Ultimate New Player Guide!

Introduction

Need a run down on the many systems in Black Desert? Here's a complete introduction! 

• This guide will have links to our other guides to help streamline the information and larger topics
• Alot of the topics in this guide are features and systems that don't warrant a full guide of their own 
• Systems in Black Desert can seem like a lot when first starting, this guide hopes to allieviate that 
• The aim of the guide is to provide a simple. base introduction to core features and mechanics  

 

Click the thumbnail images for any guides you may be interested in to open them in a new window!

 

Your First Character

 

Season servers are great for new players, they're a catch up mechanic that provide bonus EXP and easy to upgrade gear! It's strongly recommended you to start out with a Season Character.

 

 

Once you click Season Character, you'll be taken to the class selection screen, which will show gameplay examples of the different classes. 

 

 

Nearly all classes in Black Desert have two weapon types, a Main weapon and an Awakening. Awakening is a type of class advancement unlocked at level 56.

 

Awakening offers a different style of gameplay, but if you like the Main hand weapon better, you can choose an option called Succession, also unlocked at 56. 

 

 

You can change between Succession and Awakening in your skill tree window (K) so don't feel like you're locked to one play style or the other, it's really casual to switch between the two. 

 

Character Creator

 

Next you'll reach the character creator, here's a quick rundown on the basic features: 

 

• Horoscope has no effect on gameplay, so don't worry about making a correct choice
• Weather is how your character appears in different lighting conditions
• Character action shows different outfits and poses for your character 
• Customization is self-explanatory, you can change your characters features here

 

Using the "View" button will have your character's sight track to your mouse cursor to help you check different angles. 

 

If you don't like messing with it or prefer to use templates other people have created, you can use our beauty album! 

 

Here's a guide on how to use our beauty album to apply a preset template in game: 

 

Season Server Benefits 

Since you'll be starting on a Season character, you'll receive a bunch of extra rewards and faster progression options. 

 

if you need a bit of help with Season servers, we have a guide for them, too. It details the benefits of a Season server as well as how to create and progress a Season character. 

 

 

The Season guide features some of the following things to help you on your way: 

 

• Your first gear sets and how to enhance them 

• The best way to start Life Skills

• The rewards you'll receive for the Season server 

• How to level up as a new player 

 

Starting Out

When you start the game you'll be asked which zone you'd like to start your adventure in. 

 

 

It's strongly recommended that you start with Ancient Stone Chamber, this is the main questline of the game with the most variety in content. 

 

Land of the Morning Light and Mountain of Eternal Winter are more story based, with a lot less combat involved. 

 

You'll end up doing all of the quests anyway for various unlockable rewards and content, so don't worry about missing out on story content or rewards. 

 

 

Black Desert's main content doesn't really revolve around quests, they make up a small portion of the game. If you get bored of questing and need a break, you can check out our guide above to see how to level without quests. 

 

Basic Combat Effects

Black Desert is known for its combat and if you're new, you might not be too sure about some of the effects present in Black Desert that might not be in some other MMOs. 

 

As Black Desert features action combat, there are ways to resist Crowd Control effects by using skills. 

 

This section is a very basic breakdown on protection skills. Many classes have skill rotations that allow them to stay mostly protected. 

 

We have a simple guide for an introduction to combat and how it works, just click the image below to open the guide!

 

 

Show / Hide Options 

When first starting Black Desert, there can be a lot of announcements or UI elements that may be a little overwhelming. 

Don't worry, you can show and hide whichever you like in the settings menu. 

 

 

You can turn off the notifications that pop up at the top of the screen in the Alerts section. 

 

 

Traveler's Horse & Getting Around the World

Black Desert added a free Traveler's Horse that can be used by any adventurer regardless of their level.

 

This is available from the Stable Keepers in Velia, Heidel, Glish, Keplan, Calpheon, Alitnova and Tarif.

 

This is fantastic for new players as the Traveler's Horse is the equivalent to a tier 7 horse with a few skills to help it move faster. 

 

When starting, the closest NPC to provide this service is Lorenzo Murray in Velia. Just click the button of to the right side as seen below: 

 

 

Traveler's Horse Restrictions:

• It can't equip items but can still use the "Sprint" skill without a saddle
• A Traveler's Horse will return to the nearest Stable after 5 minutes of being dismounted
• You can only borrow one Traveler's Horse and can't borrow one while using another horse
• You can't use Stable Recovery / Remote Collection / Horse Market / Imperial Delivery / Sell function
• If you Disconnect, goto Character Selection or Change Character the Traveler's Horse will disappear

 

If this is your first time using a horse, here's how to use the different skills the Traveler's Horse has. 

 

Sprint 

By holding down (Shift) + (W) while riding your horse, the horse will run faster and then maintain this higher speed. 

 

 

Instant Accel 

While you're sprinting, you can press (F) to use instant accel for a burst of acceleration. 

 

You can also hold down (F) while sprinting which will cause the skill to be used as soon as its off cooldown. 

 

 

Drift

Drift allows you to do exactly what the name suggests. The horse can drift either left or right. 

 

To use Drift use (S) + (A / D) depending on the direction you would like to drift. But there is another important use for Drift. 

 

When you use Drift on a horse, it will reset the cooldown of Instant Accel, helping you gain even more speed. It's recommended to use Drift at the end of Instant Accel's animation. 

 

 

If you need a reminder of the controls in game or simply want to view what skills your horse has available press (P) while mounted. 

 

This will bring up the Mount Information window that will also show the status of your horse. 

 

 

When using abilities or generally using your horse, its stamina will decrease as seen in the above image. 

 

To restore stamina to your horse you can feed it a Carrot which you can get from Stable Keepers for 500 Silver.

 

You can also use the Central Marketplace for High Quality Carrots, Special Carrots or Carrot Confit.

 

 

Since this horse will be used on the Season server you can Fuhgar's Riding Crop, which you can equip to passively boost the speed of your horse when travelling. 

 

The Fuhgar's Riding Crop can be obtained from your Season Pass!

 

You can also auto-path in Black Desert, even without relying on quest navigation. Simply open your map (M) and right click on the place you'd like to travel.

 

Once you've set the location, just hit auto-path (T) to begin travelling towards it. 

 

 

Your First Horse

When you reach Level 18 on a Season character, you'll be awarded with a Horse Emblem: Fine Horse Qualification, this will be better than anything you can tame outright. 

 

 

You can take your Horse Emblem: Fine Horse Qualification to a Stable Keeper NPC where you will be prompted to Register your new mount. 

 

 

To use some skills like Sprint, you'll need gear for your horse, the quickest and easiest way to obtain some base gear for your horse is to head to the Central Marketplace. 

 

 

You'll be able to see what skills require different gear by hitting (F7) close to your horse to open the Mount Information window. 

 

 

To level up your horse you can ride it around, the experience it gains is based on distance travelled. Most people AFK train their horses. 

 

 

By using the map (M) you can right click a point on the map, most people will run within safe zones, like Heidel. 

 

When you set a navigation path, you'll be given the option to "Set Loop" which will auto travel back and forth, levelling up your horse. 

 

Free Dream Horse

Now that you're familiar with horses and how they work, you might want to use your free Dream horse that is given out to all adventurers. 

 

There are three different types, the Pegasus which can fly, the Doom which is fire themed and fast across land and the Dine which can run quickly across the desert 

 

For more information you can check out our Free Tier 9 Dream horse guide here: 

 

 

Loot Pets

Loot Pets are an important part of Black Desert, allowing you to continue grinding without stopping to pick up your item drops. 

 

The game now does a really good job of giving new players a fair amount of Loot Pets through questing rewards. You can check out more about Loot Pets and how they work in our full guide here: 

 

Loyalties and Daily Rewards 

When you login, you can hit the (Y) button to bring up the Reward tab. 

 

Every day you'll receive 200 loyalties and Daily Blood frenzy. 

 

 

Mercenary's Experience (60 min) - A 200% Combat exp bonus that can be combined to a 600% scroll if you have three of these. Obviously great for any player! 

 

To combine them use Processing (L) then select Simple Alchemy like in the example below:  

 

The Loyalties Store

Loyalties can be used in the cash shop (F3) which can provide some great items as well, especially during some events.  

 

The most notable is the 530% EXP scrolls that stack with pretty much any other EXP buff and they only cost 1 point each, make sure to grab them all. 

 

 

There's also event type Loyalty items that you can purchase through the loyalties store, some even offering some great rewards: 

 

These aren't the only daily rewards you'll have though, Black Desert rewards players for logging in with attendence login rewards. 

 

You can search for this in the 'Esc' side menu under 'Login Reward' and find the rewards by hitting (B) 

 

 

Black Desert also rewards you for staying logged in, through the Black Spirit's Adventure dice game as well as events.

 

If you miss any days, you can get double rewards by logging in on a weekend and waiting an hour to obtain a second reward. 

 

To access the Black Spirit's Adventure look for the UI element in the bottom right.

 

 

Here is an image of the Black Spirit's Adventure. You'll get bonus rewards for completeing a number of rounds or landing on special squares. 

 

 

Loot Scrolls 

Players with a Value Pack will also receive a daily Item Collection Increase Scroll that can be collected from the Rewards window (Y). 

 

 

These loot scrolls can be used when grinding to increase your drop rate, with two varying levels. Level 1 will use 1 scroll, while level 2 will consume two. 

 

 

Setting the loot scroll timer back to 0 will pause your loot scroll, allowing you to pause grinding whenever you want without wasting scrolls. 

 

• Level 1 will provide a +100% Item Drop Rate and a +50% Item Drop Amount 
• Level 2 will provide a +100% Item Drop Rate and a +100% Item Drop Amount
• Item Drop Rate refers to special drops like accessories or rare drops
• Item Drop Amount refers to trash drops from mobs that can only be sold for Silver. 

 

Desert Naga's Webfoot, Mushroom Hypha and Desert Fogan's Helmet Shard are all early game examples of trash drops. 

 

These loot scrolls also stack with other sources that provide similar Drop rate buffs up to the cap. 

 

If you need to know where to get more Loot Scrolls for your grinding, we have a guide for that, check it out here: 

 

Agris Fever 

Another mechanic that is unique to Black Desert is Agris Fever, luckily it's a really easy one to follow on a base level. 

 

You turn it on in the top left of the screen and activating it will increase the amount of junk item drops by 150%, these points are shared across all of your characters. 

 

There's a journal that increases the amount Agris Fever you can store, most people would consider it a mandatory journal to complete. We have a guide for it here: 

 

Family Fame and Daily Silver Reward

Put simply, Family Fame is accumulated from playing Black Desert, you can earn it through combat, life skills and the progress of your account. 

 

Fame isn't a resource, instead, once you hit certain brackets you'll gain increased daily silver. You can view your Fame by opening the My Information window (P) 

 

 

You can hover over the different types of Fame to see the milestones and their requirements, you can also get rewards for total Fame. 

 

 

These are good buffs to have as permanent benefits to your account, with most people wanting 7000 for the extra +10% Item Drop Rate.

 

To collect your daily login Silver, you can open your Black Spirits Safe (B) and click the Collect Silver Reward. 

 

 

You can also access the Black Spirit's Safe by clicking on the icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. 

 

 

This silver amount will also still be rewarded when you're not logging in and inactive from the game. You can accumulate 1 billion silver in this way. 

 

After you hit the 1 billion cap, you won't receive daily login silver again until you login again. After logging in, you can then start receiving it while inactive again. 

 

Coupon Codes

Adding coupon codes can be incredible helpful, especially the codes from recent development talks. Often you can receive exp boosters, or even pearl items like inventory slots. 

 

You can check for coupon codes on our main page, under the coupon tab. 

 

 

To add a coupon in game, hit Esc to bring up the side menu, then enter "Coupon" in the search term.

 

 

You'll then see a window where you can enter the code. The rewards will be sent to your mail box which you can open with the B key.  

 

 

Want to get new coupons sent to your discord server so that you never miss out? We've got a guide for that too. 

 

 

Important Enhancing Items

In Black Desert some of the most important items you'll need are Memory Fragments, Cron Stones and Caphras Stones, these items are all used for gear progression. 

 

We have guides on all 3 of these items, breaking down how to obtain them and how they're used. 

 

Cron Stones are used to protect your items during enhancement, most commonly used on armour and weapons. 

 

 

Memory Fragments are used to repair the durability of your items after enhancement has failed. 

 

Caphras Stones offer gear progression without enhancing, they give additional stats to your gear and allow you to craft end game gear. 

 

 

Failstacks & Naderr's Band

Failstacks are used to increase your chances at successfully enhancing an item. When you fail an enhancement, you'll be given failstacks relative to the item you fail on. 

 

There's also the Naderr's Band which can be used as a quality of life feature for enhancing, allowing you to switch out between different failstacks without changing character. 

 

 

 

Gearing in Black Desert

The Season server does a pretty good job of introducing enhancing and the Black Desert gearing process in general. 

However, some of the most commonly asked questions in Black Desert is "What do I upgrade next" when gearing. We have a guide that will help lead you through different stages of progression.

 

You can check out our gearing guide here: 

 

Nodes and Investing Contribution in Them 

Nodes in Black Desert are basically just locations, these locations can be invested in for benefits. City Nodes give different benefits to grinding spot locations. 

 

City Nodes offer a lot of extra warehouse storage space, so this is always a good starting point. 

To find a node, open your map (M) and move to the location on the map that you'd like to invest in, then click on the green City icon.  

 

 

Once you click on the green City icon you'll be given a new town layout view showing houses that you can invest into. 

 

 

These houses can offer a bunch of different features, from life skilling workshops to storage or your own housing. 

 

 

The storage that you invest in will provide you extra storage space for the city that you invest in, which is obviously super useful for your home city. 

 

Just click the Purchase: Storage button and you'll be given the contribution point cost, it might take a few minutes to complete. 

 

 

You can do the same thing with a place you'd like to invest in for your housing. You can even walk in to the homes to see if you like the floor plan and layout. 

 

Grind Spot Node Investment

Grinding location Nodes work a little differently from City Nodes and require you to have a Node Network in place. 

 

To connect Nodes you must go and speak to the Node Manager NPC, unless you have a Value Pack running. 

For this, If you don't have a Value Pack I'd honestly consider using the Loyatlies store to purchase one for a free 1 day Value Pack. 

 

Put simply a Node network is like connect the dots, you have to connect Nodes together in order to reach the grind spot location before you can invest in it. 

 

 

As you can see in the image above, the first node from a city is automatically connected. You can see Node connections by the white connecting lines between them. 

 

However these Nodes are not invested in, the white lines signify you are able to connect to these Nodes. 

Since there's no connecting line to the grind zone Node Gahaz Bandits' Lair, I can't invest in it.  I need to invest in the Nodes prior to it first. 

 

To help with this, if you click on the Node you want to invest in, in this case Gahaz Bandits' Lair, you'll be given a button to jump to the previous node in the top left corner. 

 

 

This will jump you back a Node so you can invest in it, allowing you to work backwards. This feature doesn't work in the Desert though due to the way Desert navigation works. 

 

 

As you can see, once you're invested in a Node, the connection line will turn yellow, while the white only signifies a Node that you can invest into.  

 

Grind Spot Energy Investment

Once you have connections to your grind spot of choice, you can then invest your energy into it to increase your drop rate in that location. 

 

Using Centaurus Herd as an example, if you want to invest energy, click on the Node as if you were going to invest Contribution points. 

 

Once you've invested Contribution Points you'll see this option to Invest Energy instead. 

 

 

Clicking the invest Energy button will display a list of your characters, letting you use the energy of alt characters as well, which will let you level it up quicker. 

 

 

Once you've levelled up a Node, even if you remove the Contribution Points, you will keep the levels on that Node, you'll just need to re-invest Contribution Points to get the benefits. 

 

Contribution Points 

So how do you get Contribution Points to spend on investments? Luckily it's pretty easy to do, especially if you're into life skilling or have some time to AFK. 

 

You can see your current Contribution Points in the top left hand corner of the screen, hovering over them will remind you how to obtain more of them. 

 

 

In the next housing section I'll talk more about how to get Contribution Points through your player owned housing. 

 

Housing 

Like mentioned earlier, Black Desert has it's own player owned housing. This is done through instant based buildings that are purchased with Contribution points. 

 

 

Once you've purchased your own housing you can decorate it and use it for life skills. The decoration choices used to be really limited but that's been changed.

 

 

With the addition of Old Moon Furniture Worshops, you can now craft a good amount of pearl items in game that allows you to decorate your house with much more depth. 

 

 

It's really easy to place down your furniture, when you enter your home you'll be given a new UI that will give you the option to use the "Place Mode." 

 

After clicking "Place Mode" it's really self explanatory. But if you're into life skilling you can place a Cooking Utensil and a Alchemy Tool in your residence. 

 

As mentioned earlier, you can AFK in order to get contribution points, this is done through Cooking in your residence. 

 

A good cheap way to do this is by cooking Beer, the recipe is 5 Cereals like 5 Potato, 6 Mineral Water,1 Sugar and 2 Leavening Agent.

 

 

While you're cooking Beer, you'll get random procs of Dish With Poorly Prepared Ingredients while AFK, to increase the number you cook, just increase the number of ingredients as necessary and use Batch Production.

 

These can be exchanged for Contribution Points, you'll also get Taken Out Food and Strongly Seasoned Dish that can also be exchanged. 

 

Hitting RMB on the items will navigate you to the trade in NPC locations, so don't worry about knowing their locations. 

 

Workers and Node Resources

Beer is one of the best examples of how to start AFK cooking but it's also one of the better ways to learn how the Node Worker system works. 

 

This is because the cereals needed in the ingredients for Beer can be gathered by your Node Workers and the Beer is then used to feed the workers, which makes it basically self sufficient. 

 

 

You can start in Velia to have your workers gather Potatoes, these can be then used to brew your beer which can feed your workers. 

 

The other ingredients you can obtain from a Cooking Vendor for a cheap amount of Silver. 

 

 

To hire a worker you need lodging with in your housing. If you click on the city you can look in the top right corner to filter by Lodging, showing you which houses can be used.  

 

 

Click on a house within a city like Velia and use your contribution points to create lodging: 

 

 

For actually hiring the worker, you can speak to the Work Supervisor NPC that are available in most cities. 

 

 

You can roll for a Worker by using the "Contract Workers" button, which worker you get is RNG and will cost energy to reroll. 

 

You can reroll by clicking the "View Another" button and you can hire a worker with the "Hire Worker" button. 

 

There are 5 grades of worker, Naive, General, Skilled, Professional and Artisan. The better the grade, the better the stats. 

 

A workers race can effect its Work speed and Stamina, to keep things simple, any type of worker will be fine for a beer production to serve as an intro to these systems. 

 

 

The worker logo will show you the details of your workers and allow you to recover their stamina by using your beer. 

 

 

You can also attempt to promote your workers every 10 levels for a maximum of 4 attempts to be promoted. 

 

 

Journals 

Journals are an important part of Black Desert, they give you additional gear score stats and are considered as mandatory content. 

 

They're similar to quests but are formatted differently with a different style of task than most of Black Desert's quests. 

 

 

Igor Bartali's journal log gives a lot of stats for completing though is one of the longer journals, you can check out our guides on Journals in our guide section: 

 

The Magnus

The Magnus is a questline focused around puzzles, it usually only takes a few hours to complete but offers some amazing quality of life features and rewards players with a PEN armor piece of their choice. 

 

The Magnus allows players to fast travel around the world of Black Desert and unlocks shared worldwide storage, allowing you to access the storage of most cities without visiting them. 

 

We have a step by step guide that will walk you through all of the puzzles, making it easy to complete: 

 

 

Fairy Laila 

Black Desert has Loot Pets like a lot of other MMOs but it also has Fairies. Fairies are a type of utility pet that give players some quality of life features.

 

They can do things like increase a players maximum weight limit and provide a resurrection without Exp Loss. 

 

The most popular features of Fairies are auto-using potions, this allows your Fairy to keep your HP and Mana topped up without you even thinking about it. Here's our full guide: 

 

 

Infinite Potions 

Black Desert uses potions on a short cooldown, letting you keep your HP and Mana topped up while in combat. As a way to save weight and never need to buy potions, Infinite Potions were added. 

 

Infinite potions also pair up really well with Fairies, that make using potions a fully automatic process. 

 

You can grind for these potions or purchase them of the Central Marketplace, here's our guides on how to obtain them: 

 

 

 

Are there any other systems that beginners might need to know? Let us know!

 

 

-- Change log - Added a Loot Pets section to the guide - 23/08/2024

 

 

Why not check out some of our other guides while you're here?