Table of Contents
Barter
One of the new lifeskills in Black Desert is Bartering. Barter is the system of trading goods to obtain better resources that could earn you more valuable items and more money to spend on other things in the game.
Is Bartering For You?
Barter is a fairy AFK lifeskill. It doesn’t require a lot of effort. However, it mostly suits people who spend a lot of their time in front of the computer. Preferably you have two monitors as that would help a lot.
Having two monitors makes it so you can have BDO active on your second monitor as you don’t want to sit and watch the game all the time(but quickly glance over after 10-25 minutes). You can’t walk away from it for long periods, unlike other lifeskills such as processing or fishing. I would say you can AFK for 10-25 minutes at a time while still being efficient.
Obtaining a Boat and Sailors
First off, when you do bartering in Black Desert Online, you must have a boat. A boat will be your means of transporting goods. However, good boats such as the Epheria sailboat or Epheria Frigate are expensive.
What you can do is to do The Great Expedition: Oquilla’s Eye story questline. If you do this, you will earn a lot of sailing experience too, which is important for sailing speed. You will also obtain a free Bartali sailboat using this method. This free boat will be what you can use to barter in the beginning.
The questline may be long and tedious, but it is worth it. Having said that, bartering will not be a very good profit until you get your sailboat/frigate with Improved/Caravel/Galleass/Carrack upgrade.
Sailing and Barter With Your Boat
The next thing that you must do is to register the ship that you have if you haven’t done so already. When you click Take Out, it will bring out your ship. The next thing that you do is to buy supplies. This costs 200,000 silver, and this will be your rations(yellow bar) as you depart.
Afterward, you will manage sailors and board them on your ship. Then you can recover the condition of your sailors if needed.
You also need to load the cargo which you will bring for your barter. Let’s say I wanted to trade in the Bronze candlestick, I can see in the list that I can do exchange it 4 times to get 4 level 5 102-year-old golden herbs.
I then load the Bronze candlesticks onto the boat using the “load cargo” button.
Then I can sail to the destination and complete the barter(see how to barter section).
When hiring sailors, we recommend to only go for the innocent Goblin Sailors. They have the highest speed scaling, and a higher speed is more money per hour. If you have a frigate alt, use that to level them quickly during the dailies. Preferably you want at least 3 speed when they are level 8. Otherwise, fire them and get some new ones.
While at the Wharf manager, left-click on the little ship icon button to board your boat. Then, to move, you click W, A, S, and D, which are the usual controls on your keyboard. With that, you have already learned how to sail. If your ship is stuck(which will happen), jump off the boat, swim out manually a short distance with your character, and right-click on the ship icon, which will call the ship.
ALWAYS use the “Continuously use Breezysails” option. This increases the speed of the boat by a ridiculous amount. I prefer bartering around Illya island more than Port Epheria because while using this option, your boat tends to get stuck somewhere when sailing to Port Epheria. So be on the lookout for that. This is what makes the whole lifeskill semi-AFK while still bringing in good profits.
You can also auto-path like you would with a horse. right-click the destination and press t to sail towards it. Combine this with the previous tips is what makes it AFK. Make sure to bring out your ship a short distance before doing it otherwise it tends to get stuck.
How To Barter/Planning Your Run
You should plan and see how many of your items you may be able to exchange for another. This maximizes the load of your cargo or your ship’s storage capability.
Then, you ride your boat and go to the first location where you click “Anchor”, and you click “barter” with them. Make sure to also click the “explore” button as you can get good material/barter item boxes. You may exchange it once or several times. Then you go to storage and after that the next spot where you do the same.
If you have exceeded your ship’s weight limit but still want to do more Barter for better goods, you may store the excess goods that you have. Usually, you want to store your items in Port Epheria or Illya Island(Velia for T0, base materials). Sometimes it is more worth it to overstack a boat, if you can reduce the number of times you have to barter(for example 2 barters instead of 3, might be worth overstacking it the second time) depending on how far away you are from a storage/wharf manager.
With that, you lose the excess weight on your ship, and you earn more money. Bartering is a lifeskill that some planning ahead of time to optimize your money/hour. Doing all runs isn’t efficient.
Keep a healthy balance of your barter items in all tiers between Illya and Port Epheria storage. Try to as best as possible maintain a good amount for each item so that you don’t have to go across the map to get a needed item.
Keep base items(T0) in Velia and Port Epheria, with the majority in Velia. You can access it with a storage maid.
Bartering Process
The barter system enables you to take a resource to several different islands, and you trade leveling up until Tier 5, which is the maximum level that you can get to. With this, the items that you get to become more and more valuable.
You may choose to sell them or trade them for sea coins in which when you accumulate these sea coins, you can trade them for a reward with a much higher value. Or you can just outright sell the T5 items for 5 million silver each. It all depends on your strategy for the game.
The barter process involves taking the initial item that you have off the land and take it to the first location where you trade it there. You move to a different location and trade the item that you obtained from your first location there too, and so on until you reach Level 5.
The issue here is that the items you obtain from other islands are heavy, and your boat’s weight limit might not accommodate them. So if your boat is a low-level one, you may not be able to trade for more valuable items yet. You must obtain a bigger boat with more capacity, but you must level up and afford the higher-level boat for you to be able to do that. The items in the barter list also vary for everyone, and they change from time to time.
Reset/Refresh Barter Route
To reset, you click the barter refresh button that has a four-hour cooldown. There are also only several resets per day(4-hour cooldown). This means that even if you want to, you cannot spend an entire day bartering without even docking or resting (at least not in the beginning).
The more barters you complete, the more routes you unlock. So you make more profit as you become higher barter levels. You should be more selective as later on, you won’t have the time to complete all the barter routes. Do the routes where the islands are close to each other and preferably close to the storage. Also, you don’t always have to complete the full route, that is why it’s nice to stockpile items so that when you finally get a good route you have all the materials you need.
Ship Tiers
These are listed from best to worst. Make sure you do the daily quests in order to get materials for improving your boat. Ideally, you would want an Epheria Frigate/Epheria Sailboat that is upgraded, so make sure you do the daily sailing quests.
Epheria Carrack -> Epheria Caravel/Epheria Galleass -> Improved Epheria Sailboat/Improved Epheria Frigate -> Epheria Frigate/Epheria Sailboat -> Bartali Sailboat
Storage Strategy
Always keep at least 2 T5s of all kinds in Ilya island. For Ancado, always have three or more of each T5 item as a buffer. You can get away with less, but having three or more allows you to occasionally only make coin trades when you do not feel like doing all the bartering.
Also, remember to transport the T5s via the remote storage transport function. It takes 4 hours for this to complete, but it’s worth it. I usually do it before I log off the game.
When bartering, do not exchange your items for profits right away. Keep a large stockpile of them. Once you have got a good stockpile of barter items, start with the top-down approach, where you first make all T5 trades, then T4, and finally T1-T3 trades to keep a healthy stockpile of barter items.
Advanced Bartering Tips
If you plan to take Barter seriously, we recommend investing in additional Illya storage and a storage container in Lema. It will save you many extra trips. If you have a Lema residence, it connects to Illya storage.
Remember to be on the lookout for ships to kill. Red Boats give you sea coins and sometimes gear mats. Ghost ships can give you blue gear and carrack mats/summon scrolls and more.
Make sure you have an alt tagged on your barter characters, this tagged character should have extra weight to carry additional items. You can now use wharfs around the map to stack extra items onto your tagged character.
There’s no need for T1 or T5s in your Port Epheria storage.
Use the Explore option when you are at a bartering point. You might get good rewards, such as a barter supply box or some other box containing T0-T1 materials.
It would help if you had an alt character for the daily quests. This alt can also be used for Margoria trade when you unlock additional routes for sea coins. This way, you can combine the daily run with a Margoria sea coin run.
Never remote collect your boat.
Avoid Hakoven runs if they give less than 250 coins; they are too far away to make it worthwhile.
Ancado Harbor Alt
If you are looking for even more efficiency, get a second skilled one sailing alt and place it in Ancado harbor with some silver and travelers maps. For this alt, you don’t need an as good of a boat just sailboat or frigate without upgrades. This alt is used to perform the trades from Ancado to Hakoven or the three islands to the left Ancado. We do this because Ancado is exceptionally far away from the other places, but offers sweet rewards in return.
From Hakoven, you will need to sail a bit closer to the Valencia mainland before seeing the Ancado teleport option on the map. If you did the three islands on the left of Ancado, you can sail a bit further to Shakatu Abandoned Pier and Transport your boat to Ancado, run to Shakatu, and then Character transport back to Ancado. Don’t have sailors on this boat because you will remote collect it often after using your travelers’ map back to Ancado.
You can also use the Shakatu storage as even more buffer for the T5 storage. You will be there often with your Ancado alt after you have transported your character to Shakatu via the character transport(you can take a few with you as you go).