BDO Worker, Node and Housing Guide for Beginners
Want to learn the basics about Black Desert Online’s Node, worker and housing systems? This guide will teach you everything you need to get started with them, and start building your node and worker empire!
Workers
Workers are NPCs that you can send to nodes or houses to craft items or collect materials. Workers need to be hired from a work supervisor and come in either Grey, Green, Blue, or Gold Quality, and this costs energy. Now you might think it’s a good idea to hire a naive worker (gray) and upgrade them over time but it isnt. I personally recommend never hiring Grey quality workers, and always try to
reroll for green or better. Grey quality workers are just not worth the energy to have in your employment.
- Side note -> you gain energy from talking to NPCs with a ? above their head around the map, and having some alts early on can help you get things setup since all characters have the same energy cap, but individual energy bars. Energy recuperates over time or can be refilled using an energy potion.
Workers come in 3 different types: Goblin (Papu), Human, and giant (fadus).
- Goblins have the fastest workrate but lowest energy (no energy=no working), so they need to be fed more frequently
- Giants have the slowest work rate but the highest energy, so they need to be fed less frequently.
- Human is a middle ground between the two
Ultimately up to you what type of worker you want to employ based on your playtime and how often you can feed your workers. Workers can be fed with a multitude of different foods, such as beer, grilled bird meat, etc, and you’ll want to feed your workers every now and then to make sure they keep working with as little downtime as possible. Workers also have different skills as well, and they learn new ones every 5 levels or so up to a max level of 30. So you can try and place workers on nodes that best suit their skills. Every 10 levels, a worker has a chance for a promotion test, which has a chance to move the worker up a grade. If you have a worker you no longer want, you can fire them and make space for a new one.
Nodes
Put simply, nodes are places on the map that you discover that have a node manager. Some nodes only serve as connection points to have a node, others have material sub-nodes. You can send a worker to these nodes in order to gather materials for you. It costs energy and contribution points to invest in the node, and then more energy and contribution points to invest in the individual sub-parts of the node.
- Side note -> While we talked about energy earlier, we haven’t mentioned contribution points yet. These points are a non-regenerative currency that you accrue from doing various things in BDO, such as questing, crafting, and more. Think of these points as a currency you can invest into something you want to use. You invest the points, use that node or house, and if you ever decide you don’t want what you invested your points into, you can remove those contribution points and you get those points back.
Workers then bring the materials back to the bank of the town you hired them from. So a worker hired in Heidel will always bring materials back to Heidel. If that worker is crafting something, they’ll use materials from the bank of the town they were hired in, and then deposit the crafted items into the same bank
Housing
Housing costs contribution points to purchase, and houses can serve a multitude or purposes. But for this video we are going to categorize the houses into 4 categories: storage, residence, lodging and crafting.
- Crafting houses are houses you can send workers to to craft things as i explained earlier. They’ll use materials from the bank of the town they were hired in, and then deposit the crafted items into the same bank. You can see what items the worker can craft and what materials will be required for each item.
- Storage houses simply act as an expansion for that towns bank. I recommend buying these in your main city hubs that you find yourself using a lot, as these can eat up contribution points very quickly.
- Residence houses are needed to place certain crafting tables, such as Alchemy tables, cooking tables, etc. These are also your stereotypical in-game player housing that can be decorated and made to look however you want! You can go purely functional and just place crafting tables,or get nuts and decorate your house to your hearts content.
- Lodging is required to be able to hire more workers per city. at a base, you can hire 1 worker per city, but if you want more, you’ll need to purchase lodging for your workers
Houses have different levels, and only cost silver to upgrade. The more levels, the more benefit you get from that specific house. Sometimes you’ll also have to purchase one house to get to another as a pre-requisite.
Best Node & Worker Setup
So as you can see, all of these things are linked together and why i believe they deserved to all be in the same video. Now with all this explained you may be asking yourself “what’s the best node worker setup”? I cant answer that for you. what is best is going to depend on any given player market scenario, how much play time you can personally get in, and how YOU want to set up your own personal worker empire. I recommend doing research on the nodes you can unlock to see what will work best for you. I will however tell you the best configuration to get yourself started.
Velia 1 Rm 1, 2, 3 for lodging, and any house you want as a residence.
Hire as many workers as you can, green quality or above. Invest these workers in the following nodes:
– Finto Farm potato and chicken nodes
– Bartali farm chicken and potato nodes
– Loggia farm potato node
– Toscani farm corn nodes
Early game you truly want to embrace your inner samwise gamgee and go hard on getting potatoes.
You can use the chicken and starches you gain from these nodes to craft grilled bird meat and beer respectively to feed your workers as your empire expands. Velia is simply one of the best towns to act as a hub for creating food for your workers, due to the nodes that surround the city. So, this acts as not only a good place to start to get your feet wet in the node system, but also to act as an investment to feed the rest of your growing worker empire as you start to expand it.
