There is a variety of life skill content available within the world of Black Desert. You can harvest potatoes and other produce from a farm, or go fishing down the waterside. You can cut down trees and gather timber, or collect sap from them. You can hunt wild animals both on land and at sea, and from them acquire hides and meat.

From these resources, you can craft various items and even the specialty of each town for use in trading. That’s when the processing life skill comes into play.

Out of all the life skills, processing is the act of changing the properties or form of materials you obtain through simple procedures.

Processing may sound similar to cooking or alchemy, in the sense that existing materials are used to create a new product, but there is an important difference.
The output of processing is not the complete end product, but is instead used as an advanced material for other life skills, such as cooking and alchemy.

Open the Processing window (hotkey: L), select the type of processing, and then insert the required items to start the action. However, remember that you must have at least 2 free slots in your inventory, and that your character must be under its weight carrying capacity limit.

Although processing does not have any special requirements for the most part, there are some types that are affected by the weather, such as drying which can only be done on clear days, and filtering which requires wind to be present in the area. Repair, which is carried out indoors, requires that you have an anvil installed at your residence.

Items made through processing are often used as materials for cooking, alchemy, and workshop crafting.

Right click an item to select it from your inventory, and then press the start button to begin processing it.

There are several types of processing options. Select the desired type of processing from the Processing window and you will see that knowledge acquired through processing will become active in the Processing Knowledge list, allowing you to check the recipe for these.

The different types of processing are the following:

Additionally, there is also a chance you will acquire a higher grade product when before you wouldn’t. For example, iron ore is heated to produce melted iron shards, and these shards are in turn heated to obtain iron ingots. When you’re heating iron ore with a high processing level, you will not only acquire melted iron shards, but also have a chance to acquire iron ingots directly.

As a last note, remember that you can’t carry out any processing when your weight reaches 100% of your weight capacity limit, so it is difficult to do mass processing actions with all the materials inside your inventory. In these situations, for convenience one can find a character costume in the Pearl Shop to be able to carry out processing actions with the materials still in storage.

If one finds themselves taking a long time to process a given material, know that there are several ways to increase the processing success rate. Wearing silver embroidered craftsman’s clothes, activating certain alchemy stones, and consuming  specific dishes, elixirs, and draughts will help greatly increase the success rate for processing.

To craft a higher grade item using processing, one does not only need specific materials crafted through alchemy, such as metal solvent or plywood hardener, but also need the beginner and/or skilled knowledge certificates of that type of processing to successfully carry out the action.

If one tries to process an item without the relevant knowledge entry certificate, then they will not be able to get any product from the processing action.

The beginner certificate can be acquired by Adventurers with a processing level of Apprentice Lv. 4 or higher, by accepting and completing the quests from the NPCs listed below.

However, the type of quests to be seen by an Adventurer, as specified at the bottom of the Quest window (hotkey: O), must include the Life option in order to be able to accept these quests. Therefore, it is advised that one examines whether the All option is selected before talking to the NPC.

As the skilled certificates are of a higher tier than the beginner ones, the conditions for accessing their quests are more demanding, and it is more difficult to acquire them.

Most of the quests are carried out in the territory of Calpheon, and as for the certificate for skilled shaking, it can be acquired as a challenge reward once one reaches the artisan processing level. As seen below, this means one cannot obtain the certificates for skilled grinding and filtering before reaching processing artisan.

As a summary, one begins by first obtaining all the beginner certificates, and then they can obtain the skilled certificates for the various types of processing in order, starting with the heating one. The last three (shaking, grinding, and filtering) require reaching artisan processing to acquire them, or to unlock the quests to do so.

Accessing the Life Skill tab of the character profile (hotkey: P), one can hover over the processing section to see how many batches of a processing action they can carry out at once.

Once this has been checked, acquire the materials to process, press Mass Process, and once the action has been completed the result will be seen.

In this example, out of 1,000 units of birch timber, a single processing action has used 235 units of them, or seen another way, 47 times the normal 5 units it would process normally.

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* The content of the game guide may differ from the actual game content, depending on the update and content changes.