Milk is one of the cooking ingredients which is constantly sold out on the central market because it is used for some of the most profitable cooking products. This means that if you want to cook items that require a lot of milk you need to collect the milk yourself. Or to be more precise, you need to milk cows. Thankfully, milking cows is easy, but it does cost considerable energy.
If you are a bit starved for energy then there is one other way to get milk which I will mention, but it should be considered more of an add-on to your milk gathering rather than a good source.
Location of Milkable Cows
My personal favorite location to milk cows is in Olivia. In Olivia, there are a few small ranches with a number of cows you can milk. The location of one of those ranches is shown in the image below.
The reason I point to this ranch, in particular, is that boy sitting on the fence. He has a daily gathering quest that gives you contribution experience, strength experience (useful), and gathering experience, in addition to a selection of cooking ingredients. So if you are going to milk cows anyway, then grab this daily quest before you start.
If you’re based out or Calpheon then you can also find milkable cows around Falres Dirt Farm just east of Calpheon.
How to Milk Cows.
Go up to a cow and press the R button like with any gathering action. This starts a mini-game where you need to alternate pressing the left and right mouse button until the milk bottle reaches 100%.
The trick here is to make sure that each udder doesn’t empty out before you switch to the next one. (I can barely believe I am writing this). If that happens the milking action fails and you lose three energy points. You also only have 30 seconds to complete the minigame successfully. On successful completion, you get about 25-40 milk depending on your gathering skill and RNG, but it will cost you 10 energy points.
Since you only get milk from this type of gathering it is not an efficient use for the energy on your main gatherer. However, in my opinion, this is an excellent way to use the energy of your alts, assuming you need a lot of milk of course, but then again why would you be reading this if you don’t need milk.
Milk From Side-Dishes.
This is the other way of getting milk. When cooking you get side dishes. When turning them in you can choose to get milk in return for the side dish. Now, if you do a lot of cooking and get a lot of these side dishes then this might be enough for you. Otherwise, you need to milk those cows.
Milk for Cash?
As a side note, this can be a nice, quick way to earn some silver, at least while milk is expensive. How so? Say you have 200 energy points on all of your alternate characters. If you gather milk with them all you should be able to sell the milk for about 5 – 6 million silver after marketplace taxes. Five alternate characters would then net you about 25-30 million silver and this should take less than an hour to complete.
So that’s about all there is on how to get milk in Black Desert Online. If you found this guide useful then please share it with your friends and allies in BDO and good luck milking those cows. Oh, and I also have quite a few other guides on BDO.