There is a saying that knowledge is power. In Black Desert Online, knowledge is energy. The more knowledge you have the higher your energy stat will be. There are several routes to increase your knowledge base varying with the type of knowledge. In this Black Desert Online knowledge guide, I will go over the benefits of knowledge and how to increase it. I will also explain how bookshelves work in BDO and where to get them.
The Benefits of Knowledge in BDO
Knowledge has three main benefits in BDO. First, it is the manner in which you increase your energy pool. Secondly, it counts towards your special fame score which I won’t discuss here, but you can read all about it on the page linked, and thirdly it can boost your chance of looting rare items.
Increasing your energy pool
If you open up your knowledge interface by pressing the “H” button you should see something like this in the bottom right screen.
This is the knowledge tree with placeholders for all the possible knowledge pieces you can get in the game. The yellow 2/2 shown means that this category is giving me two energy points of two possible since it is complete. The other categories which are white have not been completed. A subcategory showing 0/3 has probably not been started or has just a few knowledge pieces and if it is showing something like 2/3 then it has been partially completed and can still yield more energy.
The Knowledge Categories
Knowledge is separated into nine broad categories which are: Character, Topography, Ocean, Ecology, Adventure Journal, Academics. Life Skills, Learning the ropes of Black Desert and Trade. The first six are then separated into smaller subcategories that reward energy points when completed or partially completed. The latter three offer no increase in energy.
The Character Category.
This category represents all the people you have met in Black Desert Online. The easiest way to gain knowledge in this category is simply by running around and interacting with NPC’s in towns, villages, and nodes. The image above shows the character knowledge tree in Black Desert Online. The map can also help you with this as it often shows a question mark where an unknown NPC is located. If the map doesn’t help you might be able to use the hints that accompany each piece of knowledge. If that is now enough, then BDOcodex.com can probably help you locate the last NPC’s needed.
The Topography Category
To gain knowledge in this category you need to discover specific locations. Some are easy like nodes while other locations are harder to discover. Some of the subcategories here are hard to fill as they require you to not only travel to specific locations but often you need to gain pieces of knowledge from NPC’s by first gaining amity and later spending energy to gain the knowledge.
By clicking on an unknown knowledge you get a tooltip on how to get that piece of knowledge. For example, in the image below you can see that to get the last Northern Serendia knowledge piece I need to gain Amity from Melissa Brady.
The Sea Category.
For this category, you need to sail to every island in the subcategory and often run about the island before you unlock the knowledge. This is best done by completing the sailing quests you get from the black spirit. It’s really not all that hard as it can be done semi-afk for the most part, but it does take some time.
The Ecology Category.
Unlike the other categories, this category has tiered knowledge from C to S, with S being the best. You unlock knowledge in this category by killing animals and monsters around Black Desert Online. Having higher-tiered knowledge gives benefits such as seeing the creatures hitpoints at rank C, gaining AP and DP vs the creature at rank A+ and some say at S rank you gain a higher chance of green or rarer loot.
The Adventure Journal and Academics Categories.
To gain knowledge in these categories you must either complete quests, interact with objects in the game world, get them through the Amity game or by speaking with the correct NPC’s. Personally, I find this category the hardest to complete as there is little to work with in regards to the location of the correct NPC’s.
The last three categories to not reward any energy and are therefore somewhat less useful than the others. Still, gaining knowledge from those categories can give you titles and will count towards your special fame.
How Ecology Points Increase Loot Chance
Knowledge in the ecology category also gives ecology points depending on the rank of your knowledge. Knowledge ranked C and B get a single point, knowledge ranked at A give 2 points, A+ then gives 5 points and S gives 10 points. The sum of the ecology points from all your ecology knowledge then forms your ecology points. If you have enough ecology points you start to get a bonus to the chance of getting rarer items as seen in the table below.
Because of this, it can be beneficial to return to old hunting grounds and pound down on the low-level mobs to grind up some ecology points. The number of ecology points you have is displayed at the bottom of the knowledge screen. You will also see the benefits you are gaining from your ecology points.
BDO’s Bookshelves Explained
Using bookshelves is another way to gain knowledge in BDO. There are two types of bookshelves, the pearl store one and the ones you can make in-game. As find the pearl store bookcase to be far more useful I will start by explaining how it works.
The Pearl Store Bookshelf.
First of all, to use this bookshelf you need to buy it with pearls. But don’t worry, at 300 pearls it’s not really all that expensive. To buy a pearl store bookshelf you first need to open your pearl store, go into the interior tab and find anything called furniture in there. In the image below I have selected the Kamasylvia furniture.
Notice that when you first select the furniture you get offered a furniture pack for 2500 pearls. If you want to buy that then you can, but you can also opt to buy only the bookshelf by clicking on it as seen in the image above. Once you have your bookshelf you need to install it in your residence.
Now comes the interesting bit. You can now start using your alternate characters to read from the bookshelf. I have 15 characters myself of which 12 are used to farm energy and read books from my bookshelf.
You do this by placing them next to the bookshelf and start reading by pressing the “R” button. Without moving your character, you then switch to your next alternate character and repeat the process. Once you have done this for all your characters you can return to your main and play like normal. In an hour’s time, you will get some random knowledge from the categories located in Velia, Heidel, and Calpheon. This means that you may get some knowledge that you already have, in which case you get nothing for that round of reading.
Note after reading you can receive knowledge that you already have or ecology knowledge of a lower grade. In those cases, you do not gain any new knowledge for that round. This means that the bookcase is really good at first, but gets progressively less useful as you gain more knowledge.
I also think you need to be online when your characters finish reading to get the chance of random knowledge, at least it seems to me that setting my characters to reading and then logging off doesn’t give any knowledge. I know, however, that simply losing your connection and re-connecting won’t ruin the reading session. I have lost connection completely and once I re-logged my characters were still reading.
The In-Game Bookshelves
In addition to the pearl store bookshelves, you can craft bookshelves by speaking to Annolisa Rosie. If you want to try getting these types of bookshelves you should do it with some care. The reason being that to make a bookshelf this way you need to pay for it with some of the knowledge you have already gained. You can also only make bookshelves from ecology categories that you have completed.
For example, let’s say I wanted to make a bookshelf containing knowledge on the imps of Balenos. I would first need to have that sub-category completed and then when I make the bookshelf I lose a random amount of knowledge from that sub-category.
But why bother then? Well, you get a bookshelf which you can use as often as you like and each time you read it you get a random chance of gaining or improving a piece of knowledge from that category. So, in essence, it is a way to get your ecology knowledge ranks up to S rank without having to constantly fight low-level opponents.
Personally, I’m on the shelf with this one (pun intended) as I’m not certain it’s worth it, at least not for ecology knowledge which is covered by the pearl store bookcase.
GrumpyG’s Knowledge Location Tool.
Finally, if you are having a hard time locating some specific piece of knowledge and you really want to hunt it down you can use GrumpyG’s Knowledge Locator. It’s a great tool to help you find that last elusive piece of knowledge to complete a category.
And that’s it. Now, if you liked this Black Desert Online knowledge guide then be sure to share it with your friends and allies and feel free to check out my other Black Desert Online guides.