Black Desert/Contribution Points
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Contribution Points
a budget, not a currency
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| Held as | One total, for the whole family |
|---|---|
| Spent on | Nodes, houses and rented equipment |
| Recoverable | Yes, in full |
| Earned from | Quests, life-skill byproducts and exploration |
| Gets harder | Each point costs more experience than the last |
Contribution Points are the standing an adventurer has built up across the territories of Black Desert, held as a single total rather than separately for each country.
They are best understood as a budget rather than as money. Contribution is allocated to things and stays allocated, and pulling it back out returns every point. An adventurer never loses contribution by choosing badly, only by leaving it committed to something no longer worth it.
That distinction governs how the system is played. The question is never what to buy, but what the available contribution should be doing at any given moment.
1 What they are spent on✎
Three things take contribution, of which nodes are the first. Investing in a node activates it, which is what allows workers to be sent there and what links it into a trade network. A chain of connected nodes between a production site and a town is what makes trade goods worth carrying, since goods sold across a broken chain fetch a fraction of their value.
Houses are the second, and a residence bought with contribution becomes storage, worker lodging, a workshop or somewhere to cook. Houses in a town generally have to be bought in sequence, so reaching a particular one means paying for those before it.
The third is rental: garden fences, storage containers and various pieces of equipment are borrowed from NPCs against contribution rather than bought with silver.
2 Earning them✎
Contribution experience accumulates, and points arrive as it fills. Most quests give some, and the main cities carry daily and weekly circuits meant to be repeated for it.
The largest source is the life skills, since cooking, alchemy, farming and fishing all throw off byproducts, and exchanging those in bulk is the most efficient route to a high total that the game offers.
Smaller amounts come from exploring new ground and from defending the gateway camps, where tokens earned in the fighting are traded in for experience.
Progress slows as the total rises, because each new point costs more experience than the one before it, so an adventurer with a large pool grows it far more slowly than a beginner does.
3 Nothing is spent permanently✎
Every point committed can be recovered. A node is uninvested through the world map, rented equipment is returned to the NPC that lent it, and a house is sold back in the reverse of the order it was bought.
Nodes carry one condition. Anything depending on a node has to be cleared before the node itself can be released, so unwinding a large network takes planning rather than a single click.