BDO – Central Market Guide

In BDO, the central market is the feature that allows players to buy and sell items to each other. Using the central market is the only way players can trade between themselves in BDO, with a few exceptions such as with potions. The central market is composed of the marketplace, were the actual buying and selling occurs, and the warehouse, where you store the items you want to sell and where the items you buy are placed.

In this guide I will address the following:

1. How to access the central market.
2. How to use the marketplace.
3. How the warehouse works.
4. How buying and selling works and how to place orders.
5. How the central market tax works and how to reduce it.

I have also embedded a video on how the central market works at the bottom of the page.

Accessing the Central Market.

There are two ways to access the central market. Firstly, by pressing the escape button and then press the “Central Market” tab at the top of the Edit Menu. This way allows you to buy and sell items in the central market and place market orders, but you cannot add or remove items from your warehouse.

To also have access to your warehouse you need to talk to a marketplace NPC that is available in every major town. On the map, the location of marketplace NPC’s are shown with a bag and coins icon.

When accessing the marketplace through an NPC this is the initial screen that you see.

Using the Marketplace

Finding items

To search for items to buy in the central market you can either use the list on the left and browse through the various items for sale or you can type the name of the item you seek in the search box located at the top of the image.

Note that you don’t need to write the full name of an item for it to show. For example, if you want to find steel tools you can just write steel and press search. The marketplace will then show all the items that start with steel in their name. This also works for any set of letters in the name of an item. Say you want to compare the price of ingots, then just type ingot in search and you get all the metal ingots in one list.

You can also add any search word as a favorite. Just type the word in, press the favorite button and then press list of favorites. This adds that search phrase to your favorites. Next time you need to search for the item you just need to press the button in the favorites window.

In addition to this, you can sort by highest lowest price, number of items for sale or item grade by using the tree small buttons just above the list of items.

Finally, clicking the status button will show you the status of all your orders and clicking the manage warehouse button will take you to the central market warehouse.

How to Buy Items

Once you have found an item you wish to buy you can click it. This will open a screen with two tabs, the one above shows you the total trades for that item and the amount of the item on sale at that moment.

If you then click again on the lower tab you enter the interface you see below. In this interface you can select the amount of an item you wish to buy and at what price. On the right side, you see a number of red and blue bars. The blue bars show how many items are being sold at the price listed. The red bars show (if any) how many items are being ordered and for what price.

The desired price is the price you want to buy an item for and the desired amount is how many you want. This interface opens by default at the lowers sell price available. Note that all items have a maximum order size, this means that if you want to buy a lot of a specific item you sometimes need to buy the items again and again. For example, if you want to buy 10 000 grapes, you need to buy 1000 grapes 10 times.

If you want to buy an item at a lower price than listed, or if there are simply no items for sale you can place a buy order. Placing a buy order means that you won’t get the item until someone decides to sell the item at that price. The size of your buy order is also limited, with different limits for different items.

This mechanism is somewhat annoying, but it’s designed this way to stop players from placing enormous market orders and hording valuable items. You see, if you place a buy order at a price that already has some buy orders from other players, some kind of RNG system starts whenever someone sells at that price to determine who gets the items, with the older orders getting a boost on the RNG. So for items that are always in high demand and never directly available, limiting the size of buy orders equalizes everyone’s chances of getting the item. Without this system, extremely rich players could place market orders in the millions and in the long run virtually corner the market as the RNG of their “old” order gets better and better with time.

Once your buy order is filled you need to fetch the item in the status window. There you press collect and the items are moved to your warehouse.

The Central Market Warehouse

The other half of the central market is the warehouse. When you click the warehouse tab you open the following interface.

On the left side in this interface, you can see the items you have in your character’s inventory, the items you have in your pearl storage and the items that are in the storage of the town you are in, depending on what tab is open. On the right, you see the items you have stored in the central market warehouse. To move items between the right and left inventories you simply need to right-click them.

At the top of the warehouse interface, you can move to the purchase and sell windows. Below the warehouse inventory, you can see the VT limit of the warehouse. As every item has a VT number this limits the number of items you can store in the market warehouse at any time. This limit can be increased by increasing your family fame.

At the bottom of the screen, you can see the silver balance in your own inventory or storage and the silver in the central market. If you click on the deposit button you can move money from your inventory or storage to the central market. Clicking the withdraw button will do the opposite. Note that the silver moves between the tabs which are open. So if you want to move silver to your inventory from the warehouse you need to have that selected at the top, otherwise, the silver might end up in your storage.

Now a neat trick with the warehouse is the fact that you can access all the items in the warehouse at any marketplace NPC. So you can store items in the warehouse, like potions, clothes, armor, pet food, and other stuff that you might want to quickly access without having to return to the town it was stored in.

For example, say you have a set of TRI boss armor that you want your secondary characters to use. Instead of having to go back and forth between a single town, you could place the armor in the warehouse while in Altinova, switch characters and access the armor through the warehouse on the new character located in Calpheon. Just be careful to not accidentally sell those items.

How to Sell Items

To sell anything on the central market you first need to place the items in your warehouse. Once the item is there, you can press the sell button at the top. This will take you to the following screen.

Here you can select the item you want to sell. You also see the status of all you buy and sell orders. This is also where you collect the silver from items sold and collect items you have bought. Both silver and items go into your warehouse once collected.

Now to sell an item you need to click that item which opens this screen.

Here you can select how many items you wish to sell and at what price. On the right, you see a number of red and blue bars. The blue bars show how many items are being sold for the price listed. The red bars show (if any) how many items are being ordered and for what price. You can now decide to list your product at any price shown in those bars. If you select a price with active buy orders your item sells immediately. Otherwise, you need to wait until someone buys your items at the price you listed them at.

As with buy orders, if you decide to sell at a price that already has sell orders, some kind of RNG system starts whenever someone buys the item at that price, with the older orders getting a boost on the RNG. Once sold you need to collect your silver from the status screen.

Central Market Tax and how to Reduce them.

When you sell items in the marketplace there is a 35% tax placed on the silver for each sale. You can reduce this by having a value pack active, which adds 30% to the price you would receive after the 35% tax (i.e. without the value pack). This means that you get 65% of the value of items when you sell them without a value pack and 84,5% of the value of items if you sell them with a value pack active (it’s math).

It’s important to note that you need to collect the silver with an active value pack to get the bonus. If an item is sold while you have an active value pack and it goes inactive before you can collect the silver you will not get the bonus. On the other hand, you can sell items without an active value pack, activate the value pack and then collect the silver with the value pack bonus.

On top of this, your family fame has a small effect on the tax, similar to the value pack bonus. Starting at 1000 total family fame points you will get +0,5% to the price you would receive after tax, reaching 1,5% at 7000 fame points. You can see the total percentage that adds to your value after tax next to the symbol of the upturned hand with a few coins.

So that’s it. Now if you liked this Black Desert Online central market guide then please share it with your friends and allies. Also, feel free to check out my other Black Desert Online guides.