How to Learn Dive and Use it in Pokémon Pokopia

Since release, diving deep into the waters of Pokémon Pokopia has been a forbidden Ditto activity. Sure, you could glide across the top as a Lapras, but spend more than a few seconds in the oceanic abyss and suddenly you’d be teleported to the last on-land spot you’d been on. 

That has all changed with the recent Pokopia base game update, however. Now, thanks to a very short quest where you can learn Dive, you can traverse the ocean floor and expand your post-apocalyptic Pokémon empire. And you get to meet a mythical Pokémon in the process. 

Here’s how to learn Dive in Pokémon Pokopia’s latest update.

Unlocking the Dive Questline

You have to meet a few requirements before you can even start the quest where you’ll learn Dive. First, you’ll have to have made it to Bleak Beach and have completed the Black Beach quest “Raise the environment level,” which simply entails getting Bleak Beach up to environment level five. Your Ditto will also have to have learned Jump and Surf. 

Keep in mind that you cannot access Bubbly Beach and Wave 1 of the Pokopia Expansion Pass until after you have learned Dive and completed the Dive questline. 

How to Start the Dive Quest

Upon booting up the game after the update, you aren’t going to get any kind of notification alerting you to a new quest being available. Instead, you have to hunt down the starting point yourself. 

Head to Bleak Beach, where Professor Tangrowth, as he does, should be waiting outside the Pokémon Center with a yellow-outlined thought bubble (indicating he has a new quest for you). The Professor will point out to you that a new island has appeared in Bleak Beach, next to the Gate to the Sparkling Skylands. He then sends you to investigate. 

This is by no means a long quest, so if you have a spare five minutes, you should easily be able to complete the quest and learn Dive.

Meeting Manaphy and Learning Dive

After landing on the new island, you’ll find a washed up mythical Pokémon, Manaphy. Once you start a conversation with Manaphy, it’ll wonder how it got here (not an unusual occurrence for Pokémon in Pokopia) and say it’s hungry. Manaphy then requests five bunches of seaweed.

All you need to do to learn Dive is bring Manaphy the requested snack. After it eats, it’ll pretty much immediately offer to teach you the move Dive. In Dive mode, Ditto gets a bubble helmet and wears the Squirtle shell and tail just like when Ditto uses Water Gun.  

Practicing Dive and Grabbing Treasure

To help you get the hang of Diving, Manaphy suggests you jump into a mysterious water hole on this new island and find some treasure. You’ll notice that Dive automatically triggers (meaning you do not have to press a button to use it). 

The underwater cave isn’t very big, and you’ll quickly stumble upon a Poké Ball housing a Decorative Poké Ball item. Once you return to Manaphy, it’ll ask you how you liked the water before declaring that it needs to leave to seek out a new home (which, unfortunately, will not be in the base game). The mythical Pokémon then disappears, triggering some tutorial slides on using dive to pop up. 

At this point, the questline just ends. If you go back to the Pokémon Center, Tangrowth will have some quick, relevant dialogue but you don’t need to speak with him. If you have the Pokopia Expansion Pass, a new Pokémon will be waiting for you to start the journey to Bubbly Basin. 

But a small piece of good news is that the new island sticks around in Bleak Beach, meaning you can build on it if you’d like. 

Exploring Underwater

After seeing Manaphy off, you can use Dive at any point to explore the landscape in the ocean, which admittedly isn’t all that interesting. It’s fairly barren, full of sand and rock. Some normal materials, like Sea glass fragments, seaweed clumps, driftwood, and rock, will be dotted around for collection, but otherwise it’s a plank canvas. Which is great for the aspiring builder, but a little disappointing in general.

There is at least one new Dive-based point of interest: a new underwater cave in Bleak Beach that houses a journal. 

After you learn Dive, Ditto will no longer black out or drown when staying underwater too long. The waters of the base game and the Pokémon Pokopia Expansion Pass world are yours to explore and build in, opening a lot of Bleak Beach and some parts of the other worlds for your world-building pleasure.