Black Desert Mobile: Starter Guide

Black Desert Mobile has finally come to the West and is available for download now from the app store. So far it is a watered down Black Desert fit for mobile with auto play, and that's okay. I've had a blast with it lately. It has a lot to do, and I actually enjoy the enchanting system over the normal version. They have made some quality changes to the game, and some that are pretty blatant cash grabs.

Typical mobile game with tons of stuff on the screen. This is about as minimalistic as I could find. Hopefully you guys found something better. It's pretty standard stuff. The top left is a minimap that I have closed. Just under that are my pets and mounts. To the right is some menu option just as the top right is more menu options. Under those on the right side is my quests. They pop out if you click on them. Under that are my skills. You can have 8 skills equiped it appears. If you swipe on the outer wheel it will change to your next 4 skills. The bottom right of that is a roll button for IFrames. The middle bow icon is just my auto attack skill.

The combat in the game is fluid. It feels good to play, and the big grind like killing 2000 monsters can be done once you unlock autoplay. It's unlocked via the main story line around level 14 or so. It shouldn't take more than an hour to get through it.

The end game seems to be the arena system, and the boss rushes. Once you beat the boss in the campaign it's added to the boss rush. It's an instanced zone for you to kill the boss in. They have low chance to drop the boss loot which seems to be the best in the game. You can't do this 24/7 as you need stamps which are daily rewards or rare drops. The arena is pretty fun, but the P2W can ruin it if you take it too serious. The difference in CP makes a huge difference. Even a difference of 100 is massive and it kind of sucks

Pretty typical UI for this kind of thing on mobile. I think this screen is well done. From a glance I can see what is in my inventory I can equip and what I have on. the +numbers on the gear is the enhancement level. Just like the normal game you can enhance your gear.

Just like Black Desert we have black stones and enchancing in the mobile version. As you can see I have 4 different stone options there. The green numbers is the chance of enchanting with that stone. As you can see the numbers are very low, the good thing about this is that they stack. For example I have 4x 3.12% stones. I could use all of those for ~12% chance to enchance. You can mix and match all the way up to 100%. If you fail it just eats your stones so far. You can save some of the stones with scrolls or by using silver.

This screen is a bit different than the normal Black Desert skill system. Here you collect books from drops. Then you pay silver and the books to gain EXP. Each skill has a skill tree as you can see. Sometimes they give an extra charge before going on cooldown, more damage, or even hit more enemies. You gain skills just by leveling up.

This is my biggest problem with the game. Accessories cost black pearls instead of silver. Even on the market place. The problem with this is you can convert pearls into black pearls 1:1 from the game itself. Unlike buying say a pet and selling it on the market place. There is no "player interaction" in this.

These are the prices on iPhone version of Black Desert Mobile. They are about inline with the normal game.

Outfits are once again a thing, and they are expensive. You're looking at about ~25 bucks per outfit. They once again also give stats. You can buy these on the market place if you're lucky.

Just like the normal game of BDO you will want the max amount of pets. On this version that amount is 3. They cost about ~10 bucks each and can be bought on the market place as well.

You can see that the pets also have skills that randomly come with them. Odin gives me combat EXP and Knowledge gained. You train them by paying silver and waiting a long time. Odin is a tier 2 pet and Ori is a tier 3. The tiers are important, the higher the tier the more skills they know. They also recover faster so they can loot even faster. I haven't noticed much different, but I'm sure it does add up. For example the difference in pick up speed between T2 and T3 is 5 seconds. To upgrade the tiers you need 2 pets of the same time. So Poofs and Odin won't work. They are both dogs but they are different pets. You need Odin which is a shepard and another dog that is a shepard.

Black Desert mobile has the worker system as well. It's slightly different, and it seems so much more annoying that I kind of hate it so far. On Black Desert I just give them beer, and they work until they run out of beer. Here they only do 1 task and stop. You can build your own town which holds your workers and building.

You get workers just like the normal version. Go to the tavern and refresh until you get good ones. Once you have them send them on their tasks to collect goods for you. You can also assign them to a building to upgrade the building or make potions etc.

All in all I like the game. I've had it afking for 24/7 essentially. You should give it a shot, but without spending money you will never be the best.