The Hundred And Twenty Minute Egg : Black Desert

Housing in Black Desert can be dark. Really dark. It's a problem. As Tipa says, "why the hell is my home pitch black dark even in the day? Even with the windows open? How does this make sense?" That's why, although I generally frown on camping for anything in MMOs, I came to spend over two hours on a tiny island last weekend, camping for eggs.

There's an event going on. You collect eggs. There are different kinds. I'm not going into the details. Dulfy already did that. It's why we have Dulfy. What we'll all do when she stops slacking and gets that real job she talks about I have no idea.

The upshot is that if you collect forty Raindrop Eggs a Priest will give you a chandelier. Now that's what I call a religion. With a chandelier installed in your house you can see just about well enough not to trip over the furniture. Assuming you have furniture. All I have is a bed.

The egg chandelier itself is, like most of Black Desert, a work of art. It's lovely enough to want for itself even without the light it shines. It even sparkles. I'm not much of a one for wanting things in MMOs but as soon as I saw that chandelier I wanted it.

Without Aywren's help I would have struggled. The map in Black Desert is complex and not entirely easy to follow and even with Dulfy's illustrated guide I'd not managed to find any of the locations listed. Aywren pointed me to a small river island that I was eventually able to track down.

The giveaway that I was finally in the right place was the Wizard with the staff standing motionless in a ring of bushes. He was camping the single spawn of eggs that popped every ten minutes or so.

I was unclear on the etiquette of camping in BDO so I waited a while to see what would happen. After a few minutes, during which he never moved a muscle (other than his idling animations, naturally) an egg appeared out of thin air. He still didn't move.

I gave him thirty seconds to make a grab. Nothing. Oh, well. Eyes on the prize and all that. I scooped up the eggs, which turn out to be a random number from one to three each time, and stuffed them in my pack.

No reaction from the wizard. No fireballs hurled at my head, no flames in my chat box. After a few more spawns I concluded that we all see only our own eggs so camp-stealing is not an issue.Welcome to the wonderful world of the modern MMO where even the open world is invisibly instanced.

The eggs spawn every ten minutes. Ten minutes is a long time to stand on an island you can walk all the way around in sixty seconds. Luckily I had my fishing rod, some bait and a bottle of that wine that makes you better at fishing. Or makes you think you're better at fishing. One of the two.

Only, naturally, I couldn't just stand and fish between eggs until I had forty because I only had four free bag slots. In a couple of spawns those were full, and with fish that sold for good money, too. Good money, that is, to a Node Manager whose node I'd connected to this weird little island.

That meant some running up and down the riverbank to find the right node, whose manager turned out to be one of the ones who requires you to do some little thing for him before he'll let you invest in his services. At least I think that's how it works. I'm still a bit vague on the whole thing, to be entirely honest.

I wasn't complaining. Running to and fro doing quests, selling fish and generally moving about a bit between spawns beats standing stock-still for two hours like that other guy. Sucks to be him.

Sucks to be me, too, when, after half an afternoon of egg-gathering, I run all the way back to Heidel and hand in the wrong quest. What's more, I knew it was the wrong quest even as I hit Complete. it said "10 eggs" right there on the hand-in requirement.

So, there I was, two hours down and still ten eggs short of a chandelier. Trying to recoup I noticed one of the fish I'd caught completed a different quest and the otter in question had his fishing spot not entirely in the wrong direction so I hit "T" and auto-ran to him.

With fortuitous happenstance he turned out be the very otter that Aywren had mentioned as a marker for the other egg spawn she recommended so I was able to shave a spawn off the surplus. Which would have been great if I hadn't then gotten totally lost in the dark trying to get back to the island and wasted fifteen minutes running in the wrong direction and back.

I know, I know; first virtual world problems. Anyway, in the end it got done. Forty eggs in my bag - again. Back to the priest, remember to scroll to the second page of his quests this time (first time I've met a quest giver who needs a rollover), pass the eggs, take the chandelier. Done!

Placing the thing wasn't much fun. How you are supposed to make fine adjustments to overhead hooks in the BDO housing interface beats me. My chandelier is hanging from a rope that isn't technically attached to anything but, hey, it's so dark up there in the rafters, who's going to know?

 And that's my Black Desert Easter Event done. There are three other flavors of egg that you can swap for various pieces of egg-based furniture but I'm not going out of my way to collect any of them. If I do somehow find myself with forty of a kind then I'll make a side-trip to the priest but that event is already in the past for all it continues until April 6th.

No, we're already onto the next live event - Cherry Blossom - as detailed once again by the invaluable Dulfy. That tree looks pretty darn spiffy. Looks like I might need to learn how to farm.