Dive is free. Bubbly Basin is not.

The two halves shipped the same day, which is what makes this confusing. Dive came in the free Ver. 2.0.0 update on 5 August 2026, so you can learn it and use it at Bleak Beach without spending anything. The Bubbly Basin area itself is the paid half, and it needs the Expansion Pass.

Last updated 10 August 2026

Before you start

Three things have to be true before the chain below will start at all. None of them is bought. They are all ordinary progress in the base game, so owning the Pass does not move any of them.

• You already have the Jump ability.
• You already have the Surf move.
• You have finished the Bleak Beach request “Raise the environment level!”.

The third is the one worth checking twice: it is a request rather than a milestone, so it can sit started but unfinished while everything else looks done. If Professor Tangrowth has nothing to say to you at step 2, that unfinished request is the first thing to check. Note also what is not on this list: nothing about the Expansion Pass, and nothing about Bubbly Basin. The prerequisites are the same whether or not you own it.

Learning Dive, in order

1. 1. Go to Bleak Beach.
2. 2. Talk to Professor Tangrowth outside the Bleak Beach Pokémon Center. That conversation is what puts the prompt in front of you.
3. 3. Walk the beach and collect Seaweed ×5. It grows in the areas next to the water, all the way round.
4. 4. Hand all five to Manaphy on the island to the north. This is the step that teaches you Dive.
5. 5. Bubbly Basin unlocks the moment you deliver them — if you own the Expansion Pass. If you do not, you keep Dive and keep using it at Bleak Beach.

This chain is reported the same way by four independent guides.

Where people get stuck

• Buying the Pass and expecting a new area straight away. The Pass does not skip the Manaphy quest — the delivery is still the trigger.
• Assuming Dive is behind the paywall. It is not, and neither are Buoyant Blocks or shared storage. Try Dive at Bleak Beach before deciding whether the area is worth $34.99 to you.
• Chasing Manaphy and Phione through habitats. Neither is tied to one. Manaphy comes through story progression and Phione through the Starmie Doll, which is why the tracker shows 48 of 50 as habitat-bound.

All three of those are misreadings of how the release was split, not reported bugs or dead ends. We have not found a sourced list of things that go mechanically wrong during the Seaweed errand, so there is not one here — an invented “common problems” section is exactly the kind of filler this site exists to avoid.

What comes next

According to Nintendo Life, and we have not found a second source for any of this: inside Bubbly Basin the sequence is to raise the Environment Level to 3 by discovering habitats and befriending Pokémon, build the Ocean Temple, rebuild the Pokémon Center, then push the Environment Level to 5 — with the rebuilding kit appearing in the Pokémon Center shop once you reach Level 3, and Manaphy encountered after the temple is finished. Treat that sequence as reported rather than confirmed. The temple's own numbers are better sourced, and are covered next.

The temple's own figures are better sourced than the chain above. Nintendo Life, game8 and Gamerant all publish the material list, and five of the six quantities are unanimous: Star-spotted Rock ×50, Seashell ×25, Shiny Pearl ×10, Seashell Fencing ×10 and Ocean Door ×2. Stone is the exception — game8 and Gamerant say 30 where Nintendo Life says 50. Two of the three also put the build at about an hour. Worth knowing before you go looking: none of those six materials appears by name anywhere in the 74 material types the 36 habitats use. The nearest thing is Seashell Seat, which is a different item used by a different build. Temple materials and habitat materials are two separate shopping lists.

The temple also needs 15 Pokémon, and six of them will not help until you finish a request of their own. Nintendo Life details three: Totodile, after the playground game and a Bubbly Bathtub habitat built with a Generate-skill Pokémon; Barboach, after retrieving a Seashell Seat from deep water and building the Ocean Rest Spot habitat; and Frillish, by finding the Starmie Doll at the back of a cave and handing it over. The full chain, including the four extra Pokémon you recruit purely to satisfy those requests, is on the Beautiful Building Pokémon list , with every habitat it names checked against our own spawn table.

That last paragraph is worth cross-checking against our own table, because the two do not quite line up. Our habitat data has Totodile spawning in 3 habitats — Basin tall grass, Canoe dock, Bubbly bathtub — and Barboach in 3, namely Sandy speech, Ocean rest spot, Muddy playtime. So either the quest insists on one specific route to each of them, or the habitat list is simply wider than the quest text implies. We have not resolved which, and we are leaving the discrepancy visible rather than quietly picking whichever version reads better. Frillish is the one case where the two agree without strain: the Starmie Doll is an item, not a habitat.

Practically, that means the next thing you do is discover habitats — and that is where the rest of this site starts being useful. Every route through the goals above runs through the same bottleneck: finding and building habitats, in some order, with materials you have to go and get. Whichever of the reported milestones turns out to be accurate, the work underneath it does not change.

Questions people are actually asking

Last updated 10 August 2026

Habitat and Pokédex data compiled from game8 and Nintendo Life and cross-checked. Value ratios, material totals and build orders are calculated on this site, not copied from either of them.