Dark Cavern

Dark Cavern is a tier 1 tutorial mission. It leads you from the first Garden planet to the vanilla Outpost (see the vanilla wiki).

Tutorials
Dark Cavern teaches a number of mechanics:
 * Use of three basic techs: Dodge, Enhanced Jump and Distortion Sphere (you will receive these techs for free during this mission, and you keep them after the mission).
 * Use of Ropes (craftable one-time Grappling Hooks). You will find some Rope in chests, so you don't need to bring Rope with you.
 * Use of doors that are opened with explosive damage. You will find some Bombs in chests, so you don't need to bring explosives with you.
 * Navigating a map with several paths (requires backtracking).
 * Underwater combat.
 * Boss battle: Mama Poptop. Fighting her is optional, but she drops 20 Core Fragments that you would need to spend.

The chests inside the mission contain valuable loot, possibly including Research Data, Manipulator Modules, Teleporter Core, randomly generated weapons, lore codexes, etc.

If you are in multiplayer, you also receive 3 items that allow you to give Dodge, Enhanced Jump and Distortion Sphere to other players. In singleplayer, these items are not needed and can be sold for 100 pixels.