You could also try farming. Farming is really fun.
You start by renting a fence from a specific NPC in the city. It costs 10 contribution points to rent a fence. When you return the fence to the NPC you get your contribution points back.
If you have 100 contribution points, you could ideally get 10 large plots of lands. It takes about 6-12 hours of Real Life time from when you planted the seeds to you being able to harvest. You can use many different types of seeds. you can find them in the world, or buy them off the AH. There are also NPCs that sell them. Everytime you harvest you need to plant new seeds. I recommend you plant your farms close to town!
You also need to make sure your putting your farm at a place with a good level of humidity or your yields will be worse.
http://dulfy.net/2016/03/06/black-desert-gardening-and-farming-guide/
You can also put stacks of hay so you can have cows. then you can get milk. you can also get chicken so you can get eggs. Both are hghly desirable if you wanna get deep into cooking.
You could also AFK process. Wanna process a lot? Go to the AH and buy the Hercules Armor Set. It's cheap, and each piece comes with +Weight. You can then buy Weight gems (under crystals). The idea is that the more you can hold on your character, the more you can process at once without having to start another batch. my character can hold 1400 pounds of weight, so I can carry alot. 2000 iron ore. then I press L, then press heating, and then my character stats turning those ores into iron shards. then afterwards I do it all over again, turning the shards into Iron ingots.
But be careful- you need to do certain life quests to be able to process certain things. Heidal has many green quests (lifeskill quests) that unlocks certain shaking, heating, refining, and other forms of processing.
Processing is easy and rewarding.
Levelling your gathering is a lot more work. but it can make you a lot of money. if you buy a bunch of skinning knives from a material vendor and heads out towards goat mountain, you can make a pretty penny. Not really afk though.
You could also get into AFK horses. People level horses by buying a wagon, and using 4 horses they attach to the wagons, and then they make a auto path loot, where your character drives around on the wagon with the four horses, forever. just levelling them up. the higher level a horse is, the better chance horse breeders have to breed that horse into a higher tier horse.
Say I want a Tier 8 horse. To increase the chance of that happening my best bet would be to get two Tier 7 lvl 30 (max horse level) horses to fuck each other.
But it takes a long time to get a horse all the way to lvl 30. My horse Ohio, I've been rounding around for 4 months and she is still only lvl 24.(Tier 6).
If you wanna get into horse levelling, make sure you buy horses that can breed. sometimes the horses that people sell are horses that cannot be breed.
Dulfy also has a horse guide:
http://dulfy.net/2016/03/03/black-desert-online-horse-taming-and-breeding-guide/
But horses are completely fucked. It's so indepth and crazy it should be its own game.
The thing is- You might want to get into Horses. Once Pegasus gets in (with wings) those Tier 9 horses will be able to glide (not fly, but glide). You know thats going to be awesome, and everyone is gonna want to glide off high places.
Getting a good Tier 8 is a end goal in itself. it will take you many many hundreds of hours, and is a good example of a good personal goal to set for yourself. One that is more interesting than just getting a certain piece of gear.
This game has the most insane mount system. People are going ballistic over getting white Tier 8 Albinos!
Something else you guys also might wanna do, is to go towards the Ephiera Boat. This is also a major undertaking that will take a lot of resources! If you want this boat, you might want to hold onto your wood. But because so many are building this, wood is selling really well. Thanks boat!