Nobody cares about the Bronze Sea Diver, probably because it doesn’t make your name a cool color. In fact, I don’t think anybody cares about the activity this badge is related to either. But I got it, and it wasn’t that hard. This is a pretty in-depth tutorial on how to get the badge, and my advice from experience.
Before you start, I should mention that you need to do this on your own. You need to collect every single chest in a diving spot to get 100%. If just one other chest is taken then you will have to wait for it to respawn, and I don’t know how long that takes. You might as well give up on the spot if this happens for whatever reason.
To get the badge you need to full clear 20 diving spots from sea charts. These are the unmarked spots, not the random marked spots. Progress is saved between servers and is tracked per full clear. It’s tedious but not hard once you get the hang of it.
There is a summary at the bottom if you don’t want to read all of this. It’s mostly just documenting my experience with the badge.
Step 1: Get water breathing potions
To start actually interacting with sea charts, you need water breathing potions. Water breathing II will work as the bare minimum for now, though water breathing III makes things more comfortable. You only need uncommon catalysts for this (results in a flask). Make a fair amount, 10 minimum (you will upgrade later so not having 20 flasks is fine). You might want to make extra in cause you need to use multiple during a run.
You can do regular marked diving spots to get some blue seaweed and make a high tier water breathing potion just in case. It will slow your breath meter to a halt in a pinch.
Step 2: Get revealing vials
This is probably the most important step, aside from water breathing pots being required. Basically, destroy trees somewhere (such as forest of cernunno, though ravenna will work just fine). Make tier 1 revealing pots using one growth sap and two of any common clam. Super cheap recipe that gives an oddly large amount of what is basically wallhacks for possible threats and loot. You might think this effect would be weak for the price, but it is surprisingly strong if a bit buggy on when it refreshes. I got this tip from a youtube video.
This will locate all chests (and sealed chests), most collectibles (such as the blue seaweed, but not including jade pearls), and a lot of threats (including sharks and whales and players, but not sea urchins). If you couldn’t tell, the effects of this potion are not standardized and kinda random at times.
While diving, just pop one and play connect the dots with all the chests to clear a diving spot. Be careful, as a threat (such as a shark) will take up a lot of the “viewing power” of the potion and you will need to pop another to refresh it (this potion is really buggy). I’ll explain how to use this a bit more later, but basically make a lot of these. They are super cheap and you can easily make like 50; you only need a little over 20 for the badge but keep these around, they will help for literally anything.
Step 3: Get sea charts
Just run around opening chests. After like 30 minutes of playtime, as long as you are doing stuff on the random islands you come across you will probably be drowning in paper scrolls of all colors. But in the first 10 minutes of joining a server these guys can be really rare for some reason. Given enough playtime you will probably figure out a lot of the secret chest spots on islands and learn how to farm sea charts.
Step 4: Go to giving spot
This usually doesn’t need to be it’s own step. However if you get diving spots on the edge of the map they usually aren’t worth going for, unless if you want to for whatever reason. Also be careful of diving spots that are close to other islands or things, sometimes chests can generate inside of the terrain and you won’t be able to get 100% on the diving spot.
If you grind for long enough you might get a feel of where diving spots may be, and you can just look underwater with your camera to look for diving spots. They are surprisingly easy to see, and full clearing one without it unlocked on the map will still count as a full clear and it will be revealed.
Step 5: Get rid of sharks
Every diving spot will have two naturally spawning sharks (though they may be more random ones there; this is quite rare). They are usually regular sharks but they might be tiger sharks or worse. If you have a ship attachment you can dip underwater to lure the sharks up and do the shark minigame with the attachments (you get more loot by killing them with attachments). Otherwise just kill them, regular sharks only have 200 hp and tiger sharks only have 500 (but they hurt and can be a bit scary). I would recommend a self explosion to kill them since they run past you really fast. But try to land some good shots from far away before they are right in your face.
Make sure the sharks are dead by dipping underwater and using your ears to listen for aggressive swimming. They usually won’t respawn while you are diving, unless you are really stumped. If another one appears it’s probably a natural spawn. Just kill it and move on, chances are you aren’t fighting white eyes or something in which case I have no advice since it never happened to me.
Step 6: Looting the diving spot.
After the sharks are dead you can pop your potions and play connect the dots with what you can see. If there are jellyfish, use a magic beam to kill them if you can. A weapon hitscan will probably also work, idk if shot works though. (Edit: I have tried out weapons and fighting styles. They usually can’t destroy jellyfish. Basically anything that isn’t beam is very inconsistent in this regard.) Projectiles are wonky with jellyfish and don’t hit them in my experience. You will get jellyfish flesh, which can be used to make cauldrons which are pretty useful. This also removes a possible threat if you are clumsy.
Be careful of your oxygen, with water breathing II I would consider surfacing at around 1/3 oxygen meter or higher. And be careful of your stamina, you may need a full bar to surface and get to your boat (depends on the depth). Consider making invigorating and/or energizing food to help (not necessary but helpful). Invigorating or energizing might save your life with low water breathing.
Urchins are annoying but shouldn’t kill you unless you are really clumsy. Use a self-explosion or shockwave or any destructive aoe to destroy them. Feel free to destroy them for urchin spines, you can use them for grinding alchemy skills or in more creative ways (blue is slowness, red is poison).
Most chests are at shipwrecks or crystals or houses or anything that looks interest, depending on the layout. Some are in wall caves that can be hard to see, and some are just placed in a random spot on the opposite side just because they feel like it (THIS IS WHY YOU NEED REVEALING POTS, THIS BADGE WOULD BE 100 TIMES HARDER WITHOUT THEM AND INCREDIBLY UNFUN).
Sealed chests are not highlighted, but they are usually in intuitive spots. There’s usually 3-5 sealed chests. They aren’t required for 100% completion, but I would get them anyways. You can drop them underwater and they will fly to the surface. They will despawn after around 5 minutes, though at low water breathing your oxygen meter will remind you of their existence. At high waterbreathing, you can stay underwater long enough for them to despawn.
Feel free to get most of the other random objects underwater, such as auric seaweed and glowing coral and the bubble things. I wouldn’t bother with getting every single item, but I would recommend getting at least most of it (depending on the map layout, some layouts are much more annoying when it comes to reagents). Prioritize auric seaweed since it will actually help with the badge and just generally has strong effects IMO.
With the introduction of the Dark Sea, jade pearls (and the invisibility effect) is actually very good and can massively help with getting look from siren rocks or atlanteans if you go to the really deep layers. It’s also good for PvP, but depending on how you use it you might lose your honor… (I don’t condone the abuse of invisibility for player killing)
If the revealing pots stop highlighting loot from a random whale showing up or whatever, just pop another one to refresh it. They’re so easy to make that it doesn’t really matter. Speaking of the devil, be careful of whales knocking your boat a bajillion kilometers away while you are gone. Usually not an issue unless you aggroed a blue whale before hopping in.
Step 7: Repeat
Do this 19 more times. Progress is only tracked whenever you fully clear a diving spot, and you can see progress by hovering over a diving spot on the map. Progress saves between servers thankfully, so you can ignore the super far away sea charts and just server hop. Sea charts won’t save however, so you will have to redo step 3 every session.
Ways to improve:
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After some diving spots you can upgrade to water breathing IV using 5 of the blue seaweed. It’s super good and will make the rest of the spots a breeze. I did this way too late, but you can probably do this a bit before the halfway mark.
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You can also upgrade the revealing vials if you want; I never did because tier 1’s are just so good. But maybe they will show sea urchins and sealed chests at higher tiers, idk.
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Bringing invigorating food is very useful. I would recommend Invigorating II or higher and/or energizing any tier. This is mostly for speed and QOL as with high enough waterbreathing it doesn’t matter if you have to wait a bit longer to refill stamina. But Invigorating has some uses.
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You can use some of the jellyfish flesh that you (hopefully) have grinded to make cauldrons. They are great for long sessions of grinding this badge but otherwise you usually wont go through all 5 uses before getting bored. But it is very efficient. You can make water breathing cauldrons or sharkrepel, revealing is questionable.
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You can make sharkrepel but I don’t think it’s very useful since you can just kill the sharks easily. But I also didn’t try it out, so maybe it’s good.
Summary:
- Make water breathing potions, minimum tier 2
- Make a lot of tier 1 revealing vials
- Kill sharks
- Hop in and drink water breathing potion
- Drink revealing vial when you are close to the treasure
- Play connect the dots and be careful of stamina and oxygen
- Remember to go back up, if you are using water breathing 2 I would go up at 1/3 oxygen meter
- Remember that you usually need a full stamina bar to rise from the bottom, usually a little over 100 meters
- Repeat 19 times; upgrade water breathing using blue seaweed
Full clears save between sessions, you can see your progress by hovering over a sea chart and looking in the bottom left of the map
Thoughts on the badge:
I think the badge is a good addition but sea charts are too boring and don’t have enough replayability for me to do it 20 times. I did this over like 3 or 4 months, taking a 2 month break because of vacation and forgetting about it. It’s not hard, but it’s not fun. Sea charts need more content and should be reworked to not require literal esp or whatever just for it to be reasonably doable. Revealing vials are practically required but they reduce sea charts to a simple connect the dots minigame.
Also the title should have brown text with a pulsing deep blue border to make it more appealing. And it should change the color of your username just like Master Angler. Maybe people will actually attempt the badge if you give them a cool color to flex or whatever.
(Edits: Spelling error and grammatical error fixes, better sentence wording, a bit more information since I played the game a bit more, also a rebranding of the title if you guys don’t mind)
