Obtaining Black Stone Powder

I Need Black Stone Powder! So Does Everyone.

Master 2 trading at this stage of Black Desert is basically a necessity to compete in active fishing and crate trading. As such everyone is spamming tier 1 crates and gobbling up black stone powder. On top of this, workshops demolish your black stone powder supplies.

What Do I Do! How Do I Get it!

Here are some common methods of aquire Black Stone Powder

• Buying it directly from the marketplace, this is probably the most common method and it is a pain. You are constantly fighting others for it and it is always sold out. Nevertheless, it still works.
• Grinding gems and stones, this is the method we will look into here. The aquisition of these stones is up to you, just remember if you buy them off the market, you need to consider it as a market price and not a sale price, which, if you are using any of my other charts, will lower your profits compared to what is listed.
• Crafting them directly from rough stones. This is just not worth it. Rough stones are too rare to ever be converted into black stone powder.

For this chart I will be assuming you have purchased your gems.

Lets Take A Look At Each Gem Types Value:

Notes:

• Each Gem Combine takes approximately 9 seconds, also consider the fact that you are likely going to be having to consistently reload your combines, as getting a large amount of a single type of gem is often difficult.
• The higher tier the gem, the worse return you are getting for silver to bsp. But the time saving/lack of headaches from the higher tier gems is what makes them appealing.

Let’s Consider Gems In The Same Way We Considered Processing.

• The most important thing to consider when processing is “items in VS items out”
  • Most people only consider the end result of what they process, which makes processing look sexy, but if you subtract their initial investment you can see the real gains behind this lifeskill.

• Following this thought process is important when processing:

• For this example I will be using green gems.

  • Green gems currently have a market price of approximately 10,000 silver. Unlike the processing section we will be assuming you purchased the gems, if you collected them yourself then your profits will be higher.
  • So what happens when you process this material? You recieve black stone powder at a rate of 1 green gem = 10.13 black stone powder.
  • The value of these products comes out to be:
    • (10.13 black stone powder) x (2720 silver/black stone powder) = 27,553.6 silver
    • 27,533.6 x 0.845 = 23,283

The major issue here is that a lot of people will then say “look I’ve made 23,283 silver from that combine”, which at this point you can tell is flawed.

The real profit is of course items out minus items in:

• Items out: 23,283 silver
• Items in: 10,000 silver
• Profit = 23,283 silver - 10,000 silver = 13283 silver

As you can see, your actual profit is nearly half of what the value of your combine spit out.

So What Does This Make Per Hour?

There are a couple things to consider now to see how much money is to be made:

• Processing time
• How many gems of the same type are you holding

The processing time for green gems is about 9 seconds, the other thing to consider about this is your fail rate. This is something I have not kept records on so for this example we will assume 100% success rate, which is reality will not happen. Ideally if you want to process, you are going to want to get as high of “processing sucess rate level” as possible.

• So each green gem combine will be 9 seconds. In one hour there are 3600 seconds. So each hour you are able to do “(3600 seconds) x (1 combine/9 seconds) = 400 combines
• Each combine has produced 13,283 silver
• (400 combines) x (13,283 silver/combine) = 5,313,200 silver = 5,313.2k silver

So each theoretical hour afk processing green gems produces 5,313.2k silver.

The next thing to consider is how long can you afk for. Unlike in ore/wood processing, gems don’t stack. It is also extremely hard to get all the same type of gem. So your maximum afk time really isn’t limited to your max lt, it is limited to how many of each gem type you have.

Lets assume you somehow managed to aquire 180 of the same type of gem, obviously this is almost never going to happen and as such your maximum afk time will be significantly shorter.

• (180 gems) x (9s/gem)=27 minutes = 0.45 hours
• Maximum hours x silver per hour = Total silver made
• (0.45) x (5,313.2k silver/hour) = 2.39 million silver

Unfortunatly you will most likely be buying gems in batches of 10, so grinding gems isn’t really an afk task. Its an active task. Also you will almost certainly exhaust the gem supply before even grinding gems for an hour. This is just generally a pain to do and is the reason why a lot of people just take the hit and buy the higher tier gems to get their black stone powder.

What Should I Take Away From This?

• If you don’t value your time, green gems give the best return.
• The higher the tier, the worse the return but the less the headache.