The Sinking City 2 Chapter 4 Walkthrough: Time and Tide

The fish market and the docks

The Sinking City 2 Time and Tide walkthrough covers a sprawl by the standards of the back half: the market floor with its weighing station and warehouse, the fishing goods shops, a construction site, Ma Fishface's shop and a jewellery workshop. Most of it is optional. All of it is worth searching, because Time and Tide is where the game restocks you before the run to the finale.

Two safes are here. 1496 opens the locker room safe, and 6294 opens the abandoned office safe — the only code in the game spoken by a ghost rather than written down.

The two mechanism locks

• Symbol padlock — lighthouse, rings, star, squid, left to right.
• Salt storage — I, IV, IX, XVI. This is a square-number pattern, not a date, which is why hunting the market for a clue never works.

Doing both in one circuit through the dock block saves a lot of walking, and the salt storage in particular pays for itself in supplies.

Keys, jars and mechanisms

Chapter 4 hands you more components than any other. The Fish Eye Key and Snowflake Key open dock and cold storage doors; Bolt Cutters clear chained access; and each Leyden Jar is collected as part of a set that powers a mechanism later in the chapter.

The Antikythera, Heart of Stone, Heart of Ice, Sagittate Stone and Engraved Pod are progression items tied to the wreck sequence — carry them where the objective points rather than trying to solve them independently.

Cold storage and the wreck

The back half of the chapter moves from the market into cold storage and then onto the wrecked ship, through the orlop and the crew cabin. The wreck is the most linear space in the chapter and the most dangerous: tight corridors, poor sightlines and enemies that close fast.

Go in with the shotgun loaded. If you are still fighting at range in these corridors you are spending ammunition you will want in chapter 5.

Before you leave Time and Tide

• Both safes: 1496 and 6294.
• The salt storage and the symbol padlock lockers.
• Every ERC crate in the district — you will not get a restock this generous again.
• Spend banked Dream Essence at the Talent Table.

Next: Cold Comfort, which is short, linear and ends the game.

Why this is the chapter to be thorough in

Every chapter in The Sinking City 2 is missable, but Time and Tide is the one where thoroughness changes the ending of your run rather than just your collection percentage. Cold Comfort gives you very little, and it contains the final boss.

Whatever you carry out of the docks is roughly what you will fight the finale with. That is the whole argument for clearing the market floor, the warehouse and the shops even though none of them are required.