so i just did a quest in kamasylvia that required me to make a book in calpheon, and in completing the quest i got a bookshelf, but i also lost 6 of 12 knowledge for the kamasylvia steppe. i did the quest because i always take any opportunity to complete a quest i have not done just in case it might affect something else ingame.

but now, as far as i can tell, even if i assign a character to read from the bookshelf, they are going to have roughly a .05% of reacquiring 1 knowledge of the 12 for the kamasylvia steppe. and it is totally possible that they will learn knowledge on one of the six things i already have knowledge on.

is this really how this quest was designed? this is utter garbage. a requirement to make the book to turn in the quest was to have all 12 of the knowledge for the steppe. so as the reward i have 6 of the knowledge taken away, and now i have to go grind those mobs again to get the knowledge. 

just total garbage. i consider myself a casual player, but the further along i get in this game the more i dislike it.

Yes, that's how creating the bookshelves works.

Now, a couple of notes:

1. You can set a character to read from the bookshelf and swap to a different one and play.  You can even do this with multiple characters if you like.  You just can't swap servers while they are reading.

2. If you do the quest again on an alt, you can hand in the bookshelf you already made/received and you will get a new one.  No need to lose the knowledge a second time around.

3. Knowldege farming is a long-term project, so I wouldn't stress too much about it if you are playing casually.  Just kill the things when you are there for other reasons and you'll get the knowledge back eventually.

thanks for the info. just for me personally, it feels as if so many 'rewards' in this game have to come with some kind of punishment as well. i really don't get the game design a lot of times. as far as i can tell it seems BDO has solid enough numbers of a player base that the game is able to continue with this design. 

to explain a small bit. what would have been great for this quest, if you ask me, is if you went through the entire process to acquire the bookshelf, but did not lose any knowledge. the reward is that you have the same chance as originally of getting knowledge from having your characters read the bookshelf. although when they gain knowledge it may or may not be higher than your current knowledge. i think this would have been a much better way of doing it.

Yes, this quest works like that, maybe it's a punishment, but this quest opens access to very good daily quests and knowledge from mobs can be recovered killing mobs again.

Non-pearl shop bookshelves are outdated content at this point. It used to be the case that you could not acquire mob knowledge that you already had. So, in order to get higher tier knowledge, you had to delete your existing knowledge and then get it again, hoping that you would get higher tier knowledge the next time. Bookshelves provided a way to delete the knowledge from an entire category and then get it again without having to kill the mobs again. It also made it possible to effectively buy that knowledge from the CM, because the bookshelves could be listed there.

However, PA has long since fixed it so that when you kill a mob, you have a chance to get knowledge on it even if you already have knowledge on it. And if you're lucky, the knowledge you get is a higher tier than what you already have. So, it mostly no longer makes sense to delete knowledge, and turning categories of knowledge into bookshelves really doesn't make sense anymore. In fact, for many categories of knowledge, it's not even possible. The quest you're dealing with is basically a hold over from when bookshelves made sense, and it was a tutorial for how to make them. So, it makes sense to do the quest to increase your quest count and get access to follow-up quests, but otherwise, it doesn't make sense to make bookshelves any longer, and you're probably going to have to grind the Navarn Steppe mobs again to get some of that knowledge back.

At this point, the only times that it makes sense to delete knowledge are when you want to get it from an NPC, and they only give it if you don't have it, and when you get knowledge from a quest but can't get the quest if you already have the knowledge. The most common cases for NPCs giving knowledge are world bosses, though there are some other mobs whose knowledge can be gotten that way (e.g. it's probably easier to get some of the nymph knowledge that way than to find them and kill them). The most common cases for quests for knowledge would be scroll bosses. Most of them have a quest that you get if you don't have knowledge on the boss. That quest then requires you to do something (e.g. kill 100 mobs of a specific type), and then it gives you both the scroll piece and the knowledge, whereas if you already have the knowledge, you get a different quest that just gives you the scroll piece but does not give you the knowledge again. So, in those types of cases, it can make sense to delete knowledge in order to have the chance to get it again and hopefully get a higher tier, but you wouldn't want to do it for mobs that you're going to grind.

Now, while non-pearl shop bookshelves really don't make any sense anymore, the pearl shop ones potentially do. They give you a random piece of knowledge (not restricted to a specific category) and don't lose durability when used. So, it can make sense to use them over and over again to attempt to get knowledge that's very hard to get (e.g. if you didn't get S on Garmoth with the family quest that gave knowledge on her, you can't delete the knowledge and get it back, so you have to either get lucky and get the last hit on Garmoth and get higher tier knowledge, or you have to get lucky with a pearl bookshelf). But since it's a random piece of knowledge from the entire knowledge database, the odds of getting any specific piece of knowledge are pretty garbage. However, since there is some chance of getting knowledge that you need and can't get any other way, the pearl shop bookshelves aren't completely useless, whereas the normal ones pretty much are.

thanks all for the info

The Black Desert wiki has an article about pearl bookshelf knowledges: https://www.console.playblackdesert.com/Wiki?wikiNo=129#List%20of%20Bookshelves%20(Pearl%20Shop%20Items)%20and%20Obtainable%20Knowledge

Some of the listed knowledges are not available in any other way than this but this is super edngame completionist stuff ontop being limited to event rewards or straight purchase from the pearl store.

There was a time when I would use like 20 characters to read and it took like 20 minutes just to get them all to read. I wish there were a simpler way for new people wanting to expand their knowledge (I have almost all important knowledge now). Personally I'd use the knowledge menu and go through each category one by one and do it. It's actually pretty fun EXCEPT the amity game. Ughh--- I really hated doing that lol. When all your choices are passing grade but then it tells you to fail like 6 times in a row. >.>;

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the original kamasylvia question. It's one of those things that I probably did and forgot about it. Focus first on whatever gives you energy rather than being a completionist. Like there's no reason to get knowledge on all of the weapons but doing things like looking in the tome in Velia will give you maybe +2 energy. Well worth it!