Essential Tips and Tricks - Dave the Diver Guide - IGN (2024)

Dave the Diver has many different systems, from action-focused boss battles to dense restaurant management, and getting your head around everything isn't easy. We've rounded up the most essential tips and tricks to get the most out of the game and make exploring the mysterious Blue Hole a little easier.

• Diving Tips and Tricks
• Restaurant Tips and Tricks

Diving Tips and Tricks

A well-oiled sushi bar starts with fruitful diving excursions. Here's how to get the most out of diving in the Blue Hole

Focus on Upgrades First

When you first begin Dave the Diver, you might not be sure what to do with all of the gold you're earning. There are a lot of uses as the game progresses, but you'll want to spend your early gold upgrading Dave's diving kit to make your dives more effective.

There are four pieces you can upgrade: carrying weight, suit, harpoon, and oxygen tank. Try to focus on the carrying weight and oxygen tank first, which will allow you to spend more time underwater and bring up more fish. Exceeding your weight, which is very small at first, will limit your movement, making it harder to reach the surface.

Explore Wide First

The Blue Hole is much deeper than it is wide, but you can't explore too deep when you first begin the game. Thankfully, there are loads of fish to catch above 50 meters, so you can get a lot of mileage out of your dives before you upgrade your suit and head into the Blue Hole Depths.

Fish are spread out, though. You won't find them all on the left side of the Blue Hole map where you begin your dives, so it's worth venturing to the opposite side of the map to find new fish species you haven't encountered yet.

Pick Up Everything

Outside of fish, there's a lot of junk in the shallow areas of the Blue Hole: glass, rope, and scrap metal, among dozens of other materials. The vast majority of these items are under half a kilogram, so you can load up with them during each dive without weighing you down. And, if you do exceed your weight limit after catching some fish, you can easily discard these items.

These seemingly random items do a few things. First, you can sell them to Cobra once you unlock Cobra's Premium Shop. This is a good way to bolster your gold before a shift at Bancho's Sushi Bar to buy new interior and recruit new employees. In addition, you can use these items to craft new weapons and complete tasks in the Ecowatcher app.

In addition to items, you'll find chests in the Blue Hole. Some of these chests give your items or ingredients, while others drop weapons, helping you unlock new blueprints with Duff.

Watch Out for Aggressive Species

Fish with a small red diamond above their head will attack you if they notice you. You can still catch these aggressive species, either by killing them or using non-lethal means like Net Gun or Hush Dart, but they will continually chase you down until you either get far enough away from them or catch them.

Aggressive species can make some solid dishes, but you want to avoid getting hit by them, especially early in the game. Your oxygen tank serves as a health bar in Dave the Diver, so getting hit will deplete your oxygen and cut your dive short.

Keep Dishes in Mind

Trying to track down ingredients you need for specific dishes is tough in Dave the Diver due to the large number of both ingredients and recipes. You can tailor your dive in a specific direction, though. For example, catching multiple of the same species of fish will allow you to enhance the quality of the dish during the evening.

The most important thing to keep in mind is how you catch the fish, though. Dave the Diver includes a star rating for each fish you catch, and that refers to how much meat you get from the fish. Here's how it breaks down:

• One star: You killed the fish.
• Two stars: You damaged the fish but caught it before it died.
• Three stars: You caught the fish without dealing any damage.

Out of the gate, your standard harpoon deals some damage to fish, so you'll earn a lot of two-star catches at first. As you progress, you can unlock non-lethal ways to catch fish like the Net Gun and Hush Dart, allowing you to earn a three-star rating. A higher star rating nets you more meat, allowing you to enhance your dishes for more flavor.

Restaurant Tips and Tricks

At night, you'll open Bancho's Sushi Bar to serve dishes and earn money. Here's how to get the most out of each evening.

Focus on Taste Over Price

There are two main metrics to a dish: the taste and the price. It's important to earn gold from your sushi bar, but you'll want to focus on getting the best taste out of your food as much as possible in the beginning. Better taste leads to more satisfied customers, but more importantly, it leads to a higher rating in the Cooksta app.

Increasing your rating in the Cooksta app unlocks new recipes, more menu spaces, and more room for employees. It's the essential way to level up your sushi bar, so always keep the customer experience in mind to increase your Cooksta rating.

Enhance Basic Dishes

As you upgrade your carrying capacity, you'll be able to carry loads of basic fish out with each dive. They aren't worthless after you have a few fancy dishes on the menu, though. You can enhance the flavor of a dish by sacrificing a few of your ingredients.

This is why it's important to focus on catching a large number of a particular type of fish on your early dives. These enhanced dishes cost more, generating more revenue, and they taste better, providing more customer satisfaction. Even if they aren't the star of your menu, basic dishes that you've enhanced can help fill in the gaps on your menu.

Even better, enhancing a dish is permanent. Whenever you can, try to enhance dishes on your menu, even if that means sacrificing some ingredients. As you build up your fish farm and gain rarer fish in the depths, you'll be able to take advantage of high level dishes.

Fill Out Your Menu

Before you open the sushi bar each night, you'll have to set the menu. It's important to note only set a compelling menu from the start, focusing on the price of each dish and its taste, but also to keep the menu stocked with dishes throughout the evening.

At any point, you can open the menu while the sushi bar is open and swap out dishes you no longer have ingredients for. This will pause the shift, so you don't have to rush.

Hire Staff to Help

Early in the game, you'll unlock the ability to hire staff for your sushi bar. Your first staffer is a server, and shortly after they join the team, you'll start seeing a lot more customers. Keep ads out for new staff as often as you can, and try to have staff in both the kitchen and dining area if you can.

Splitting your staff up is the key to running your sushi bar efficiently. If you have two employees in the dining area but none in the kitchen, for example, you'll have a bottleneck where customers won't get their dishes on time.

When hiring and assigning staff, you'll want to pay attention to the four staff stats:

• Cooking: The higher the stat, the faster the employee cooks food.
• Serving: The higher the stat, the faster the employee serves food.
• Procure and Appeal: It isn't totally clear what these stats do, as the game never provides any guidance on them. However, they appear to influence how much of a tip you get from customers and the rating they leave you in Cooksta.