Gathering Guide – Black Desert Online [BDO]

In Black Desert Online, there are certain materials that you cannot get by having your workers collect them. Such items are for example logs, rough stones, meat, and hides. To gather those items, you need to find them in the wild and use your gathering skills and proper equipment to collect them. In this gathering guide, I explain what the gathering skill does, how to increase your gathering speed and some helpful tips and tricks on leveling this skill.

What Does the Gathering Skill do?

This skill serves three purposes. First of all, it increases the yield you get from each gather action. This means that at low levels you would get one or two items each time you gather, but at higher levels, you can get four, five or even more items each time.

Secondly, you need to get this skill to a certain level to be able to gather specific materials and learn special knowledge. As an example, you need to have your gathering skill at skilled 5 to be able to mine gemstones. And to learn the “skilled processing” knowledge you need to have your gathering skill at skilled 10.

Thirdly, with a higher skill level, you get an increased chance of not using energy for a gathering action. At the start, you will need one energy for each gather action, but as your skill increases, you will start to get free gather actions with 30% of your gathering actions not needing energy at artisan rank level 1.

Now it’s important to remember that gathering costs energy. So one of the things you need to do is to grow your energy pool by increasing your knowledge base. A high energy pool will allow you to gather much more frequently and for a longer time than a small energy pool. I will mention ways to manage your energy pool a bit lower.

How to Increase Gathering Speed

There are two ways to reduce the time needed to gather materials. You can increase your gathering rank and you can use tools that have a reduced gather action time.

By Increasing Your Gathering Rank

There are numerous ways in which you can increase your gathering rank. You can, for example, buy special gear, items, and consumables, and you can join a guild.

Joining a Guild With a +3 Bonus to Gathering Rank

The best way to increase your gathering rank is to join a guild that has invested guild points into the Nimble Fingers skill-line. This will result in a maximum increase of +3 to the gathering rank. If you intend to do gathering on a large scale this is essentially a must. You can also benefit from completing life skill guild missions that require a certain amount of items to be gathered.

Silver Embroidered Gatherer’s Clothes

The silver embroidered gatherers clothing is a wearable gear that boosts your gathering rank. The best way to get them is simply to buy them from the central market. You can also make them in a costume workshop. The basic version gives you a gathering rank increase of +1 and movement speed of +1. To get a higher bonus you need to enhance them. Silver embroidered clothes are enhanced the same way as accessories.

If you intend to use them I would recommend enhancing your gatherer’s clothes to at least +2. At that point, you get +2 to the gathering stat, you get +2 to movement speed and you also get a 15% increase towards your gathering skill experience gain.

Keep in mind though that you should really be using mastery clothing when gathering. More on that later.

Alchemy Stone of Life

If you open up your equipment screen you will see a square in right in the middle of it. This slot is designed for alchemy stones. For gathering, having an alchemy stone of life can be quite useful. These stones come in a few tiers, much like other equipment, where only two of those tiers have any direct effect on gathering. The blue tier stones give you a bonus to your gathering rank, either +1 or +2 depending on the type of stone. And the yellow tiered ones increase your gathered item drop rate from +3% to +20% for the best stone.

To get an alchemy stone of life you either need to make your own alchemy stone or try to get one from the central market. You can also opt for a cheaper non-repairable version called Spirit Stone of Life.

Spirit Stone of Life

Again, you can find these stones on the central market, usually in abundance. The blue tiered life spirit stone has similar bonuses as the sturdy alchemy stone of life. It’s rather cheap and plentiful in the marketplace as this is written. The benefits of a blue tiered spirit stone are:

• Alchemy/Cooking time -1.1 sec
• Processing success rate +11%
• Gathering/Fishing +2
• Gathered Item Drop Rate +10%

Since these bonuses are the same as a sturdy alchemy stone of life (minus the weight increase), so starting with a blue tiered life spirit stone is an excellent way to start using alchemy stones while gathering.

If you have an alchemy stone or spirit stone that gives you +2 to your gathering rank and are in a guild with the +3 gathering rank benefit you will have your gathering stat at level 5 which is the highest that gives any benefits. This is in my opinion the best way to get your gathering rank to 5.

Of course, if you don’t want to be in a guild for some reason then there are other ways to increase your gathering rank as well.

By Using Foods and Drinks to Increase Gathering Rank

You can use various food and potions, such as the Balenos Special meal, to increase your gathering rank, but remember that you gain nothing from pushing it above level 5. If you already have your gathering skill at rank 5, then you could still use fig pies or sweet fig pies to get more material when you gather.

Using Better Gathering Equipment

There are two kinds of tools that you can use for gathering. The regular tools and life skilling mastery tools. With the game as it is now in 2020, there is almost no reason to use the regular tools. The only regular tool worth using is the magic tier.

Let me explain. When you are just beginning to gather you should use the Loggia tools, which you can buy from Loggia farm or from certain NPC vendors. These tools give you a -11 sec to your gathering time (which is as good as it gets) and they are also repairable.

However, once your gathering skill reaches skilled 5 you should start using magic tools if you can. The magic tools give you a -11 sec reduction to gathering times just like the mastery tools, but you also get a hidden bonus which is better than the bonus from using the Loggia tool.

Keep working on your gathering mastery and once it reaches about 650 to 700 you should again switch to using only mastery tools. At this point, you are getting all the benefits of the magic tools and more.

Gathering Mastery

At this point, we need to start discussing the life skill mastery system in conjunction with gathering. In basic terms, your gathering mastery increases the number of items you get for each gathering action. Which then means that you get more silver per hour of gathering if you sell the gathered items. The precise workings of the mastery system are, however, beyond this BDO gathering guide. What is important for this gathering guide is how to increase your gathering mastery.

Gear That Increases Gathering Mastery

While your gathering mastery does increase as your gathering skill increases you really should start investing in some gathering gear. As mentioned earlier, the first thing you should buy are Loggia tools. While not necessary, you can enhance the tools you use a bit, maybe to +7 or +8 to increase their durability. These tools follow regular enhancement rules.

Your next step should be to get yourself either Loggia or Carta gatherer’s clothes. You should also start enhancing them as soon as possible, but here you need to use Black Gems to enhance them and the enhancement rules are quite different.

At some point, your gathering skill will hit skilled level 5. At that point remember to switch over to magic gathering tools from the central market instead of the mastery tools.

Then there are the accessories. I would recommend first getting +10 Carta gatherer’s clothes, then start buying Gernanoa accessories. I’d skip the Loggia ones unless you find a great deal on the central market for a TRI or better.

I recommend this as getting the gathering clothes from +10 to +15 is a somewhat expensive journey and only gives you an extra +36 to your gathering mastery. At the same time, a full set of unenhanced Geranoa accessories will give you +40 to all your life skill masteries and will cost you far less.

When you have a full set of Geranoa accessories the next step depends on the number of black gems you have. If you have about 20-30 black gems and a lot of memory fragments you should try to push your Carta gatherer clothes to DUO enhancement level. Else you should aim to get all your Carta accessories to PRI or DUO, while always keeping in mind to enhance your clothes once you have enough black gems and memory fragments.

In any case, you should continue to enhance your clothes and accessories until you end with a full set of DUO (or better). At this point, your gathering mastery from gear alone should be about 265. Assuming you have reached artisan 1 in gathering, your gathering mastery is then around 470.

Now the goal is to get your gathering mastery to 650 – 700 points to start using mastery tools, but those 700 points can of course also contain the mastery bonus from the tools themselves. For this final stretch, we can aim to get a TRI Dostter gathering tool. Start with the tool you use the most and then go for the other tools you need.

Assuming you get a few more gathering levels while at it you should end up close to 675 mastery points when using your Dostter tool, which means it is now better than using a magic tool.

After this point, you need to decide between getting TRI accessories and TRI Carta clothes or start getting Manos gear (by buying or making it) and enhancing it. Whatever you do, good luck.

How to Manage Your Energy Pool

As mentioned before, gathering costs energy. Happily, there are ways to restore energy faster than the 1 energy per three minutes rate when active.

First, we have energy potions which you can buy from the central marketplace. These energy potions are made by players by interacting with specific NPC’s and trading their energy pool for energy potions. There are four types of energy potions that restore energy by a different amount. They are:

• Energy potion (small) – restores 10 energy
• Energy potion (medium) – restores 20 energy
• Energy potion (large) – restores 30 energy
• Energy potion (Extra large) – restores 50 energy

They are somewhat expensive, costing from 15.000 to 25.000 silver for each energy point, so for a beginner, they are not really worth the silver unless you are spending the silver to train your gathering skill faster. However, at higher skill levels they might become economical as you start getting more actions per energy point. Also, you can only use one potion every 10 minutes so you need to take that into account when you select which energy potion to use.

Another way is to buy high-quality wine from a Cook/Innkeeper, but that costs 200.000 silver for only 3 energy points and is clearly not worth it if you can get energy potions. You can also get yourself a bed and sleep in it. This will restore 2 energy points per three minutes while you are logged on. Sadly this does not improve energy restoration speed while offline, which would be a cool addition to the game.

Finally, and this is my favorite way, you can have your alternate characters located near an NPC that can turn their energy into energy potions and have them exchange their energy for energy potions, which you then place in your central marketplace storage for your main gatherer to access. This way you get a much higher pool of energy with some limited effort.

The NPC that exchanges energy for potions is Alustin. He can be found in the following town and cities:

• Velia
• Alejandro Farm
• Glish
• Calpheon
• Keplan
• Port Epheria

To convert your energy pool into energy potions you simply need to talk to him and select which energy potion you want to get from him. The best potion to get is the extra-large one as it has a better energy pool to energy potion ratio and because of the 10-minute timer on energy potions.

How to Level the Gathering Skill

In my opinion, the fastest way to level this skill is to find a patch of a dense, little-used forest, get a fluid collector or an ax of the highest quality you can use and just go wild gathering as fast as you can in the forest.

Some players might tell you to go find the rare gemstones as they give higher experience, which is correct. However, the gemstones are usually far apart and during the time needed to find them, you could have gotten much more experience collecting sap or lumbering wood from trees. Also, logs are a valuable commodity, selling for a decent price in the marketplace.

Of course, if you need rough stones or something else not gathered from trees, then you should do that. But if the main goal is to increase your skill, then the trees are your best bet.

Boosting Life Experience Gain to Level Gathering

When leveling the gathering skill you should also try to get as many life skilling experience boosts as you can. There are a few you can buy that are always viable to use. They are:

• Elixir of Flowing Time – 15%
• Sute Tea – 8%
• Life experience scroll from loyalty store – 10%
• Perfume of Swiftness – 20%
• Villa Buff – 10%
• Value Pack – 10%
• Secret Book of the Old Moon – 50%

In addition to this, some pets can give life experience bonuses, some have a +1% to all life skills per tier of the pet, while others may have +5% to gathering specifically. So remember to have any pets you have which may give you extra experience out and fed to give the bonus.

If your guild has enough guild skill points the guild master can use the “Complete Perfection” skill to give everyone in the guild a 20% bonus to life experience gain.

Finally, silver embroidered clothes give a bonus to experience earned so having them equipped when you go gathering will speed up your gathering leveling. You can either use the ones that you get as a reward for reaching apprentice 1 or the silver embroidered ones mentioned above. If you can enhance the silver embroidered clothes to at least +2 then using them is the better choice.

The Hedgehog

Speaking of pets. If you are an avid gatherer you should consider investing money into a hedgehog. When fed and active this pet gives you a chance of extra loot for each gathering action. The chance of extra loot is about 30% for a tier 1 pet at level 10, increasing to up to 50% for a tier 4 pet. This also increases your experience earned as the experience increase depends on the items you get from each gathering action. So if you get extra loot 30% of the time it means you also get extra experience 30% of the time.

The easiest way to get a hedgehog is to buy Amerigo’s Welcome Package from the pearl store. It costs 4.400 pearls so it is not cheap. It’s also hard to get a higher-tiered one as hedgehogs are limited pets and can therefore only be exchanged for other limited pets, such as penguins.

You can also get a hedgehog as a reward for giving the game to a player (or yourself) which then reaches level 30. This is a much cheaper option as the gift option costs 9.99 euros.

Having Enough Inventory and Weight Limit

The final thing to consider is your ability to carry the items you collected. By increasing your inventory slots and weight limit you will be able to spend more time collecting materials before you need to head back to town to unload all the stuff you’ve collected. Having a high weight limit is therefore highly useful and more important than inventory slots for gathering.

Now if you liked this guide then be sure to share it with your friends and allies and feel free to check out my other Black Desert Online guides.