BDO Wealth: worker empire

Warning: there is evidence that GMs collude with exploiters. Maybe it's not the best idea to play this game.

This post is part of the BDO Wealth Guide.

This is the detailed description of the best way to get rich in Black Desert Online: having a worker empire. It is long, so most people won't read it. Well, as workers create no silver and selling on the market destroys silver, the silver must come from somewhere and that "somewhere" will be people who don't read it and grind instead.

The workers are essentially a stereotypical mobile game resource gathering implemented into BDO for some reason. You click on the resource and it's collected in real time. How much? About 20M silver worth a day. To harvest it, you need less than 30 minutes of actual "at keyboard" time, but even most of that is not clicking, but waiting for character switch and autopathing from spawn point to storage. There is one catch though: for some bizarre reason, workers only work when you are online. So in order to use them, you must leave your computer running.

Important note: you don't need levels or gear to use this method. You can start using them literally as a new player and earn income thousand times higher than grinding low level mobs. With the income you can buy gear a new player can't dream of and oneshot level-appropriate monsters.

Let's start with the basics: there are nodes on the map that you can activate usince contribution points. Every city and major town is a "free node" that you can connect to nearby nodes. You can do it at the node manager or by using 10 energy if you have "subscription", the Value Pack buff. Then you can connect other nodes to the already connected ones, as long as you have contribution points. After a node is connected, you can connect its "work nodes":
Each town comes with their own separate warehouses and with one worker slot. You can recruit a worker to that slot at the work manager. You can find the work manager using the NPC finder, "worker" button. You can increase your worker slots by the pay-to-win item "[zone] worker lodging" and/or by using contribution points for renting lodging buildings in the town (and in some cases, nearby nodes):
If a resource node is connected to a town (trough any length of connected nodes), you can send the worker to harvest that resource. Then click on the resource and select your worker to harvest it for your warehouse. The worker lives in the town and exist in the game world. He walks out from the warehouse to the node, does the work and walks back like this little goblin from Tarif (town) to Kamasilve (work node):
Pick the resources based on their market value and don't miss on the "excavation" resources which provide rare crafting items. Their locations are: Bernianto farm, Lynch farm ruins, Mansha forest, Rhua tree stub, Glish ruins, Ancient stone chamber. You must pay 35 energy to "find" them and then normally activate. Work happens in cycles. The cycle length depends on the work and travel speed of the worker and the distance of the node from the town. The workers have 4 main stats:

• Work speed: the higher, the faster the work is done
• Walk speed: the higher, the faster the worker reaches the destination. Important if the node is afar.
• Luck: the higher, the more secondary resources you get. For example if you farm chicken meat, you can get eggs.
• Stamina: how many cycles he can do before refreshing. Refreshing must be done manually, by clicking on food item. You obviously can't do it while not at the keyboard.

All these stats depend on the worker quality (grey, white, green, blue, yellow, orange), level (gained with work) and abilities (one gained at ever 5 levels). There are also 3 races:

• Goblins: fast work, fast move, low luck, low stamina
• Humans: moderate work, moderate move, high luck, moderate stamina
• Giants: moderate work, slow move, low luck, high stamina

You can see these on clicking on the worker icon top left of the screen or selecting the "Worker List" item on the ESC menu and mouseovering one worker: ?br: The quality of the worker is the most important thing. You can improve it two ways: by firing and hiring a new worker and promotion. That takes a day, only one worker can be promoted at a time, promotion fails more often than not and all workers get one try every 10 levels (3 combined).
You can improve the secondary stats of workers if they reached level 30. Just select the worst stat and you get a new one randomly:
Workers need "fuel" to work. Several kinds of food serve as fuel, typically beer is used. Refresh them often to top them up. Always have fuel in your backpack:
I currently have 302 Contribution Points. From that, I use the following nodes:
Olvia is the starting zone, yet it's really important, because Velia is horribly lodging-starved, so I staff most of the near-Velia nodes from Olvia.

Velia itself only staffs the nodes east of it:

Heidel is my headquarters, receiving all the products from all places. It also has a bunch of nodes, including the very profitable Fleece and Honey farms. The node in the southeast that doesn't look connected is connected trough Kamasilve, Tarif region:

Glish is the smallest region, only a handful of nodes, but one of them is excavation, other is pine, so don't ignore it:

Keplan has some weird long connections, because it only have 1 useful nodes next to it. But it worth making the chains, it's one of my most profitable regions:

Calpheon is hands down the largest network and probably it would be the optimal headquarters:

Trent in the Southwest corner of the map looks like some irrelevant remnant of pre-expansion content. Not in BDO! Most of the materials of the infamous Calpheon Timber Crate come from here. Too bad that its lodging is stretched:

Tarif covers the largest territory and its nodes are paying well. It's plagued by low lodging, so I staff some nodes from Heidel:

I barely use Altinova, because I simply don't have enough CP to cover its nodes in the Valencia continent, despite there are some lucrative ones, but that two I use make black crystal:

Poor Sand Grain Bazaar is in even worse condition. Update: since then I activated its teff farm, but there are still several lucrative nodes on the south I didn't even explore.

The workers deposit their products in their respective towns. How do the products get from these places to Heidel where I sort, process and sell them? Two ways. The simpler is Warehouse transport. Just open the map, select the town and press transport. Then click Send and set the destination along with one available transport method. Then click on the materials until all of them is in the transport window and press Send at the bottom of the transport window. The catch? The stacks are broken up: Why is that a problem? Because this single Olvia transport takes 37 packages and only 100 can be en route. Which means after a few towns you have to wait 2 hours while they are transported, use the same transport method in your headquarters and press "Receive All". Only after that you can start another transport. You must also connect the nodes between the two towns to make this possible. That costs contribution points. 3 for connecting Velia (and Olvia connected to that) to Heidel. Same for Glish. Tarif is already connected due to lodging problems. 1 point to add Altinova to that. But good luck connecting Sand Grain Bazaar or Trent. Finally, even if you connect Trent, there is no trade route. You must transport from Trent to Calpheon and from Calpheon to Heidel. Considering how many stacks the Trent wood is cut into, transporting it twice would be quite a pain.

So I transport from Olvia, Velia, Tarif, Glish and Altinova (double-transport via Tarif). But from Calpheon, Keplan, Trent and Sand Grain I transport via alt-AFK-transport. This means selecting disconnect from the ESC menu, selecting Transport and picking a town and another character:
The selected character logs in and the old one goes into transport. If you log back to her an hour later, she'll be in the destination, along with her mount. My transport alts have large wagons as mounts, so they drive it to the warehouse, fill it and their backpack with items and use the same AFK travel to get back to Heidel where they dump their stuff to the warehouse. These alts are equipped with the following gear for max weight limit:
How to get workers? You must go to the work manager (NPC finder, "worker") and select contract worker. For 5 energy a worker is suggested to you. If you are starting up and need to hire lots of workers, take every except Naive. But after your nodes are covered, start accepting only blues and above, firing greens. When no greens left, start to fire blues and replace them with yellows. You get a yellow from about 200 energy. You can get extra energy by buying a bed and lying into it. Remember: if you want a Velia worker, you must hire him from Santo Manzi, the Velia manager.

There is also a worker exchange where you can buy and sell worker contracts. It's a fast way to stack up with blue workers and you can get lucky with some higher quality ones. You can also use it to get some money for your no longer needed workers. Since my empire is already near maxed, I can afford to fire lvl 30 yellow workers after all their promotions are used, to hire someone in their place: