Black Desert Online Beginner’s Guide – [BDO]

So you recently started playing Black Desert Online. Welcome. You‘ll soon find that this game is incredibly vast with so many things you can do and try out. In this BDO beginner’s guide, I will try to help you get started and avoid some of the mistakes I made myself. I will also point you to other useful sources, such as other guides, charts, tools, etc.

This is a work in process and will grow over time as I further realize what information would be most useful for beginners. But let’s start with the first thing you encounter in this game, the Black Spirit.

The Black Spirit

When you first wake up, you find yourself talking to the Black Spirit. This entity will be your companion throughout your journey in BDO. And that‘s a good thing because it allows you to enhance and infuse your equipment and gives you the black spirit quests. To summon your black spirit you just press the “,” button on your keyboard (not sure about console).

The Black Spirit Quests

The first quest you get when you wake up is the first quest in the black spirit questline. You should always complete them as you gain a lot of experience, useful items, extra inventory and even pets (more on that later). In fact, you probably won‘t need to do any other quests up until you hit level 50. After that things start to get a bit more complicated.

In any case, do the black spirit quests. I started running around doing all sorts of quests in my early days, making me take forever to reach level 50 (which was the cap then).

Enhancing Gear With the Black Spirit

You can use items called black stones to enhance your gear above their base value. Each level of enhancement makes the piece of gear slightly more powerful. I have an enhancing guide here that covers enhancement in detail, but in brief, you can use a black stone (weapon) to enhance your weapons to +7 and black stone (armor) to enhance your armor to +5 without any trouble. After that limit it starts getting complicated.

Speaking of gear. There is no level limit on gear. You could use max enhanced boss gear on a level 1 character if you felt like it (and had it). The choices you need to make are more in kin with which gear gives the best stats of the type you are seeking. That is, however, an advanced subject not suitable in a beginner’s guide. For a beginner, I would recommend just getting a full set of Grunil armor gear and either the Azwell, Yuria or Bares weapons and when you can, enhance them to +5 and +7 respectively. Don‘t worry too much about picking the wrong gear until you need to start enhancing it above the +5/+7 limit.

The Character Screen

Here you can see some of the important information about your characters, such as your character’s level, it’s HP and WP/SP/MP, your family fame and your character’s karma status. You can also see your skill level in the life skills that are available in the game.

Your Family

In BDO, you and all your alternate characters belong to the same family. This means that a lot of things are shared between your characters, such as energy and contribution points, storage space, fame, money, and special bonuses. so, if you later want to try another class you won’t lose the money and items you have gained on your previous characters.

The Equipment and Inventory Interface

To access your equipment and inventory interface you can press the “i” button. which should open up a window similar to the one below.

In the equipment window, you can place four pieces of armor, the main weapon, a sub-weapon, and six accessories. You won’t get an awakening weapon until you reach level 56. You can also see your attack power (AP) and defense power (DP) in this window as well. These two stats give you a rough idea of your combat power.

If you hover over the combat stats you then get a better breakdown into AP, accuracy, evasion, defense, damage reduction, and damage reduction rate.

List of Combat Stats and What They Mean

AP = Total attack power with the main weapon.
Awakened AP = Total attack power with an awakened weapon.
Accuracy = Ability to land a hit.
Evasion = Ability to avoid a hit.
Damage Reduction = If hit, how much damage is mitigated.
Damage Reduction Rate = An additional percentage reduction to damage.

There are also slots for your outfit (if you buy one), an adventure tome and a life skill item.

On the inventory side, you will see all the stuff you have on you. You can also see all the currencies you have at the bottom of that screen. You then also have a pearl inventory which stores all your Pearl Store items you have received or bought.

Looting and Pets

When you start you you might find that looting is incredibly slow. This is on purpose to push you into buying pets from the Pearl Store. But don‘t worry, once you have finished the black spirit quests for the Velia region (around level 16) you will get a free pet. Then another when you finish the Serendia region (around level 30) and the third pet once you complete the Calpheon region (around level 50). There are also occasional pet giveaways through the daily log-in reward system.

All-in-all. In time you should be able to get five pets (the max number you can use at once) without paying for them. But if you want them faster, want specific pets, or want to upgrade them, then you will need to buy them from the Pearl Store.

The Pearl Store

The Pearl Store is the way the game monetized itself. To access the pearl store you can press the little pearl icon in the lower right corner of your screen. While there is no subscription fee, you can spend real money to purchase items that give you some advantage over other players. And while most of those items can be bought in the central market, there is a limited supply being sold there by other players.

This system has prompted the discussion on whether BDO is a pay-to-win game. Personally, I would say it‘s a pay-to-save-time game. There is nothing in the Pearl Store that allows you to do something other players cannot do, it only allows you to do things faster. There is, also, no item in the Pearl Store that gives you a direct advantage in PvP.

Important Pearl Store Items:

Value Pack
Pets
At least one outfit

The Map and Auto-travelling

To access the in-game map you can press the “M” button. This will show you all the areas you have already discovered. On the map, you can see the location of nodes and towns and where you have open quests. If you right-click on a spot on the map you get a blue path running from your current location to the point you clicked on. If you now exit the map and press the “T” button you will start traveling towards that destination automatically.

This is a feature I personally love and should be in all MMO‘s.

You can also auto-travel to quest locations from the quest list in your UI. Just hover over your quest in the quest list and press the running man icon. This will set up an auto-path towards that quest’s next location.

Contribution Points and Energy.

These two stats are somewhat important in the game. Just how important depends on your playstyle. Contribution points are useful regardless of which path you take in the game. If you look at the map you will notice the nodes there. One of the things you can do with contribution points is to connect these nodes together. You can also use contribution points to invest in houses in towns, rent items from NPC’s and more. For a more detailed look at contribution points, you can read this guide here.

Energy is used for life skilling actions, such as gathering. If you are planning on a life skilling career then energy is really important. Energy can also be used to invest in a node, which will increase the loot you get from that node. At level 10 this increase is 5% on average or as the game developers say “50% increase to loot chance but only 10% of the time”.

Other Useful Guides for Beginners

Having played this game since it‘s release in the west means that I might have missed some important topics a beginner would need, but I hope I got the most important items covered. If you found this useful then you should check out my other BDO guides. Anyway, good luck in the game and I hope you have a blast.