Trading in Black Desert Online is arguably the best way to make money. It is also the most fun. Being a skilled trader is complemented by being a savvy business owner with more than enough goods to trade. Being a trader who goes about different towns hawking wares and various forms of knickknacks requires that you have something of worth to prospective clients and dealers. Some markets can be a little too discerning when it comes to traders whose sole aim is to make them part with their money. As someone who would occasionally need or want certain goods, you should know that this is simply how it works.

Trading Essentials: Horse and Wagon

Regardless of class, you can’t successfully farm gold without transportation. Get yourself a horse and a wagon and you’ll be on your way to becoming a formidable empire owner.

When you do special quests, there’s a great chance you will be rewarded with a donkey. While useful, a donkey is not as fast and as strong as a horse and therefore not as efficient. Horses are better and will prove necessary later in the game. You either purchase or catch a horse and have as many as you like. Successfully catching one could take time, but also fun and doesn’t cost as much. But, whether you bought or adopted, you will need to learn how to tame a horse which will determine how your stable of horses will perform as you go along.

In case you’re still unsure of a horse’s and a wagon’s value, here are some compelling reasons to have them:

Faster transportation – You won’t be the only trader in Black Desert Online, so you need to be constantly on your feet and make sure you get to towns faster and beat the competition. You can do that with a horse in your stable.

Ability to carry plenty of items – In case of sales booms, which happens sometimes in certain town nodes, having a horse and a wagon ensures you are able to hawk as much items as you can and make more money. Of course, having a stack of the right goods is still necessary for you to successfully make a sale.

Avoid bandits – There are ways to know which areas have heavy bandit presence, but sometimes they find their way into your vicinity and help themselves to your goods. With the unbeatable combination of a horse and wagon, you can easily flee bandits and transfer to a much safer town.

Learn How Consumers Value Your Goods

Commerce in Black Desert Online operates on the very basic principles of the law of supply and demand. Over the course of your grinding and earning, you will be accumulating both valuable and inexpensive items. Unfortunately, you do not get to dictate the worth of your goods solely on the basis of the difficulty through which you obtained them; the market does.

Are you selling a particular item that is abundant in a certain marketplace? Then don’t expect hefty profits from its sale, if you make any at all. There are certain items that you will be carrying around that will definitely be worth more for certain buyers and some items that will have to carry a lower price for the very simple reason that the people doesn’t have great and urgent need for them. Think twice before selling goods in an area that is close to where your goods were made and is therefore in abundance. Needless to say, hawk those items that you know are in much less supply in specific areas where the production of such goods is virtually non-existent. It is also worth noting that hawking your wares in an area that is unconnected to your node network is a big no-no.

Once your businesses and your goods are in order, the only thing to take care of is knowing what to sell, as well as when and where to sell them. Have businesses, nourish your workers’ well-being, and flourish. Speaking of taking care of your workers, you might find that keeping your bunch of workers satisfied might be the thing that gets you through an economic slump. As long as you have an income source that is fuelled by the industry of your workers, you will never have to through the vast landscapes of Black Desert penniless.

If All Else Fails, Grind

If you feel like maybe commerce and trading is not for you, you can always fall back on grinding and happily hacky your way into prosperity. In a perfect fantasy world, you have both superb commerce and combat skills. In case you find yourself struggling with the life of a trader, with all that has to go with it including nurturing staff of farmers and gatherers, you can fall back on grinding and chop up monsters to your heart’s content, and get rich doing it.

Black Desert Online leaves it all up to players to become either prosperous or scavenging for scraps. You can grow your wealth by being a shrewd buyer or seller, or you can be a careless gambler who risks all his hard-earned loot by selling or buying the wrong items to the wrong merchants, and most importantly, at the wrong price. You can avoid all of that.

Carelessness with how you carry around your wealth certainly has a price. Stay away from bandit areas and you should be able to carry on with your business with all your goods safely tucked in your horse or carriage – very important to you as a merchant. Detecting areas where these petty thieves abound is pretty easy to do, so it is safe to say that it is not impossible to stay out of harm’s way as you go on your commercial escapades.

Much like trading in real life, there are shady dealers and they run rampant in this intricate and imperfect fantasy world. Again, you will want to avoid them by exercising caution. Just as there are bad apples, there also are good, honest dealers who are not out to steal you of your hard-earned gold.

Because Black Desert Online is one of the more ‘life-like’ MMORPGs available today, picking the best professions is, like in real life, a critical factor in your quests. You can choose among any of the professions – trading, taming, fishing and gathering, among others, but you don’t have to choose blindly. Opt for what you think or feel would be a worthwhile job and bear in mind that the most enjoyable one may not necessarily be the most lucrative.

There are many ways to make money in Black Desert Online. You can earn large amounts of currency by doing quests and collecting loots from monsters, selling items in the auction house and making significant profits from your trade. But just depending on these activities is never going to guarantee to yield the most earnings. There are obvious roadblocks in doing trade and grinding; selling items in an auction house, for example, involves taxes that can often be exorbitant. Instead of buying and selling, you can farm monsters and get plenty of items, but then you’d have to spend an insane amount of time doing this and forsaking the more enjoyable aspects of the game. You are playing a game so it shouldn’t have to feel like work.

It couldn’t be any more life-like than that. This is why it’s extremely important to choose a profession that will let you earn the most profits while still having a good time.

Carving a Career Path in Desertscape

As mentioned, there are a number of professions you can take. Black Desert Online is set in a fantasy world – and a vividly designed one at that – but it demands that you make ‘career decisions’ the way you would in real life. It might be worth mentioning that profits made from professions in Black Desert Online don’t always have to be in the form of currency. You can gain skill and contribution points and get better with experience, and consider those a profit. That is all well and good, but for the purposes of actually growing your wealth and using such wealth to improve weapons, beefing up your inventory and enhancing your profile, choosing a profitable profession should be one of your top priorities. These some tips on how seemingly low-earning professions could also be the most rewarding.

If you are shocked at the suggestion that fishing could be one of the most profitable professions, you need to calm down. Unlike most professions, fishing isn’t going to cost you a lot of capital, true, but you won’t earn much from it, either. It involves nothing more than gathering enough number of workers and getting them to plop down near a body of water and start hooking and baiting. But it’s not as simple as that.

When in the fishing industry, deal with a trade manager. Don’t just sell your fish; hawk them like a ruthless merchant who means business. Know which nodes offer the best fishing spots. More importantly, sell your fish at a profit. It sounds obvious, but underselling might strike you as an attractive option when buyers in certain nodes aren’t too keen on buying. Hold off on this line of decision-making and survey other areas where there is a large demand for your products and sell them when the time and place is right. You could also be a hunter or a farmer and other types of worker, in case you find yourself not thriving in a particular profession.

Taming

But what makes a good tamer? You will soon learn that professions in Black Desert Online can be interconnected; being a good tamer could benefit you by being adept in fishing (enables you to go from one field to another to find the best fishing spots) or gathering which could turn you into a master collector of materials and raw resources that you will need, whether for weapons or for your houses, as you go along.

Being a skilled gatherer as a result of being a skilled tamer is also one of the ways in which said professions are interconnected. When you have the means to go around, it’s only a matter of time before you discover untapped areas where you can gather even more materials, not to mention, fight monsters out of which you’ll get a surprising amount of wealth.

The world you’ll be playing in is rich in natural resources and non-player characters that could be instrumental in your economic progress. With a number of handy skills and a bit of expertise from professions you’ve studied, you’ll be making profits of the tangible and intangible kind.

Practice Practicality in Your Professions

You certainly don’t need to learn all professions and be an expert in all of them. It might also be useful to know that each profession requires different equipment, so spending only what’s necessary could mean practical savings in both inventory space and actual amount of currency spent. Gathering requires that you purchase special equipment which could tempt you to go on a spree, but know that each profession has specific equipment requirements.

While there are no actual numbers to prove which professions historically made players the richest, having these guidelines can help you decide which professions in Black Desert Online can lead you to a more stable economic state, or better yet, a state of affluence. Your choice of profession might be driven by what you enjoy doing the most, but it never hurts to apply a little cunning and a bit of practicality when practicing other necessary professions.