Dave the Diver guide: How to relax and enjoy the ride

Dave the Diver is the very best sort of complicated. It introduces its various mechanics to you in such a way that things almost always feel manageable, but after you’ve been playing for about 10 hours—combining your deep-sea diving fishing trips with co-running a fish farm, growing vegetables on a farm-farm, completing tasks for a dozen different characters, aiding an underwater kingdom, and managing a sushi restaurant and its menu and staff—you’ll look back in astonishment, because there's no way you could cope with even a fraction of this if it had been thrown at you all at once.

Part of why Dave the Diver feels so sustainable is that it's rarely about time pressure. Sure, the evening openings of the restaurant have Dave rushing back and forth, delivering food, pouring drinks, and cleaning up plates—but the funny thing is, this part actually gets easier the more you play. Still, with so much to do, it's hard to know where to put your focus. Let us hold you by the hand as we dive deep into the Dave the Diver waters and guide you toward your own ideal balance. Trust us, once you’ve found your groove, it all starts to come together beautifully.

 

You’re not in a rush when diving

So much of Dave the Diver’s narrative can give the impression that you’re under pressure. You need to catch enough fish to be able to serve enough food to keep your customers happy, and there’s a special guest coming in three days who requires you to catch these specific ingredients, and if people don’t like your service you’ll get bad reviews, and head chef Bancho is so grumpy and temperamental, and… 

Shhhhh. It’s fine. That’s the story, but it’s not the reality.

Every day in-game is split into three parts: morning, afternoon, and evening. The first two are for fishing, while the third (at least at first) is about the sushi service. Think of things in those three distinct sections, and it’s all much more manageable. 

It gets even less anxiety-inducing when you realize that while, yes, you have a limited tank of oxygen when you dive, in truth you can spend as much time underwater as you wish.

Your primary limitation when diving is really how much weight you can manage, because you’re going to be catching so many fish each trip that you can’t carry it all. You never need to worry about not having enough fish for Bancho Sushi, and with the number of O2 supplies you find when diving, it’s rare you'll run out of air.

 

You’re in sort-of a rush when serving

Time pressures are more real in the evening, but there's still no need to get in a frenzy. Customers who don’t get their food quickly enough will leave in frustration, but honestly, Dave the Diver doesn't give you more than you can cope with.

At first, it’s just Dave and Bancho—the latter cooking, and the poor, out-of-shape former trudging to the tables with food and drink. But even then, you’ll be able to bus the tables and pour the drinks with minimal panic. This isn’t Diner Dash, and it’s never about finding your failure point. If a couple of customers stomp off in a huff, you aren’t going to break the game. Dave the Diver is far more interested in seeing you progress through its bonkers storyline than it is in punishing you for not filling mugs of green tea.

You’ll also be able to hire staff pretty soon, and even though your first few hires have low stats, they can do their jobs. The more you hire, the more load is taken off Dave, even as the game introduces more and more elements to the evening meals. At a certain point, you’ll find your role is just picking up the slack, filling in where the staff are rushed, and you’ll never need to pour a damned green tea again.

 

Trust the process

At first, with your limited equipment, you’ll only be able to dive so deep, your harpoon will only be able to kill so many, and you'll only be able to carry so much. (As we’ve established, unless you get yourself in a pickle, O2 is rarely a limiting factor.) And that’s fine. Deeper areas will be discoverable, but Dave the Diver will warn you off them, and if your harpoon just bounces off a fish, it’s something to catch later.

Running the restaurant makes you money, enabling you to buy improved versions of your suit, tank, carrying capacity, and harpoon. The more you play, the more these can be upgraded, and you’ll be able to dive deeper and catch more. There’s no need on your part to try to push past Dave's limits and go further than you’re able. Trust the process. You’ll know when you can go deeper, because the story will introduce it.

 

Fish can be mean

In shallow waters, there are only a few menacing fish. Invasive species like lionfish have it out for you, and you’re bound to run into that one shark. In Dave the Diver, O2 is your health. Getting “hurt” means losing oxygen, and losing it all means failure. (You don’t die, you get rescued, but the consequences are rough. We’ll get to that.) 

As counter-intuitive as it may feel in such serene surroundings, you are going to want to make sure you’re armed.

You're soon given a gun and introduced to the very disturbing Duff, your weapons creator. As hilariously odd as his cutscenes might be, he is going to be very useful to you, as he can craft weapons based on those you find underwater. But the thing is, you can only hold one weapon at a time, and if you want Duff to work on a specific choice—perhaps the less violent net gun or the extraordinarily violent grenade launcher—you need to make sure it’s the one you’re carrying when you choose to resurface. This lets Duff analyse it, and once you’ve brought back enough of the same type, you’ll be able to craft your own.

At first, that feels redundant. You just find them, right? But soon, you’re introduced to upgrades as well, where—using all those shells and bits of glass and such that you’ve picked up with no idea why—you can start to embellish your favorite weapon to match your specific desires. Perhaps you want your rifle to set everything on fire or for nets to electrocute the fish. (Don’t think too hard about how any of this works.)

The deeper you go, the more likely you are to meet some proper aquatic bullies, and you’ll want a quick and effective way to get them off your back. And once killed, you can chop them up for meat too!

 

Death is surprisingly harsh

Dave can’t technically die, but running out of air while underwater is equivalent. In these instances, he’s mysteriously rescued, but there’s a colossal penalty: you only get to keep one item collected during your dive.

As I’ve mentioned, running out of air can take some effort on your part, given how generous Dave the Diver is with O2 canisters and air-filled clamshells as you dive down. However, because oxygen doubles as your health, you can find it disappearing quickly if you get cornered by a shark or two. The trick is to not fight your way out of the situation. You’ll think you can! You’ll swear to yourself that you can get enough shots in before it’s too late.

You’re wrong. Run. Always swim away whenever it’s vaguely possible, because the cost of failure is so high, and chickening out is often possible. 

If you do manage to gather a fantastic haul of tricky-to-catch fish, a plot-critical item, and a good cache of silver plates to sell, and then have to pick a single thing to keep, you’re going to feel horrid. But it’s important to remember that as much as it sucks, it's not the end of the world, even if you don't have a ton of fish banked for the restaurant. You'll have a rubbish night for profits, and then the next day you’ll pick yourself up and carry on regardless.

 

Dave the Miner

You’re going to find piles of special rocks and gems that your regular equipment can’t crack, as well as annoying crabs and crumbling bits of ground that you cannot dent. That’s because you need specific tools, and once you find them, you’re going to want to keep hold of them. Shovels and picks go into your melee item slot, and while both are effective means of bopping errant sea creatures, they're also the only way you’re going to deal with the above situations.

The shovel will let you attack from above, effectively taking care of those crabs, as well as breaking into the floor in specific areas. But if you’re forced to choose, always keep the pick. Those towers of stone will give you precious items that can be used for specialist weapon crafting, but also sold for a good fee on your boat. It’s always worth dedicating a dive every few days just to collecting rocks and gems to sell, giving you a big injection of cash to spend on upgrading your equipment.

 

If you’re not having fun, you’re playing it wrong

The above is all to say: just chill. 

So many games that look like Dave the Diver are about pressure and time management, and it’s so easy to go into this with those expectations. But while there are events that occur on specific days, you always have abundant time to prepare. 

The jellyfish event, for instance. All you need to do is make sure you’ve caught a few so you can serve up specific meals, and you’ll manage to do that in a single dive—but Dave the Diver gives you 6 – 9 dives to get it done! And if you didn’t get that many? The only consequence is you make a bit less money, and there’s plenty of time to make more.

You’ve got the time and space to enjoy all the different elements of Dave the Diver at your own pace, and if you find the farming stuff boring (and it mostly is), other characters take care of most of it for you anyway! Service at Bancho Sushi gets easier the more you play! And you’re rarely about to run out of oxygen, so just enjoy exploring! If anything’s making you panic, you’ve likely misunderstood the assignment. Relax and enjoy!

Dave the Diver is available now on the Epic Games Store.