This guide will not be explaining the basics of each of these methods, just an understanding of how to build yourself a daily routine. If you find something you like, there is much better information on how to get involved in it, and the numbers behind it in different sections of this website.
This particular question is asked by so many people, and understood by so few. There are two extremely important concepts you MUST understand about how people in Black Desert suceed via lifeskills. They are:
Simply, how much time do you want to invest every day into lifeskills? Every activity takes time and you need to personally decide how much you are willing to commit to it. If you are too busy to play a lot, then focus your efforts around afk lifeskills. If you have a lot of time every day, then try and make sure you hit all the critical daily lifeskill incomes.
The second most important question is, how much money are you willing to invest into lifeskills? Most lifeskills require some sort of monetary commitment in order to recieve the maximum benefit. You need to decide if you are willing to pay this, or accept the loss of income without it.
You need to decide how many of the active lifeskills you will have time for, and then how you will use your remaining time with afk lifeskills.
This is without a doubt the most afk lifeskill you can get. Your workers harvest you resources worth silver. Your only job is managing them. The most important point in this section is that the more cp you have, the larger your worker empire will become. When you just begin you should be hitting certain critical nodes, and after that moving onto the highest silver/cp nodes available. As your cp grows you can start getting worse and worse silver/cp nodes.
When you first begin this game, building a solid worker base is critical. Energy gathering should be minimized and your main focus should be around hiring new and better workers. Until you have a strong worker base the only time you should be realistically gathering is when you are gathering to collect rough stone/logs for cooking tables.
This should be every black desert player’s basic afk income. In the game’s current state, your major goal should be to process materials your workers have collected so you can avoid the marketplace tax. This particular lifeskill is heavily gated behind pearl shop weight and the pearl shop costume.
You need to have a plan to move your processed materials, find what sells and get your workers to collect those resources and process them!
This can be tied in nicely with processing but a major setback is building the correct infrastructure in order to suceed. You NEED master 2 trading and you NEED to sell your crates to Valencia City. Any other situations means you are making less than the value of the proessed materials. So obtaining master 2 is your goal. If you do not want to do this then you can just sell your processed materials on the market.
The second thing with crate trading is you need to build a worker base in ideally trent, or epheria port. You need to match their crate production rates with your processing rates, theres not a lot of point in getting a ton of crate workers if they are sitting idle. One very technical solution to this is buying the processed mats, but for a new player I would highly suggest not doing this. The margins are so slim that you need to be extremely careful in what you are buying and how you are crating it to make sure you are actually making it worth it.
This is afk processing’s competitor. I will be releasing a page on the numbers behind afk fishing soon, but for this section the important thing to understand is if you want to succeed at afk fishing, you need to be willing to be in active time each day as well. If you do not do this then processing will make you more silver.
Afk fishing is also not free, you need to buy basically the maximum amount of inventory slots, after you have obtained all the free ones, otherwise your inventory will fill up and you will not be able to afk fish for 8 hours. You will also need to invest in a decent branded balenos rod and also into the pearl shop costumes to gain more fishing levels. (Splat Fishing Hat and Professional Fisher’s Uniform converted to a costume). On top of this you should invest into a +2 fishing clothes and also attempt to join a guild with at least +1 fishing. Lastly the higher your fishing level is, the less durability you will use on your rod. So when you first start out, even a +10 branded balenos rod will likely not last 8 hours.
Here is what you need to do to make afk fishing beat processing:
This is a high value daily lifeskill you can complete. It is directly tied to your cp level so more cp = more daily silver. There are 2 approaches to this particular lifeskill. The maximum profit maximum effort method, or the average profit minimal effort method:
Lastly you can use rare materials (milk/gatherables) to make other imperial crates. These rare materials could be used in non imperial alchemy/cooking but you can decide if you want to involve yourself in that, or just make your imperial crafting delivery less of a headache. Again up to you!
In the end it’s up to you to decide how much your active time is worth and how long it will take you to do both methods. Either method results in a large amount of daily silver.
This is obviously gated to how much energy you have and also your gathering level. The higher your gathering level the less energy you use overall. Gathering is a great source of daily income but it is important to know that if you are a new player with a bad setup of workers, you should focus on hiring workers before diving too deep into gathering. What you should be gathering will be listed on my gathering page once I have collected enough data.
Make sure you are always using lucky/magic tools as these double your chances of getting hards/sharps.
This lifeskill can bring in a large amount of daily income, the biggest issue is how you choose to obtain that income. You can sell blue flowers/fruits for silver, but this depends on the current market, you can sell greens as well for overall more silver but a more contested market, or you can crate your products and tie it in with active trading. The same rules apply as in the crate trading section for the last method. Aside from the critical silver making worker nodes, farming adds a lot of silver/cp/day. The issue of course is that it is not as afk as workers, so you need to determine if you have the time to add this into your daily rotation. Your silver/cp will vary significantly depending if you can harvest 1 or 6 times a day. This lifeskill does use energy but as you level up in farming, the energy used becomes minimal.
This particular lifeskill is fairly difficult to get into, for starters most trade items from merchants just dont make you enough silver to warrant you using your time to do it. Unless of course you just find it fun! There are some high level difficult routes that can be profitable, but these require an epheria sailboat, knowledge of the game and at least master 6 trading. Or a usable command to gather. This skill is arguably limited to a daily amount due to the magnate debuff, which lowers your ability to purchase the good items in a reasonable amount of time.
Before even considering this method you really need to make sure you have the following:
Active fishing can make you a lot of money, but if you are half assing it and missing the things above, your profits will be much much lower. If you just find fishing fun and you don’t have the above, then by all means do what you want, it is your game and your choice in the end!
This method can basically soak up all of your active time if you are willing. Its profits are contested heavily, if other players are taking your hotspots then your silver per hour will lower. Basically the more people fishing, the worse it is for everyone. You need to decide at what point you no longer feel like its worth your time.
This is another one of those areas I would suggest new players avoid. Most of the products created are heavily contested and are often hard to sell. The sellable ones often take gated materials that you need to work hard to aquire. You can make a lot of money off of these lifeskills but you need to be prepared and understand the market before diving into them. If you don’t, you could end up with a massive stack of unsellable items, or sell items at a massive loss to the potential that you could have. If you are insistent on doing this method, take a look at my non imperial cooking/gathering section. Take a look at the gated materials for each recipe, check the recipe’s profits and see how well the item is selling. Decide for yourself if it’s worth the effort, or worth your rare materials. For the record I consider any gatherable material/milk/eggs to be rare materials.
Players with little time to play can still succeed if they are smart, you need to build yourself a usable routine that you can realistically complete. Don’t try and copy someone else, build one that works for you. Mix the afk and active lifeskills to suit your life. This will put you in the best position possible to achieve your goals in Black Desert.