Underkeep Mushrooms: All Five Locations, Quest Route, and Both Hand-In Outcomes

Five caps stand between you and the strangest outcome in Underkeep's opening demo. The Underkeep mushrooms quest begins as a simple favor for a hungry cook and quietly turns into a choice between two very different payoffs — one practical, one that literally reshapes your party. Collecting Underkeep mushrooms is also the fastest way to learn the demo's tile-based navigation, so the route below doubles as a tour of the forest, the cave, and the tunnel landmarks that actually matter.

Where to Find Underkeep Mushrooms: The Full Five-Cap Route

Underkeep does not mark its mushroom pickups as a resource node on the map. They sit beside paths, brush, crates, and rubble, and you collect them by right-clicking or dragging them into your inventory. Because of that, community reports have converged on five specific landmarks rather than a generic "search the forest" answer.

The single most useful habit here is checking your inventory after every pickup. Seeing a cap on the ground is not the same as owning it, and narrated demo runs show players walking away from items they assumed were already collected.

Two locations are outdoors and three are underground. Remember that split — it is the fastest way to work out which part of the route you still need to recheck when your count stalls.

Forest Mushrooms: Two Caps Before the Cave

The cook opens the demo by explaining that he is out of mushrooms and pointing you toward the nearby forest. Accepting his request for a handful of fresh caps is what actually starts the search, so talk to him first if your quest log looks empty.

The first cap sits near the opening fork, on the left side of the start and south of the resurrection statue. The second is in the merchant's glade, in the northwestern corner of the clearing where a trader is holding off a swarm of oversized rats. Player experience suggests revisiting that corner after the fight rather than assuming the battle cleared the area for you.

Helping the trader is worth the detour for a separate reason: he hands over a small iron key that opens his supplies chest, which is where narrated runs pick up gauntlets, potions, and loose coins. Do not confuse that chest with the mushroom objective — the key opens loot, not fungus.

Dungeon Mushrooms: Three Caps and One Pickaxe

The remaining three caps are inside the cave, and this is where most players get stuck at four. Use the first purple worm encounter and the sunlit bush as your two orientation points.

The Sunlit Bush

From the fork near the first purple worm, head north into the chamber with a bush lit by a shaft of sunlight. Inspect the bush's square and confirm the pickup in your inventory before moving on.

The Crate Room

From that same chamber, follow the corridor east until you reach crates and barrels. Smashing is a legitimate form of interaction in Underkeep, so attack the containers and check the space they were blocking. One community report notes that a player stood directly next to this cap without ever seeing it.

Beyond the Rubble

Take the route south of the first purple worm area and you will hit a blocking rock pile. You need the pickaxe first — community reports place it in the chamber with the humanoid mushroom. Once it is in your inventory, left-click the rock pile. Attacking the rubble with a weapon or trying to "equip" the tool does not work, which is exactly why this one gets missed.

While you are in that chamber, talk to the mushroom figure instead of swinging at it. It is not hostile, and the conversation is the whole reason this quest has two reported hand-in branches.

The Mushroom Entity and Your Hand-In Choice

Golden spores drift through the chamber where the fungus figure waits, and the air is described as damp and faintly sweet. Its first question is blunt — are you thieves? — before it explains that it is looking for its little ones and asks you to return the caps you have gathered, promising that your gratitude will not be empty.

That dialogue updates the quest and creates an alternative to the cook's original request. What follows is a straight choice, and the game does not warn you that it is permanent for the session.

The mushroom-family branch is the memorable one. The entity gathers the returned caps, offers its reward, and pulls the party into an unsettling sequence involving a sealed door, a solitary tower, and something vast and draconic opening its eye beneath the mountain. When the vision fades, your companions' portraits shimmer into squat, smiling mushroom versions of themselves. For reference only, accounts conflict on whether that sequence ends the demo or allows play to continue afterward.

The cook's version is far more grounded. He weighs the caps in his hands, talks about stew and roast, and pays out. Both narrated runs in the reference material treat these as the two reported demo branches, not an exhaustive list of endings for the full game.

Practical Tips for Collecting Underkeep Mushrooms

A few mechanical details make the Underkeep mushrooms hunt much less frustrating:

• Check both sides of every route. The demo's first-person turning makes it easy to walk past a cap that was behind you.
• Keep the map open when you feel turned around. Post-battle detours make the starting forest look unfamiliar.
• End your combat rounds deliberately. Characters act once per round, and movement is locked until the round resolves.
• Watch your food supply. Resting restores health, stamina, and magic but consumes food, and you cannot rest while enemies are nearby.
• Protect the front row. Only the two front champions take hits from most monsters, so keep potions for whoever is absorbing damage.
• Match skills to weapons. Several abilities require a specific weapon type, and a locked skill is often a gear problem rather than a bug.
• Save immediately before the hand-in. This is the only clean way to test the cook's reward and the mushroom branch in one playthrough.

For the game itself, including demo availability and platform details, the official Underkeep Steam page is the source to check. A launch-schedule page on the Underkeep Wiki, captured on November 6, 2026, listed a November 5, 2026 PC release date with a Nintendo Switch release planned for Q1 2027 — treat that as a dated snapshot and confirm the live status on Steam. The same wiki page, as of that November 6, 2026 capture, also stated that demo saves are not compatible with the full game because the levels differ.

FAQ

How many Underkeep mushrooms do I need to collect? Five. The cook's opening request and the mushroom entity's alternate request both point to the same five caps, so confirm the count in your inventory before handing anything in.

Why am I stuck at four Underkeep mushrooms? Recheck the crate room and the rubble route. One cap only appears after you break the crates, and the other sits behind a rock pile that requires the pickaxe plus a left-click on the pile itself.

Who should I give the mushrooms to? Give them to the cook if you want a straightforward quest completion and his reward. Return them to the fungus figure for the lore-heavy transformation scene. For reference only, accounts conflict on whether that scene ends the demo or allows play to continue afterward.

Do I have to kill the mushroom entity? No. Community reports confirm the five caps are all found elsewhere on the map, and attacking the entity only removes the dialogue-based hand-in — and with it, the mushroom-family branch.