Underwater: the seven dives, the Black Trench and the 57 locations
The Sequence 6 diving bell opens four trophies at once, and one of them — Cartographer — stays locked forever if you never go down. How to do them in a single pass.
And it counts towards Davy Jones' Locker, Ed the Diver, Cartographer, required for the platinum.
Nothing exists until the diving bell
Four trophies in this game hang on a single item: the diving bell, handed to you by the story in a Sequence 6 mission.
Before you have it, the underwater wrecks are on the map but stay marked undiscovered no matter how often you sail over them. This is not a small detail: it is what leaves people who have explored the entire map without Cartographer, with no idea why.
The four and their percentages:
- Seven Deadly Seas — 18.4% - Cartographer — 15.8% - Davy Jones' Locker — 9.4% - Ed the Diver — 51.7%
All four overlap. Doing them separately means making the same trip three times.
Underwater wrecks require going down with the bell to count as discovered. Sailing over them does nothing, and that is why Cartographer sticks one location short.
The seven dives and the Black Trench
Seven Deadly Seas asks you to find every treasure chest in the underwater shipwrecks, and there are 7 dives.
The nuance that trips people up: in each one you have to collect every treasure and every secret, not simply pass through and leave. A half-finished dive does not count.
And the saved trip is inside one of them. The Black Trench, in the Castillo de Jagua region, contains the lowest point on the map, which is exactly what Davy Jones' Locker asks for. On the way down, look for a broken diving bell and swim to it.
Do both in the same pass. Leave Davy Jones' Locker for later and you will be redoing the whole dive.
Ed the Diver closes itself along the way: it asks for 1,000 metres swum underwater in total, and the exclusion matters here — whatever you swim inside the seven dives does not count. Even so, with the map's underwater chests and normal exploration it pops around the eight-hour mark. If you want to force it, just dive and surface repeatedly anywhere at sea.
Cartographer: 57 locations and one rule that saves hours
There are 57 locations: islands, forts, question marks, wrecks and a few story-exclusive ones.
Two details that change the work entirely:
- You do not have to land on the islands. Getting close enough to unlock fast travel is enough. Going ashore, exploring and returning to the ship across 40 islands is the slow way, and it adds nothing to the trophy. - The underwater wrecks do require going down with the bell. That is the exception, and the one that breaks the count.
The comfortable approach is not to treat it as a trophy at all. Discover as you play — sailing to places rather than always fast-travelling — and it comes without noticing. Leave it to the end and it is hours of sailing.
And one location arrives late by design: Long Bay does not exist until the main mission The Observatory. Before that the island is inaccessible, so Cartographer cannot be closed before that mission no matter how thoroughly you have combed the rest. As a bonus, getting there is what opens Blow The Man Down, the hanging-bodies trophy.
The trophies involved
Each one links to its section inside the full Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced trophy guide.