Black Desert Carrack + Bartering Complete Guide (August 2026): Which of the Four Ships to Build, How Much Material You Need, and How to Actually Profit
The April 16, 2026 patch turned bartering upside down: it added T6 (50M) and T7 (100M), banned the Transport system for moving barter goods, and standardized parley costs. The result: the Carrack went from "nice to have" to "your loading capacity directly decides how much you make per day."
Most Chinese-language guides online are still stuck at T1–T5, and their material tables still show old prices. This guide rebuilds the whole thing from scratch: which ship to pick, how much material you need, what it costs to buy your way through with Crow Coins, and how to actually run routes once the ship is built.
TL;DR
| Your situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Want to run bartering for profit | Advance — biggest loading capacity, don't even look at the other three |
| You already have a Sailboat | You're on the right line: Sailboat → Caravel → Advance / Balance |
| You already have a Frigate | You're on the other line: Frigate → Galleass → Valor / Volante — you cannot upgrade into Advance |
| Stuck on materials | It's usually not the consumables — it's the 4 pieces of +10 blue gear |
| Ship's built | Target 22,000 LT empty weight — that's the line between fitting a full 10-piece T7 load and not |
One line: in this game a ship is a tool, not a collectible. If you're running bartering, build Advance — anything short on loading capacity is a wasted build.
Where This Data Comes From
Material quantities and Crow Coin prices come from the official Taiwan-server Wiki's Carrack crafting page (I built the full set following it myself). Bartering mechanics follow the official April 16, 2026 patch notes. Anything marked "tested" is a number from my own account (90,009 cumulative barters, Guru-tier mastery, so my parley is discounted — yours will run higher). Anything marked "community" comes from Korean and Japanese forums and videos; I'll note whether it's a single source or something multiple sources agree on.
On pricing: the official May 2026 patch cut Crow Coin prices for ship materials across the board — Moon Vein Flax Fabric 50→40, Deep Tide-Dyed Standardized Timber Square 100→80, Brilliant Rock Salt Ingot / Brilliant Pearl Shard / Tear of the Ocean 500→400. That's roughly 20% cheaper than guides written in the first half of 2026 — if you see the old numbers, don't copy them.
1. The Four Carracks Split Into Two Lines — Choose Wrong and You Start Over
This is the trap most people fall into: the four Carracks are not on the same upgrade path.
| Starting ship | Mid ship | Carracks you can build | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epheria Sailboat | Epheria Caravel | 🏆Advance / Balance | Loading-capacity focus |
| Epheria Frigate | Epheria Galleass | Valor / Volante | Firepower / speed focus |
| Ship | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|
| 🏆Advance | Highest loading capacity — +10 green gear alone gets you past 20,000 LT | Mediocre speed |
| Balance | Decent speed, solid all-round | Loading only catches up once you've paid for blue gear (community: roughly 21,000 LT with blue gear) |
| Volante | 120% base speed, fastest of the four | Worst loading capacity — running bartering on it means leaning on cash-shop items and maxed-out stacking |
| Valor | Strongest firepower, built for sea monsters / naval combat | No advantage for bartering |
💬 My take: if your goal is bartering, there's nothing to agonize over — Advance, and +10 green gear is enough to start working. The Japanese guides are blunt about it: Advance with +10 green gear gets you to roughly 20,900 LT, calling it "the best value entry choice." Balance only catches up once you've paid for blue gear, and Volante and Valor are built for a completely different job.
I built a Volante myself later, but that was for speed runs, not for hauling cargo — don't mix up "I want the cool-looking ship" with "I want to make money."
🏆 For bartering: Advance. Escape clause: if you're already on the Frigate line and don't want to start over — run whatever Galleass-line ship you have first. You'll take a loading-capacity hit, but at least you're earning. Add an Advance once you're serious about bartering.
2. The Full Material List for Advance
Upgrading into Advance takes two kinds of things: consumable materials and 4 pieces of +10 Caravel blue gear.
| Material | Qty | How to get it | Crow Coin price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moon Vein Flax Fabric | 180 | Drying Khan's Tendon, farming Khan (Ocean's Eye), dailies, Crow Coin Shop | 40 |
| Deep Tide-Dyed Standardized Timber Square | 144 | Chopping firewood on Usable Pirate Ship's Remains, farming the Cox Pirates, dailies, Crow Coin Shop | 80 |
| Brilliant Rock Salt Ingot | 35 | Tier 5 Sea Trade Goods bartering, Crow Coin Shop | 400 |
| Brilliant Pearl Shard | 35 | Tier 5 Sea Trade Goods bartering, Crow Coin Shop | 400 |
| Tear of the Ocean | 42 | Tier 5 bartering, [Great Ocean] Margoria's Star, Wandering Merchant's ship, dailies, weeklies, fishing, alchemy | 400 |
| +10 Caravel blue gear | 4 pieces | +10 green gear → craft blue gear at the workshop → +10 again | See next section |
※ Note: the permit called "船舶擴建許可證：艾裴莉雅貿易船" (roughly, "Ship Expansion License: Epheria Caravel") is bought from Falasi at Port Epheria; the blue gear has to be crafted at the level-4 Ship Part Workshop, Epheria 1-4, 2F.
For comparison, here's the final expansion cost for the other two Carracks (both need 4 pieces of +10 Galleass blue gear):
| Material | Advance | Valor | Volante |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moon Vein Flax Fabric | 180 | 180 | 210 |
| Deep Tide-Dyed Standardized Timber Square | 144 | 170 | 144 |
| Brilliant Rock Salt Ingot | 35 | 30 | 30 |
| Brilliant Pearl Shard | 35 | 30 | 30 |
| Tear of the Ocean | 42 | 42 | 42 |
3. What Actually Bottlenecks You Is the Blue Gear, Not the Consumables
Most people assume they're stuck on the flax fabric and timber squares. In reality those two build up fine from daily quests — the blue gear is the money pit.
Why: one piece of blue gear isn't one or two materials, it's hundreds of them, and it needs a base of +10 green gear first.
| Step | What it involves | Wave Black Stone cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Buy 4 green gear pieces | From Falasi at Port Epheria, paid in silver | — |
| 2. Enhance green gear to +10 | 1 stone per attempt at +0–5, 2 per attempt at +6–10 | About 220 stones fixed for all 4 pieces |
| 3. Craft 4 blue gear pieces at the workshop | Hundreds of materials per piece | — |
| 4. Enhance blue gear to +10 | Same rule as above | Roughly 200 stones (varies) |
※ Success-rate reference (BDO Codex): Galleass green gear (White Horn Figurehead) 70%, blue gear (Black Dragon Figurehead) 30%. Failure doesn't downgrade the item, but it costs durability.
※ Carrack blue gear (the gear people nickname "Chiro gear") is worse: each attempt burns 50 Wave Black Stones, and your success rate drops from 10% at +1 all the way down to 0.5% at +10 — don't enhance bare at this stage, use enhancement tiers/stacking to soften the failures.
💬 My take: I ended up buying the full material set with Crow Coins. I made that call after running the numbers and finding out that "trading time for it" cost too much — the days-required table later in this guide will make that obvious. But I don't recommend buying the blue gear stage outright, for reasons in the next section.
4. What It Costs to Buy Everything With Crow Coins
Three scenarios (prices already reflect the May 2026 cut):
| Scenario | Crow Coins needed |
|---|---|
| Already have 4 pieces of +10 blue gear, buying only the final expansion materials (Valor) | 61,600 |
| Same, for Volante | 60,720 |
| Only have green gear, buying every material for the 4 blue gear pieces too | roughly 231,000–232,000 |
| Above, plus Wave Black Stones and repairs for green/blue enhancement | Budget 234,000–237,000 in practice |
Where's the gap? Just the crafting materials for the 4 blue gear pieces run about 170,500 coins — more than 70% of the total.
💬 My take: what this number really tells you is that you're not buying blue gear — you're paying coins to skip the time-gate on making it, and the exchange rate is bad. If you already have one ship earning coins from bartering, dumping months of that income into blue gear materials for a second ship doesn't pay off.
My advice: buy the consumables (flax fabric, timber squares, the Brilliants, Tear of the Ocean) — craft the blue gear materials yourself. The former is pure time; the latter hurts to buy outright.
🏆 The best allocation: buy Brilliant Rock Salt Ingot / Brilliant Pearl Shard / Tear of the Ocean with coins (400 each — it saves you the most painful barter counts), grind flax fabric and timber squares from dailies, and craft the blue gear the honest way.
5. How Many Days If You Only Run Dailies
If you use zero coins and rely entirely on daily quests:
| Material | Needed (Advance) | Daily yield | Days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moon Vein Flax Fabric | 180 | 3 | 60 days |
| Deep Tide-Dyed Standardized Timber Square | 144 | 3–4 | 43–48 days |
| Tear of the Ocean | 42 | 3 (+2 from weeklies) | 13–14 days |
| Brilliant Rock Salt Ingot / Pearl Shard | 35 each | From Tier 5 bartering | Depends on your barter count |
※ Note: these run in parallel, not stacked — your real finish time is set by the slowest one, which is the 60 days for flax fabric.
If you want to speed it up with coins: 180 flax fabric costs just 7,200 coins to skip all 60 days — the single best-value line in this whole table.
Daily quest checklist (don't skip these):
- [Daily] Old Moon Guild's Young Sea Monster Hunter → Tear of the Ocean / Moon Vein Flax Fabric / Moon Scale Plywood
- [Daily] Win-win Situation → Deep Tide-Dyed Standardized Timber Square
- Ravinia's 7-day questline (Crow's Nest) → your main source of ship materials
- The weekly Old Moon Guild sea monster quest → Wave Black Stones
6. Building the Ship Is Just Step One: Loading Capacity Caps Your Income
This is the part most people underrate after the patch. T6/T7 goods weigh 2,000 LT each, and a full two-port run means 10 pieces = 20,000 LT.
But you can't just count the cargo:
| What eats your weight | Per unit |
|---|---|
| T6/T7 trade goods | 2,000 LT |
| Sailor (each) | 200 LT |
| First mate | 200 LT |
So the practical threshold is roughly 22,000 LT empty weight (the figure recommended in Korean post-patch beginner videos) to carry a full crew and 10 high-tier goods at the same time.
A couple of community examples make the point:
| Case | Empty weight | Result |
|---|---|---|
| German guide author | 21,250 LT | Could only crew 6 sailors |
| Korean tester | 18,500 LT | Could only fit 8 T7 goods → a straight 20% income loss |
How to add carrying capacity:
| Source | Bonus |
|---|---|
| +10 green gear | About +4,400 |
| Advance blue gear on top | +8,000 |
| Sea Crystal | Rusalka Sea Crystal fixed at 1,350 (the strongest), a regular roll can go up to 900 |
| Ship skin | +600 |
| Pet | +50–200 per tier |
💬 My take: max out +10 green gear first, worry about blue gear after. +10 green gear on Advance already clears 20,000 LT — blue gear takes you from "can run" to "runs comfortably," it's not the gate on whether you can start at all.
One detail a lot of people miss: when T5 converts into T6, the weight doubles (1,000 → 2,000 LT). Leave room for what you get back when loading — otherwise you'll reach port and find you're over weight and can't complete the exchange.
🏆 Priority order: +10 green gear → keep your crew count in check → Sea Crystal (Rusalka first) → then think about blue gear.
7. What Bartering Looks Like After the Patch
| Tier | Weight | Sell (NPC) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| T4 | 1,000 LT | 2M | Main source for Crow Coins |
| T5 (Coastal) | 1,000 LT | 10M | Post-patch, its main job is feeding T6 |
| T5 (Great Ocean) | 1,000 LT | 25M | Renamed with a "[Great Ocean]" prefix |
| 🏆T6 | 2,000 LT | 50M | T5→T6, 1:1 |
| 🏆T7 | 2,000 LT | 100M | T6→T7, 1:1 |
Key patch changes (from the official patch notes):
- Barter goods can no longer be moved via the Transport system; once you're holding T6/T7, even Magnus and character-to-character transport are blocked — the old "stockpile at another port" strategy no longer works
- T2 weight dropped 800 → 400 LT; the minimum T1→T2 and T2→T3 conversion rate is now 2–3 (no more 1:1)
- Parley standardized: Crow Coin exchange is a flat 21,650, Great Ocean goods a flat 14,286
- Bulk Crow Coin exchange moved from Hakoven to Crow's Nest (old guides that say Hakoven are outdated)
- Special Barter now requires Gold Bar or T4 (no longer T5), and the coin reward was bumped up to 4,000–5,000
Actual run rhythm (the planning unit here is the "loop," not the "island"):
- 3 sets of T6 two-port routes paired against 3 sets of T7 two-port routes, re-paired on every refresh; 1 loop = 10 T7 goods = 1B silver
- Parley break-even: ≤26k per trade → run 1 loop; ≤13k → 2 loops; ≤8,695 → 3 loops
- My own numbers (tested 2026-08-20, 90,009 cumulative barters / Guru mastery): T5→T6 costs 11,347 parley per trade, 5 T6 trades per island per refresh — this is already discounted, yours will run higher
- Three independent community creators converge on roughly 9–10B silver per day (directional signal only, no hour-by-hour breakdown, and I haven't verified it myself)
8. Common Mistakes
- Overweight ship gets blocked from trading — the most common trigger is the weight doubling right after T5→T6
- Remote-docking your ship destroys all your cargo; T6/T7 goods have a higher destruction chance if the ship sinks, so avoid red-name waters and sea monsters on long routes
- Trying to move barter goods with Transport/Magnus — it's blocked; holding T6/T7 even locks out character-to-character transport
- Not re-scouting the map after a maintenance — every maintenance resets Barter Information
- Ignoring the Special Barter navigation UI — the coin reward is high now, do it if it's on your route
- Refresh Points don't apply until you re-log (resets daily at 06:00 UTC)
- Skipping Ravinia's dailies — they're your main source of ship materials
FAQ
Q: I only have a Sailboat. What's the fastest I can get to Advance? From zero materials, zero coins spent: about 60 days (bottlenecked by the flax fabric). Willing to spend roughly 7,200 coins to skip the flax fabric grind: you can get that down to around 40 days, though it really depends on your blue gear progress.
Q: How much does Advance actually beat Balance by? Tested comparison, both at +10 green gear with 11 crew: Balance fits 17 pieces, Advance fits 18 (roughly 700 LT of extra headroom). One T7 good is worth 100M — that gap adds up fast over time.
Q: Can I just buy everything with Crow Coins? You can, but don't. Buying every material including blue gear runs over 230,000 coins, and 170,000 of that is the blue gear alone. Buy the consumables, craft the blue gear yourself — that's the sane allocation.
Q: Can you really make 9–10B a day? Three independent creators all cite this number, but none of them break it down hour by hour, and I haven't verified it myself. What I can confirm: 1 loop = 1B silver, and the rest comes down to how many loops you can physically run in a day, which depends on your loading capacity, your parley cost, and your patience. Korean players report clearing three T7 chains in at least 80 minutes, tested.
Q: Will the numbers in this guide go stale? Yes. Bartering has already changed twice in 2026 (the April 16 overhaul, the May 21 follow-up adjustment). Material quantities tend to stay stable; Crow Coin prices and route thresholds are what change most often — check the official patch notes before you commit to anything.
Material data in this guide verified as of 2026-08-23; bartering mechanics follow the official April 16, 2026 patch, including the May 21, 2026 follow-up adjustment.
Sources
- Official Taiwan-server Wiki, "Crafting the Epheria Carrack" (material list, how-to-obtain, Crow Coin Shop prices; page last revised 2026-01-27, cross-checked against the updated table after the May 2026 price cut)
- Official April 16, 2026 patch notes (T6/T7 routes, parley standardization, transport restrictions)
- Official May 21, 2026 follow-up adjustment (route thresholds rounded to whole numbers, route cap raised to 12, ship-material coin prices cut roughly 20%, daily limits changed to weekly limits)
- BDO Codex (gear enhancement success rates)
- BDFoundry (+10 Carrack green gear figures, unverified claims about T6/T7 frequency limits)
- Korean/Japanese community guides (ship loading-capacity recommendations, the felt experience of two-port pairing reshuffles, roughly 80 minutes for three T7 chains)
- 8 English-language gameplay-tested videos (parley break-even math, two-port structure, ship-weight minmaxing)
- My own testing (2026-08-20, 90,009 cumulative barters / Guru mastery: T5→T6 at 11,347 parley per trade, 5 T6 trades per island per refresh)