Let’s Learn another System – Farming!

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!

Imperial Cooking

Yesterday I was doing my cooking and thinking to myself “what the hell use is this stuff, we can buy better from vendors” – and then I learned about Imperial Cooking.

Basically after you’ve cooked some stuff (I’m doing grilled bird, as an example) you hit the L key, tab over to Imperial cuisine, and you can stuff those items you’ve made into boxes that weigh 50LT each – package them up, and then deliver them to one of two NPC in the lands (I use Oliva, it’s close the NPC is Lotz Pavarotti). You can sell them to these people for a nice hefty sum – if someone else hasn’t already delivered all of the items for that good. It’s shared server wide, but varies per server, so let’s say the imperial dude is accepting 500 boxes of chicken on one server, on another someone might have already sold a bunch so he’s accepting 32, or zero.

This AM I made 1400 grilled chicken, packaged them up, and delivered them for a nice little sum. There are different boxes for each tier of crafting and a nice list of items you can package up can be found here which is a fantastic site if you don’t want to watch a video for everything. Sometimes, I just want to read the text.

Any way, now my Shai is at skilled 10 and I’m really happy with that. The workers are eating their chicken and the excess is being sold to the imperial dude, and I’m not going to ask what he’s doing with so many boxes of supplies, after all that’s a bit rude.

One more mechanic that I’ve managed to figure out thanks to guild mates and web sites! The list continues to grow. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Life Skills? We’ve Got Those!

Yesterday a really awesome Halloween patch was released in BDO, but of course instead of looking into that at all I’ve been working on my life skills. First, the fishing event ended (boo) and that happened to be my major form of income for a while. Now I’m looking into other things. I started learning about contribution points, nodes, and workers. Basically you spend points unlocking things on the maps (nodes) and then you can put workers there to gather / harvest whatever that node provides. It gets more complicated than that with linking nodes and finding valuable workers, but that’s the basics.

I used this node calculator to figure out what I wanted where, and to start off I went pretty simple. I have 5 workers. I have one doing chicken/eggs – I use this to create grilled bird meat, and it feeds all of my workers. That’s right, they have stamina and they can run out. Then I have another worker gathering potatoes. This can be used as flour or a number of other things. My third worker is out harvesting grapes, another is gathering iron, and my final worker gathers honey.

With these supplies I can either use them to produce items (like grilled bird meat) and then use those items, or sell them, either to players or NPC. I haven’t worked out everything I want to do with it all yet, but it’s a nice start into cooking and I’m currently at cooking skilled 4 which makes me pretty happy. Cooking is also nice and relaxing, in fact almost all the life skills are. Probably why I enjoy them so much. I spent some time working training and leveling up my horses so that I can breed them, but that will be another time.

I haven’t decided which character I want to boost with my time piece yet. You might recall that everyone gets a time piece this season and it basically swaps your current season character to another character, boosting them to the same level with the same skill points. My Shai is currently my season character, at level 60 (ideally you’d want 61/62 but I’m happy with 60) and I’d like to boost a combat orientated character to finish off the rest of the season pass. I did create a tamer which is lots of fun, but I’m not sure if that’s who I want to actually play. I also have a guardian at 58 that I’d like to reach 60-61/62 with. I’m thinking training books for that one.

Then there’s my entire other account, where I also have a shai and a lahn. I’m not sure what I’ll do with that one yet.

I won a BDO twitter contest this week, which was awesome! I got (hah) another copy of the game, and a master pack of goodies that I’m hoping to use on my main account since it’s so far behind all the new goodies everyone gets. I’ll give the game copy to a friend, or my husband since he’s expressed a little interest in playing and of course I want to foster that! I’m hoping to explore the Halloween things tomorrow, but it has been a busy week with not a lot of free time, and it has been uncomfortable to sit at my desk for any length, so we’ll have to see. For now I am in game mostly AFK just doing the life skill thing (as it is meant to be done).

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

GM Events, Twitch Drops, and Fishing – Oh My!

Event screenshots in BDO remind me of GW2, where it’s just a blurry mass of bodies participating and difficult to get an awesome shot – normally a good thing, speaking volumes about the population.

This weekend was one filled with events to partake in, and on the 13th the Halloween ones begin in BDO. I know this has been an attempt at player retention while other games did their thing (that’s right New World, I’m looking at you) and I’m quite happy that I can benefit from it. On Friday/Saturday/Sunday the GM’s hosted rift events on Season_2 and Season_3 servers where you could show up to one of four locations and defeat some rift mobs for a chance at season+ items (mostly used to enchant your gear). I got a bunch of tuvala ore, some time-filled black stones – and an awesome DUO tuvala belt. The belt was especially nice because I don’t bother enchanting my accessories in BDO, so it was a free upgrade. The GM ran the event twice for us on Sunday as it was the last round, and everyone was thankful and praised them for their efforts. Sure, chat was typical PVP game chat (pretty crass) but I think for the most part everyone had a great time.

Then there were some twitch drops that have ran for a few days. You basically watch a BDO twitch streamer who has drops enabled and you’d get various free things. One of the things you could claim was a copy of the game, there were three chances for that actually. A few friends picked it up and I’m glad they didn’t miss out on the opportunity. I found some new streamers to watch (Salt, is one who does a lot of RNG enchanting on his channel that was amusing to watch) and it was neat to see how others play the game.

The fishing event that I’ve been participating in for a few days now wraps up on the 13th (maintenance, a bunch of other things ends then too and then Halloween begins) so I’ve been trying to take advantage of that as much as I can. My Lahn is partially into 57 now, and I’ve been questing through her main story in an attempt at wrapping it up. I’ve also been working on enchanting my gear which is finally at the tuvala stage, but no where near PEN. I keep failing the enchants – a lot.

The guild is doing well, I believe we’ve got 6 members now, two of those being myself. I don’t think or expect the game to have staying power for everyone, but it’s certainly something I’ve settled into as being my main game and I’m quite happy with that decision.

You can find me in game under the family name Reveurs – or Soiree. Our guild is Quail’s Tale Tavern, we’re life skillers and proud of it, hehe!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Quail’s Tale Tavern (and other Adventures)

I was doing some thinking last night and came to the conclusion that perhaps I should start my own guild in Black Desert Online. Now, I ‘run’ guilds in a few games, but they’re not what I would consider active, at all. They’re used mostly for storage and because I don’t always play nice with others. BDO just feels like a different game to me, one I actually WANT to play for a long time. I’ve been playing for almost two months now and I still enjoy it as much if not more – and there’s tons of stuff I haven’t even explored yet, like bartering, sailing, and all that good stuff.

I decided to start up the Quail’s Tale Tavern, a life skill guild for any mutual friends who wanted to join. We’ll never be big and take over the world, but that’s fine by me. It’s a quiet place to call home and rest if that’s your thing. If you’d like to join just let me know and we can make that happen (discord, twitter, in-game, whatever works).

My lahn is now sitting at level 53, and has spent most of today attacking a training dummy because my hands have been too sore to play. Sure, the levels come slower than if I had of just been out exploring and questing, but that wasn’t really an option. At least this way, I can still ‘play’ – and I honestly couldn’t be happier. The class is just plain fun to watch, and I’m not sure what character I’m going to time piece yet on my alt account, but I’m pretty sure it will be another lahn on my main account.

Two good friends joined up in game today and added themselves to the guild which just makes me smile. I love seeing others enjoying themselves and giving the game a chance. I feel like this game has flown under the radar for a long time because of the MANY confusing mechanics, but sticking with it and learning in smaller bite sized doses has been much easier. Ignoring the onslaught of quests and UI gimmicks has been key to my enjoyment. Well, that and horse training. I’m very close to being ready to breed my first mounts – I’ve got my fingers crossed for a Tier 8!

There is also another new event that involves twitch drops – you can read about it here. It works much like New World’s current event where you watch for an hour, claim a reward, watch for two hours, claim another reward, watch for 5 hours, get a reward. There are new rewards each day, and it runs for a number of days. You need to link your twitch account to your BDO account through the BDO web site, then you claim the items on twitch, and redeem them back on the BDO web site. They’re not game breaking items, but hey, free is free.

Goals? I’ve got those! I can only set the guild emblem on Monday’s (why? I have no idea, it’s in the rules. Maybe the person who goes around approving guild emblems only works Monday’s) so that’s one goal. I’d like to get ranks and stuff set up but BDO has everyone do a mandatory 14 day trial as a new member before you can be promoted (minus the guild leader) so I can’t assign anyone yet. I think this is a great idea, it auto assigns you to a ‘general’ player once your two weeks is up. During this time you can’t earn guild incentives (money) so you’re less likely to hang out waiting to abuse the system. You also have to wait 24h before joining a new guild after leaving one, so there’s lots of time to think things over.

Anyway. 53 inching my way to 61 on the lahn, working on fishing on the Shai (and other crafts in time) next on the docket is to learn how to make use of the workers I have, and get into simple farming. I need to start my empire after all!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!