Originally written by Eminent (u/CadeGuitar), who generously published a Worker & Node Guide in “Eminent’s Life Skill Guide“. This well-received, 260 page guide has been added to and edited by me. It’s now kept current on GrumpyG, with Eminent’s permission. Thanks Eminent! ! I will update this Worker & Node Guide with any new BDO patches/changes. (Eminent is currently taking a break from Black Desert Online.)
Eminent’s Node Networks and Worker Empires Guide
Worker empires are one of the most important (yet least understood) aspects of the game. Having a solid empire is extremely crucial for lifeskillers, and it should not be ignored.
There is no best node network. If you simply copied a top player’s network you would be making a big mistake.
Node networks are fluid, and should be tweaked and changed depending on your own playstyle and goals. Just as your own goals change, your network should change as well.
Your network should be built on two criteria:
- Usefulness
- Silver
In that order.
In many ways, usefulness ends up being silver. For processing, usefulness means getting nodes that provide valuable wood/ore that you will use to make huge sums of money. For trade, usefulness means a connection to the desert which will let you sell crates or fish for enormous profit. For cooking, usefulness means getting cereals that will let you make beer to feed your workers.
Only after you get your “usefulness” nodes should you begin focusing on silver nodes. Silver nodes are the ones that give you materials that will end up going straight to the marketplace. For example, the honey node on Alejandro Farm. For cooks this is an extremely valuable resource, but even if you’re not going to cook it can net you 1m+ silver per day if you list it on the market.
Determining What Nodes Are Useful
For this you need a have an actual goal. I’m not talking about a “I want top 5 in every lifeskill” type of goal, I mean short term. Something you are working towards right now.
If you are trying to raise your alchemy level, you’ll probably want to get the sunrise herb and silver azalea nodes. These are the secondary ingredients in reagents which you’ll probably be making a lot of.
If you are a cook you will want to get every single cereal node, as well as the olvia grape node. In addition, you probably want to get some dried fish nodes off the epheria coast in order to get fish/seafood for imperial cooking.
If you are processing 5+ hours a day, you should get wood/ore nodes that are valuable with the current market. I can’t tell you which ones are the best profit for processing because markets change.
If you have Artisan 2 trade and you’re processing, you should get nodes that give materials for the crates that you want to make.
If you are farming you will probably want to get farms instead of more nodes…that one’s kind of straight forward.
Horse training you’ll want to invest your CP in a horse ranch (not really a node).
There are a million things in the game that require CP, and you will never have enough for all of them. This is why your network requires constant change — so it can evolve to your current needs.
I don’t know your personal situation, so you’ll have to study your options a bit and figure out what is best for you.
Nodes for Silver
The majority of silver your network brings you will be from turning your resources into other things. Cereals are only valuable because they make beer, dried fish are only valuable because you can make fried fish boxes. That said, even the highest level processor could never process all of the materials he brings in.
You’re going to have an excess of materials, so you should probably make sure that excess is going to be things that sell well.
Tools to Help you Find Valuable Nodes
- Black Desert Analytics: – Balzor’s research on Nodes. Helpful Node spreadsheet and lots of good info here.
- BDOdae – Dae has done some great work on node and recipe tools.
- GrumpyG’s Node Investment Calculator: calculates total CP, silver/day, silver/CP, and worker variables.
Feel free to play with all of these helpful tools. Input your own values for each node. It will be a fairly annoying task, but it will probably be extremely valuable to you.
Connecting Nodes
There are many elements to the game that make it desirable to have the world connected. It may seem like a straightforward task, but you should put some thought into the path you take to connect cities and nodes.
This is the southern Calpheon region. There are many ways to connect this region, and a lot of it ends up being a stylistic choice.
A lot of people cut Longleaf Sentry Post and Crioville, and instead connect Trent and Behr through the northern nodes that have more resources available. It costs a bit more CP, but you get valuable resources from them instead of 4 CP on a connection.
Some people cut the connection going south from Calpheon starting at Gabino Farm, and instead connect from the right down through Keplan.
A lot of people connect Calpheon to Heidel through Delphe Knights Castle instead of down through Glish the way I did it.
In fact, if you study that connection enough you’ll realize that by doing the previous two suggestions I would save 3 CP. I want to say all that was just for an example, but I realized my inefficiency while writing this page. It goes to show that no matter how much you work on your network, you’re probably still not doing it right.
The main purpose of this section is to show how many different ways there are to go about connecting cities. An important thing to realize though is that every single connection requires CP, so before going after a resource just because it’s valuable, take note of how many connections it takes to get to it (it might just not be as valuable as you think).
On the other hand, sometimes the cheapest route from one city to another might not be the best. If there is a second route that has twice as many materials along the way, perhaps it’s better to connect via the more expensive path.
In the end, these are all decisions you’re going to have to make yourself, and it’s going to take a lot of thought and effort to get it right.
Workers
After getting your nodes all set up, it’s time to think about the workers (actually it would have been real nice if you thought about workers before now).
Learn the intricacies of workers, workload, and their skills. Go over like 3 times until you understand it all.
Worker Guides that Explain Worker Stats and Work Time Influences:
- Black Desert Analytics: good description of Workers & Workload, awesome job at data gathering!
- Saarith Gaming: Another good worker overview explaining Workload, Distances, etc
- GrumpyGreen’s Worker Guide: Worker Skills Tool to find and sort the best skills. Workload, distance, and worker stat explanations.
It’s important to realize that your network is going to be basically crippled without good workers. If you have mostly green/blue workers, you’re bringing in very little.
When you are new to the game it is totally acceptable to hire skilled workers (but I would never hire a green).
However, once you have a worker on every node, I would immediately start working on rolling for professional and artisan workers. Until every single one of your workers are professional/artisan, you shouldn’t be spending your energy on anything but rolling workers.
The long term benefits you’ll get by having a solid army of slaves workers by far outweighs what you’ll gain from spending your energy elsewhere.
If you roll artisans, you’re lucky. The majority of the time, however, you’ll probably be stuck with professionals. In that case you should level them up to 20. At 20+ you should begin doing promotion tests for them.
Advice on Worker Upgrades and Promotions:
Every 24 hours you can do a promotion test for a worker. A worker gets a chance to take the test every 10 levels (so at 10, 20, 30) for a total of 3 tests.
It was datamined (although not yet confirmed through extensive testing) that workers have a higher chance to pass their promotion test if they are a higher level. For that reason, we wait until 20 (rather than 10) to take our first test.
“But why don’t we just wait until 30 then?”
The reason for that is because level 30 takes a very very very long time. In the end, it is completely not worth the effort to wait that long.
After the worker hits 20 you can take 2 tests. If it succeeds — Congratulations! You now have an artisan worker. If it fails both tests, however, you fire it (or sell).
It’s faster to roll a new worker and level it to 20 again than it is to keep that worker around until 30, so just fire it. This is a process that you will repeat a huge number of times.
If you have a large node network (70-100+) workers….and you can only take 1 test per day….and there’s no guarantee that your worker will pass….
Well you get the idea, it’s going to take a long time to get an army of all artisan workers. With that in mind, you should make sure that you are promoting a worker every single day.
- Worker Promotion Guide – detailed data about worker promotions and chances
Once you get a worker that is the correct rarity and race (often that means Artisan Goblin), you can roll for skills in order to build super workers. This means 150 Work Speed goblins on nodes, and advanced packers in Trent or Kamasylvia.
- Worker Skills Guide – detailed data about worker skill resetting and a handy Worker Skill Tool
All of this might seem overwhelming, but it’s not something that you need to put all of your effort into right now. Workers are a process that you slowly build up over months and months of playing.
