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 for what vanilla Outpost is).

How to start the mission

 * 1) Find laboratory of Vinalisj (somewhere on the first Garden planet) and complete his tutorial quests.
 * 2) Go through the entrance to Dark Cavern (somewhere on the first Garden planet). Initially it is locked, but Vinalisj will open it for you.



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).
 * Activating Mission Checkpoints by approaching them.
 * Underwater combat.
 * Boss battle: Mama Poptop. Fighting her is optional, but she drops 20 Core Fragments that you would need to spend.

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

There are also dedicated chests with food that usually grows on Garden planets, such as Corn, Rice and alike. The mission has a kitchen room where you can cook them (there is a stove-like furniture that cooks everything that Campfire can cook).

If you are in multiplayer, you also receive 3 items that you can give to other players to share Dodge, Enhanced Jump and Distortion Sphere techs with them. In singleplayer, these items are not needed, just sell them for 100 pixels each.

Map
If you are lost, there is a map of Dark Cavern (spoiler alert: shows all secret chests): https://www.reddit.com/r/frackinuniverse/comments/iuv9ag/huge_size_ive_made_map_of_dark_caverns/

Secrets
This mission contains several 1 tile wide paths. They can't be accessed on tier 1, but you can revisit the Dark Cavern later (at approximately tier 4) once you obtain either Spider Microsphere or Precursor Microsphere (mid-game techs).

Trivia

 * In vanilla Starbound, Mama Poptop was in the Mine (vanilla dungeon on Garden planets). In FU, there is no Mama Poptop there.
 * In vanilla Starbound, portal to vanilla Outpost, which is activated with 20 Core Fragments, was a dungeon on the surface of Garden planets. In FU, this portal is at the end of Dark Cavern mission.
 * In vanilla Starbound, you only received Distortion Sphere by completing a third quest of the scientist on vanilla Outpost. In FU, you get Distortion Sphere for free (inside the Dark Cavern), and the scientist will instead offer you a FU-added Distortion Sphere II (which has an extra feature of setting up small bombs with [F] button).