As any new comer might say black desert is a little overwhelming for your average new player as it's different than most MMORPGs out there in terms of depth of its systems.

I answer questions on a regular basis on server/world channel and I can say that the one thing that confuses players the most is workers as it was the case with myself. This is an entirely new concept for MMO. I know WoW etc. has similar systems (order hall quests for companions) but they only scratch the surface while BDO goes in much deeper and where there is depth, there is money to be made.

Let's get some terms out of the way so the guide is more fluid:

Beer : This is the fuel for your workers. They don't get beer they slack off and won't do the job they're given. I'll explain how it is made further down the road.
Lodging : This is where your workers stay. By default each city has 1 lodging so you can hire 1 worker. To increase this, you need to open your map, click on the city and find a building (blue) that has lodging as a possible investment.
Contribution Points (CP) : Used for a great variety of things. You can always get back whatever CP you spent so never leave them laying around. In workers system, CP is used to buy lodging as well as villages/mines. You actually need to invest CP to villages/mines to be able to send workers out to them.

Why should I bother while I can mob grind?
Workers are a passive income. You feed them with beer (I'll explain how this is made) and then they produce anything you want. Keep them fed at all times as this is a 0 effort easy money if you do a little bit of planning on what resources you actually need.

Getting Started
To start off with, you need to invest Contribution Points to certain towns/villages in order to be able to send workers there at all. You earn Contribution Points from questing, most people get stuck at 140-160~ after their main character awakens. Best method to increase this further is to level some alts due to quests being repeatable between characters but this is something you shouldn't worry about too much.

Let's do our first investment! Go to Velia, open up your map and click the Magnifying glass at bottom right. Click Worker and this will find the closest worker employer for you to hire.

Worker Race & Rarity
There are 3 races for workers. Goblin, Human and Giant. From left to right, energy capacity increases (have to feed beer less often) but they also work slower, taking more time to complete tasks. If you're one to leave your PC on overnight giants are irreplaceable. If you're online and don't find it a hassle to feed beer often goblins have the best efficiency in terms of jobs done/time.

Workers have different rarities ranging from White, Green, Blue, Yellow and Orange rightmost being rarest. Rare workers will finish their jobs quicker, have higher energy capacity  and some special skills that make them excel at different workloads. You can view their info at workers panel after you've hired them.

For starters, anything green or above should be decent. Do keep in mind each time you find a new worker you spend energy. Race depends on your playstyle but this too doesn't matter much for your first couple workers. You can always hire better ones later.

How do I make my workers work?

This is the point where most people get stuck. You need to invest Contribution Points  to a nearby village/mine etc. in order to be able to send workers to them. To start off, let's grow some potatoes. You can make beer and flour with them, you always want to have some grain laying around.

Bartali farm (South of Velia) is the first node anyone should ever invest into. It gives you potatoes, has low-cost house options and you can also produce eggs from here which is used in imperial trading for some good silver.

Make an auto-path to Bartali Farm (if you haven't discovered ti, south of velia in the woods before you cross the road.) and this should get you to the node manager. Click node management when speaking to the said NPC and from top left click invest. This will use your Contribution Points to unlock this node. Now you also need to invest in the production you want your workers at. Click Potato Farming, invest, do this for Chicken Meat aswell.

Now get away from the NPC, open up your map and click on the farm, choose Potato Farming, choose your worker and press F + R to add maximum amount of times to work the field. This will make your worker do his thing non-stop as long as you feed them beer. You can also hire a worker and send them to Chicken Meat later on.

Hiring More Workers

You need lodging (can be bought in towns or villages) as explained above on how to acquire one. You don't need to walk to a node manager to send your new workers to a perviously unlocked node+production method.

Beer Production

6 Grains (Potato, wheat, corn etc. 6 of one of those.), 5 Cups of mineral water, 2 Leavening agents , 1 Sugar and some chemical X. This is the recipe you'll use to make beer. However, first we need a cooking utensil and a house to put that in. Common misconception is that "if its lodging I bought I should be able to enter". This is wrong and you need to buy a Residence to physically access it.

Same process as lodging, buy a Residence from the map. Then using the magnifying glass at bottom right of your map, click "Cooking". Buy as many as 6 utensils, they break easily. Traditional version is made for AFK cooking, however this isn't needed for a beginner and might come a bit pricey for your budget.

From the recipe, Grains are gathered by workers while the rest of it you need to buy from this cooking vendor. For each 6 potato you have, buy 5 mineral water vice versa so you don't buy more ingredients than you can use.

Once you've bought all the requirements, go to your home and click Place Mode (center-top of screen), switch to tools tab and place down your utensils. You can rotate after you've put down an utensil.

Now approach the said utensil and press R. You need to put the exactly same amount of ingredients as I wrote above. You might have 600 potatoes, but you still need to put 6 of them in, not 600. The game can use up all the stacks you have if you use "Continuous Production". Cooking takes some time. You can get a silver cooking outfit from the market to cut down on time, or you can simply grab a cup fo coffee. Utensils tend to break every 5-10 minutes depending on your cooking skill. So if you're gonna AFK for very long you might want to keep a traditional utensil nearby.

Well done!

You've learned the basics and built the foundations of your worker empire. Now you might ask, wheres my silver!? As worker empire is a passive income, you'll get your silver in due time. For now you should get back to questing, invest in more villages/hire more workers when you have the chance.

If you want to delve any deeper into it, you can look up Crafting outfits, Fishing poles and tools and how they're made. Those things will sell on marketplace and you can make them through materials gathered from your workers. Each piece needs a different material from a different village so there's no 1 build for all.There are also things like eggs that can make some money from imperial trading.

Although mob grinding is arguably the best sivler/hour in the game, all of this is some addition on top of it, since it's 0 effort essentially until you have to process the large stacks of raw materials gathered by your workers (which BTW most people do over-night.) and it is recommended that you don't bother to process them until theres a large amount to be processed.

Hope this helps some of you lost souls out there
Oriyanna from Scionet family, peace out.