Dave the Diver does an exceptional job of telling you where to go and when. The main story is full of breadcrumbs, UI elements, guiding arrows and landmarks to help you navigate the Blue Hole. There are some elements that might have you scratching your head. Without spoiling the story, we’ve put together how to get through the main quest-line along with a lot of tips, hints and tricks to make it in the Blue Hole.
Getting Through the Main Story
Most of the main story will directly tell you where to go and how to do it. There are a few places you might get stuck:
- Boss Fights: Each boss has a gimmick and generally a brute force way to go about it. All supplies you’ll need for the gimmick are provided nearby.
- Stealth Section: The fish that you stealth past have a normal aggro distance and do not aggro based on their eye vision but the area around them. If you sprint, they’ll have a larger aggro radius. We have a detailed walkthrough of the sea base stealth section below, but it works somewhat similarly except crouching reduces the aggro radius drastically. There have been hotfixes to make these sections a smidge easier.
- Bei: The secondary currency in the game is obtained starting around chapter four. You won’t need it until after chapter five. You can farm it in the casino playing the games. In the memorization game you can simply write down the cards to help remember them. There’s lots of side quests and turn-ins to get more. You should not expand the underwater farm until you have to.
- Story Quests: In the phone’s To-Do app you’ll see main story quests marked. They won’t require anything that the story quests won’t provide.
- Main Locations: The ship wreck is always on the far left. The mural room is always on the far right. The limestone cave is in the middle. There are two entrances into the further depths. Tube worms require UV light which is always nearby.
- Missable Events / Items: There are some potential missable achievements, like eating the rations in the sea base that either aren’t available without another playthrough or unlock later on but the vast majority of everything in the game can’t be missed. VIPs will come back later if you don’t have the materials available for them. All the quests will wait. Photo ops will respawn, etc. The game is nothing but good vibes, so if you’re clicking spacebar on everything during quests you’ll be golden.
Chapter Walkthroughs
Dave the Diver is a chill game. Your missions and to-dos are in the “To Do” app on your phone. The game is very explicit on where to go. For points of reference, the ship wreck is different than the cargo ship wreck, but sometimes the game will refer to both interchangeably; both are towards the left. The right side will have the sea mural.
Chapters 1 – 4: The first four chapters occur directly in the deep blue hole. The only requirement to make it through these chapters is to keep enough oxygen to stay down and take a few hits and a diving suit that can go far enough down. There are no side missions, quests, etc. that will trip you up. There will be a boss fight or two, but they are simple and the game tells you what to do.
Chapter 5 & 6: The game opens into more areas as you expand, the new area you’ll explore requires some additional upgrades. There are two stealth sections. The sea base explanation is below, the underwater session is literally about just staying far away from the enemies. There’s only one sea base section and one underwater stealth section.
Chapter six contains a plethora of puzzles, however as Dave mentions, you just click on things and it works. Most puzzles are solved clicking clickables in the order you see them. You can’t get stuck and you generally only need to move objects to allow the beam through. If you get stuck just try moving everything around you.
The very last section of the game will not have any rocks to pickup. You’ll instead pick up moving snail like creatures which will move off platforms.
Chapter 7: The last chapter is fairly short and is the final sequence of the game. There’s not much to say here other than there’s just timing puzzles and one last boss fight, which the game will give you instructions on how to handle the different mechanics.
What’s the difference in fish quality?
The amount of “flesh” you get from each fish. The chef has extremely high standards. He only takes the best cuts. Damaging a fish and killing it will lower its quality. You won’t unlock the ability to not damage larger fish until much later in the game. Even with the high-level net, if you net a large fish, you’ll still need a later game function.
Stealthing Through the Sea Base
This one is actually much simpler than it appears.
- Floor 1: There’s one guard. Crouch at the box, wait until they begin moving right and follow along a bit behind them. Wait until they pause to go up the ladder.
- Floor 2: Stay on the ladder until the camera swings left. Then move to the boxes. When it swings right go to the next box and crouch. Same process as the floor 1 guard.
- Floor 3: Wait on the ladder until the guard begins moving right. Then get in the freezer when they’re looking to the right. After they pass the fridge, exit and crouch behind the beam (this will avoid the guard) until it’s safe to move to the boxes for the light. Here, avoid the freezer and just follow behind the guard until you get to the ladder.
How do I get X skin/fragment/etc. from a fish? What about rare metals for upgrades?
Keep farming them. You can use some weapons to catch them to get a better chance at it, but they’ll drop normally. The metals will unlock via the story automatically much later in the game.
How do I deal with tube worms? What upgrades replace what?
You’ll get a charm to avoid having to use the UV light. Otherwise, you can melee them if you somehow find yourself stuck or just not wanting to pick up the UV light. You’ll get the ability to use your knife on rocks without a pickaxe later in the game as well. Almost all the early game mechanics are replaced.
What’s the best staff?
I’d normally say the ones you think look the best, which applies to cooking. For serving, you’ll likely want El Nino and Raptor which were for me the two easiest to draw. They have wasabi refill, cocktails, drinks and cleaning. That’s everything for a fully automated front desk. You’re going to absolutely have to have drink serving. The combination of cocktail, drink serving, cleaning and wasabi means you can focus on helping more than doing any one specific task.
How do I get X taste rank dish?
You have to upgrade. Sailfishes and the highest-level sharks are going to be your maximum taste in the game. Before that, you’ll need to find a high taste fish and continue to level it. A lot of fishes will take you to gold and beyond. You might have to just be highly specific to catch a lot of only that fish and focus only on its ingredients, don’t sell it (or skip at night) and work on just grinding out that dish to get there.
You’ll finish the game before reaching Platinum.
How do I deal with the seeking rockets?
You can loop back around on the boss and have the rocket explode near them to damage them. That’s the way a lot of people solve this boss. At the sea floor there’s a baseball bat. You have to charge the baseball bat in order to hit the rocket back at the boss.
This boss makes a return, this time it might be best to run away since the rockets seem to do nothing. It’s a pretty large area after all.
How do you catch seahorses?
At a certain point in the game, you’ll be asked to capture seahorses and it’ll feel as if the game is stuck because there’s nothing you can do to capture them. To capture seahorses in Dave the Diver simply complete your VIP quest requests. You have to add their dish specifically to the menu for that day and Dave has to serve them.
What’s the best gun?
The sniper rifle, to be honest. You get enough range you don’t have to expend oxygen to get close and potentially getting hit. You can get the tranq upgrade to make it easy to take out larger fish. The grenade launcher later on is kind of cool too, but it’s slow and the arc is a bit weird.
Random Game Tips
- Who is Itsuki? What’s the max staff level? You can press space when hiring someone to see their full stats. She’s got a really high serving level in later levels. Max staff level is 20.
- How long is the game? It depends on what you want to do. You can actually power level through the main story quite a bit by ignoring a lot of the sub-missions (side quests). They’re almost all optional except for a section where you’re forced to do a handful of them. I’d say Dave the Diver is between 20 and 30 hours long.
- Does appearance impact anything? No.
- How do you get gold? You can sell items to Cobra when that unlocks. You’ll get it from quests. You can sell fish (although sushi is better…) and by running the sushi restaurant. If you’ve got plenty of fish and don’t want to dive, you can just skip time and do a few shifts in the restaurant to get gold. You can also make a few shallow runs for weapon upgrades.
- Does the cat do anything? Yeah, everything in the game does something. Feeding the cat will cause something to happen. It will be endearing and wholesome.
- Why are the achievement % weird? How did I get .01% or .03% of all players? The game was in early access. The launch included the rest of the story and many new mechanics like the seaweed farm, etc.
- What’s auto-supply? How do I know how many fish to put out? We have an auto-supply guide that covers that.
- GYAO!? What does it do? It’s an achievement and some decoration unlockables. We have a guide!
That covers everything in Dave the Diver you need to know to succeed! Enjoy your trip into this wholesome comfy adventure.
