I’m not a professional angler, but I do know one. It’s true, he lives down the street from me and has a really nice boat. For me fishing is a leisurely activity to be done while relaxing and enjoying the outdoors. Or enjoying something, almost anything, else. Because of that I’m here today to tell you how to get the most out of fishing in Black Desert Online.
First. Get a fishing pole.
Second. Find a body of water. Any lake, ocean, river, stream, it doesn’t really matter, will do. Stay away from creeks though. Scary things live there.
Third. Equip your fishing pole.
Fourth. Hit space bar.
Five. Walk away from your computer.
No, really. Walk away from your computer. Black Desert Online auto fishes for you while you are AFK. There is no need to sit around and watch your character cast over and over again. In fact I’m in my office right now 35 miles away from my home PC while BDO is fishing for me. When I get home I’ll probably have pocketed about 100,000 silver worth of fish.
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Too good to be true you ask? As it turns out, no, not really. However, there are a couple limitations. First, you’ll eventually run out of inventory space, and inventory space in BDO is at a premium. Secondly, your fishing pole has durability and will break after a period of time. Keep in mind though the better you get at fishing the higher quality poles you can use. Oh, and you still get better at fishing while AFK. Those higher quality poles come with increased durability so they will allow you to AFK fish for longer. If you are using normal poles you should get about an hours’ worth of use before you have to equip a new pole. But guess what? That’s an hours’ worth of money, experience, skill advancement, and energy reclamation that you didn’t have to do anything for.
Advanced Tips
Here are some more advanced tips for AFK fishing. These are purely optional but will increase the monetary load earned while you are AFK:
Sell your fish to a trade merchant. Do not sell them to a vendor. The one closest to Velia, where everyone and their mother AFK fishes, is named Bahar and he's by the stable master. One more time, do not sell them to a vendor. The game will even warn you about this but rest assured people will still sell their fish to some random vendor to clear up inventory instead of a trade merchant. Don’t do it. You’ve been warned.
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Sell your fish as soon as you get back to your keyboard. Those buggers have time limits on them and will spoil eventually. The timer is close to 24 hours so it’s not a huge rush but you don’t want to forget about them in your pack either. You also don’t want to become a stink pot. Trust me. No one wants that.
(Optional) Check the box to throw away the useless items. While you are fishing you’ll catch all kinds of crap. Seaweed, fish bones, hooks, dead bodies, random garbage that sells for about 70 silver a piece. You’ll also catch a few white fish but they do not sell for nearly as much as the higher quality fish. Since each fish takes up an inventory slot, fish do not stack, another reason inventory is at a premium; do you want to waste a slot on a white fish that will only sell for 2k or for a green fish that will sell for 5k? Exactly. Plus you can fish up shards that you can sell at the marketplace which people are currently buying for north of 100,000 silver. You definitely don’t want to miss out on that because you had some broken fishhooks in your bag. That said, there are fishing daily quests that require you to collect white quality items. So you may in fact want to AFK fish and not check the box. If you are in it for the most money, however, check the box.
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One last thing. There is a status message before you start to fish that will tell you how many fish are in the area. They can range from abundant to exhausted. You’d think that if you fish in an area where the fish supply was exhausted you would never catch a fish right? Wrong. Amazingly enough you can still catch fish. It just takes a bit longer. But, hey, you’re AFK anyway, what do you care? Cast away!
So go grab yourself a pole and hit the space bar and enjoy yourself a frosty adult beverage, a book, or vacuuming your house. You’ll thank me later (and so will the other people in your house that now have clean carpets).
