Star Ocean The Divine Force (EP)

Preemptively: The post-game content isn't required/eligible for this achievement. Everything that appears prior to killing the final boss is the target.



Honestly, I'm not here looking to recreate a thorough rundown of all 242 chests locations. The two go-to sources for information of that scope, that I skimmed through in my own attempts to track down what I was missing, seem to be:

1) YouTuber Primalliquid's video (53 minutes long, but broken down by area with labeled anchors):
Note: I have not watched the entire video, nor verified that everything is shown. I believe at least one chest from the final dungeon does appear on their map, but does not get its own video snippet. If doing visual checks because of D.U.M.A. Scan concerns, be vigilant.

2) Japanese content creator @kainsinai/Kakinblog's visual breakdown:
https://kakinblog-com.translate.goog/so6-takarabako/?_x_tr_s...
Note: Has deliberately chosen to omit showing two maps from the Integration Plant and only provides brief text commentary. See #1 and #2 below.



What I am here to provide is simply where you can start looking, following my relatively brief couple of hours running around like a dingbat for the four chests that I personally overlooked. TL;DR to the next bolded sentence to skip straight to that. A general prioritization of what to look for beyond that will then be provided after. I'll work on formatting and whatnot for the solution itself over time.

During my playthrough I capped out the size of D.U.M.A.'s field scan ability ASAP - remember to actually equip it too - and just systematically ran left-to-right, right-to-left covering each map as I went along. There have been numerous reports of slight height variances making the scanner fail to locate chests, but this was not something I personally experienced. I had a single chest fail to show up on the map/generate D.U.M.A.'s audio cue, and that was one of the chests in the Scorpium Battleship, towards the end when you're going through a fairly quick series of teleports. The chest was, however, in plain sight when I rotated my camera a moment later to get my bearings and I assume the asset simply hadn't fully loaded in and that caused the problem.

If you're similarly inclined/conditioned - if you've done mapping in SO3; if you've gone for achievements in something like Lost Odyssey - there really isn't much of anything you'll miss. Remarkably little in this game is intentionally hidden away, and besides a couple of Private Actions I haven't personally noticed anything that's permanently missable.



Anyway, my missing chests were in two areas:

#1 & #2) The Integration Plant contains two (basically) hidden floor maps, each of which have a chest. To know if you're missing these fast travel to the Integration Plant, then press (default controls, I think:) RT to pull up the map, and then LB to toggle floors. The hidden floors are Map 9 and Map 10. These are accessed by, from the start of the dungeon (after completion): Run forward into door -> Run forward into door and take first teleport. You're now on Map 8. In that northern oval section you arrive in, walk towards the southern door exiting that oval area, turn around and look up.

There's a platform on the top of the room containing the teleporter and a ledge along the perimeter, but no green glowing harvest points, purple crystals nor inclusion in cutscene backgrounds that I recall to tip you off to its existence. That's Map 9, and this is the only way to reach it - to dash up using D.U.M.A.; Map 10 is the ledge immediately above that. Map 9 has three enemies that will probably cause you to fall while fighting them, but otherwise there isn't anything noteworthy about this besides how easy it is to overlook and how out of place it feels.

#3) There's a floating island on the western side of Vey'l Region that has a chest on it. It's actually very obvious on the full map if you're looking, however I wasn't and also just didn't get close enough for my scanner to cover the last island and flag the chest.

#4) Again in Vey'l Region, this time on the eastern side somewhat north/northeast of Terranus. There's a series of floating platforms that can't be seen directly looking at the map, but are pretty obvious if you just look at the sky. There's a chest up there that a ton of people, myself included, overlooked.



If you have all four of those, don't lose hope just yet. The next highest priority are chests that simply weren't available to you the first time you passed through an area. There should only be seven of these in total; a fairly obvious one that your scanner won't reach because of cutscene placement, two that appear on your scanner but are behind a locked door you can only open by doing a late(r) game side quest, and four that simply won't appear until you possess Key Items from completing side quest chains.

Obvious, but maybe you forgot: There's a chest in the Scorpium Battleship that you must return after clearing the dungeon to obtain. It's at the very end of the room you fight the boss in; your maximum range scanner is just a little short of reaching it if you scan while standing right in front of the quest marker that starts the cutscene. This cutscene also removes you from the Scorpium Battleship when concluding. If you've never gone back in, you're missing this one.

Two chests behind a locked door: These are in the Nilbeth Ancient Coil, and if you - like me - have a habit of jumping down stairs you very likely didn't come across it during your initial visit. This is Map 3, so you can pretty easily check using the map after fast traveling to town. To access this door you need to obtain the Key Item - Spirit Orb, which is rewarded for completing the side quest "That Unyielding Door." You get the quest from NPC Melthia inside the Semiomancy Consortium, which for me did not seem to be available prior to the Scorpium Spire becoming available very late in the game.

Clearing "That Unyielding Door" requires five Spirit Ether, which you can get by breaking the arms of and/or simply killing the Lava Man enemy in the north/northeast second of Nilbeth. By the time the quest is available, this is very easy to do by targeting an arm and doing D.U.M.A.'s VA dash into it - either to initiate a Surprise Attack or after battle has already begun. You can move a little bit away from the location of the battle, save and load via the menu to respawn Lava Man for quick limb breaks/kills to achieve this.

Four don't appear without Key Items: These are the chests everyone else has probably pointed out first. While clearing side quests found throughout the game, you'll receive Key Item - Cryptographic Message as rewards. There are six in total: A-1, A-2, A-3, B, C & D. Each letter (all 3 are required for A to appear) makes an otherwise unseeable/unobtainable chest appear.

These are already accounted for, and marked, in the above guide(s). But for ease, the four areas these chests appear in - that you need to return to - are 1) Mhedume Ruins, 2) Cottorinth Region, 3) Devotion Hill (Aucerius Plains fast travel), 4) Nilbeth. The Key Items aren't rewarded at random and come from specific quests, and you can quickly identify what you need to do using dedicated guides.



Still nothing? Don't panic, try chests with similar quirks as the above.

Unmarked D.U.M.A. Platforming: Like that chest north of Terranus, you can't really see these just by looking at the map. The Aucerius Plains alone have three of these that, while you're encouraged/prone to look skyward in that zone, are still easy enough to miss: Marked as #2, #3, and #7 on Kakinblog. To a lesser extent don't forget the verticality of towns, even if they aren't used overly much. There are two in the Imperial Capital just outside of Castle Vey'l, marked as #4 and #5, and one that I can see a lot of people missing in Paladurnia if they're into the action/events occurring at the time, marked as #1.

Marked D.U.M.A. Platforming: It's hard to miss because the terrain is constricted and I believe it does just show up on scan from the main path, but there's a platforming chest in the Edahli Region. That one is marked as #2 on Kakinblog. There may be others, as well, but I can't recall any while typing this.

Missing maps: As with the Integration Plant, some locations have weird setups that lead to semi-hidden chests. Parrapoeiam is notable for this: Map 3 is the second floor of the inn, but they were nice enough to include a stairwell to let you know something is there. Map 4 is the upstairs of the learning facility and is only accessible via D.U.M.A.'s VA dash, but the chest is shown in the background of a cutscene to tip you off.

Chests inside of houses: If you aren't manually searching for Eso'wa Players and side quests, these can be overlooked. The triangle icons on town maps represent buildings you can enter; most serve no purpose besides world-building and junk items via harvesting points and breakable objects. Several have chests inside, however. There are 3 in Acendros City alone, for example. These are generally, but not always, marked with solid circles on the Kakinblog maps - the three from Acendros City are marked as #1, #3 and #5.



Still no dice? Now may be the time to panic. Or take a deep breath, really, and prepare for some obnoxious legwork.

What's probably happened is that you had a full allotment of 20 items the chest was trying to give you, and because there's no method of dropping items you likely moved on and then forgot about it. This is less likely to happen with something like Blueberries, because reserve characters are almost always missing HP, nor with Aquaberries or Fresh Sage because you can use Item Creation to free up space from very early on.

I would look at something like Physical Stimulant (Ctrl+F "Physical activator" on the above Google translation of Kakinblog) because it's a healing item, but you may not have realized it at the time. Or something that I personally had to deal with three times, including the hidden maps in Integration Plant: Resurrection Unit (Ctrl+F "Resurrection mist"). These sorts of things should just appear on the scanner, or otherwise have remained on your map, but narrowing your search a little couldn't hurt.