into these specialized workers can further optimize your resource gathering in that specific territory.

By understanding these fundamental aspects of the worker system in Black Desert Online and continuously refining your strategies, you’ll be well on your way to establishing a highly efficient and profitable worker empire that will serve you well in your many adventures!