The Ice Cavern

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

This is the first dungeon in the game that is actually a dungeon, and it teaches one idea: the walls are lying to you.

Vivi is a key

Three chests in here are behind ice, and ice is what Vivi is for. Walk up to a wall that looks slightly wrong, press the button, and he burns a hole in it.

The game tells you this once and then never reminds you. Two of the three walls are easy — there is a prompt, you use it. The third is at the back-left of the room with the frozen pillar, and people miss it because by then they have stopped believing the walls are checkable.

Check every wall. It costs nothing and there is an Elixir behind one of them.

The Potion the camera hides

One pickup in here is not behind ice. It is behind the staircase in the second room, reached by a path to the right that the camera declines to show you.

It is only a Potion. It is worth mentioning because it is the game’s first proper use of a trick it will pull for the next forty hours: fixed camera angles that hide a walkable route in plain sight. Get in the habit now.

Grind in the mist if you want to

Jets of mist come out of the cavern walls, and walking into one starts a fight immediately rather than after a few steps. They respawn.

That makes them the most controllable encounter source you have had so far. If you want a level or two before the boss, this is where to take it. If you do not, they are entirely avoidable.

Everything in here is weak to fire, so Vivi does the work.

Free the moogle, take the letter

Near the end the path forks. Right is a chest. Left is a dead end with a moogle frozen into it.

Thaw him. Mois is the save point, the second Mogster tutorial, and he has a letter for Gumo — who is in the next town. Miss him and the Mognet chain breaks at its second link.

Then go right, then go left, then take the fork you did not take.

Zidane fights this one alone

The boss is two enemies and Zidane is by himself for it, which is a jolt after three areas of having a party.

The important fact is elemental and nobody puts it plainly: fire is the only element that does anything here. The big one absorbs ice, shrugs off earth and water, and burns. The small one burns too.

Zidane does not have fire. What he has is steal, a decent dagger, and Trance if the meter cooperates — and there is a dagger on the fish that is better than the one in his hand.

Get the steals. The fight is not hard; it is long, and long is fine.

Game Notes

The Ice Cavern is where FFIX admits it is a game about looking at things.

Everything before it was a set. This is level design: a space with a rule (walls can be false), a tool for the rule (Vivi), and a series of rooms that ask whether you learned it. The reward for paying attention is an Elixir seven hours before you would otherwise see one.

It also does something quietly cruel. It takes your party away for the boss — not by plot device, but by burying them in a snowdrift a screen earlier — and hands you a fight against two enemies with one character. FFIX will do this again. It is very fond of splitting the party at exactly the moment you have got comfortable with it.

And then, at the exit, it asks you to give the princess a fake name and type it in yourself. She has been travelling under a lie since Alexandria. This is the first time the game makes you the one who writes it down.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 3 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

There are eight chests in the Ice Cavern: Tent, Ether, Potion, Elixir, Potion, Mage Masher, Phoenix Down, Leather Wrist. Seven publishers agree and the game’s own field data agrees with them.

The four that do not are all making category errors rather than competing claims: one folds in two chests from the North Gate approach outside the cavern, one counts the boss’s guaranteed Hi-Potion drop as a chest, one lists a single Potion where there are two, and one enumerates eight while printing the word “seven”.

So the checklist is settled. What is not settled is almost everything else.

Sealion is weak to fire, and one of your two best sources says otherwise

Game8 publishes “Fire deals 150% damage”. Final Fantasy Wiki publishes “Fire: Normal (100%)”. They cannot both be right and it changes how you fight.

Game8 is right. The game’s enemy record carries a weakness mask of Fire for Sealion, alongside Ice absorbed and Earth and Water nullified. Its complete elemental profile is:

• Fire — weak.
• Ice — absorbed. Healing it.
• Earth, Water — no effect at all.
• Everything else — normal.

That is a fight with exactly one useful element in it, and no character present can cast it. Which is the point: Zidane fights this alone.

Black Waltz 1 is weak to fire and ice, both, which Final Fantasy Wiki prints and most others reduce to fire alone.

The HP figures

From the game’s battle data:

StrategyWiki is the only dissenter and is wrong twice. It is also internally inconsistent — 472 appears elsewhere on the same page as its own 450.

These two are worth flagging for a reason that has nothing to do with StrategyWiki. The four Evil Forest fights are written into the game’s battle table ten thousand higher than anyone publishes them — 10,916 for a Plant Brain everybody agrees has 916. These two are not. 229 is 229 in the table and 229 on every page that prints it.

So whatever the ten-thousand gap is, it is a property of particular fights rather than of a stretch of the game: Black Waltz 2 in Dali and Black Waltz 3 on the cargo ship both have it again, and it turns up as late as the final battles. Around twenty-five records carry it and the published number appears nowhere in the game’s files. We do not know what it is for.

The steals

Four slots, fixed odds, same for every enemy in the game: 100%, 25%, 6.25%, 0.39%.

• Black Waltz 1 — Remedy (100%), Silk Shirt (25%).
• Sealion — Ether (100%), Mythril Dagger (25%).
• Wyerd — Potion (100%), Tent (25%), Phoenix Down (6.25%). The only enemy in the cavern with a third slot filled.
• Flan — Potion, Ore. Cave Imp — Potion, Phoenix Down.

Jegged publishes 70% and 23% for both boss pairs. It is describing a different thing — a distribution across outcomes once a steal connects — but it never says so, and a reader comparing it against Game8’s 100% sees a contradiction with no way to resolve it. Gamer Guides, GameFAQs and Caves of Narshe give no numbers at all, only “common” and “uncommon” or slot ordinals.

The Mythril Dagger is a 25% roll, not a 23% one and not a rare. It also teaches Zidane Bandit, which improves every steal for the rest of the game. No publisher calls it missable. It is: Sealion cannot be refought. It is bought in Lindblum, so what you lose is a few hours of head start rather than the item.

Cave Imp does drop a Tent

Game8 lists Ore and Phoenix Down. Fandom and RPGClassics add a Tent. The Tent is in the fourth drop slot, which is 0.39% — so it is real, it is in the data, and you will almost certainly never see one.

Flan’s magic defence really is zero

Caves of Narshe gives Flan a Magic Defence of 0 against the 8-to-10 that every other enemy in the cavern carries, and it is the only publisher that does. The enemy record agrees: Flan is 0, Cave Imp is 8, Wyerd is 8.

It is a small thing that means Vivi kills Flans considerably faster than the numbers elsewhere would suggest.

Wyerd does not put you to sleep

This is worth correcting because it is widely half-remembered. The sleep move in this cavern is Cave Imp’s Sleeping Juice. Wyerd’s signature is HP Switching — it swaps its HP with a party member’s, which usually means it heals itself and drops your character into critical.

Wyerd encounters are also flagged preemptive in the data, which matches every guide’s description of the mist jets: walking into one starts the fight immediately rather than after a delay.

Where the chests are, and where the guides put them

Entrance room. Tent on the low ledge — hop up the steps.

Second room. Ether behind an ice wall. Jegged and Caves of Narshe say the wall is on the right of the staircase; Gamer Guides says the left; Game8 says only “behind the first wall”. Potion reached by the path to the right of the staircase, which loops around behind it — this is the one with no prompt and no ice, and Game8’s “go around to the back instead of up the stairs” is the clearest description any publisher gives of it.

Icicle Field. Elixir behind a wall at the back-left. Potion on the lower level across the pillar. Mage Masher through the path that opens once Vivi drops the frozen pillar. Gamer Guides is the only guide that thinks to say you should keep the second Mage Masher rather than sell it.

The fork. Phoenix Down to the right. Leather Wrist to the left, through what Gamer Guides accurately calls a “supposed dead end”. Equipping the Leather Wrist teaches Vivi Blizzard — stated by Caves of Narshe and StrategyWiki, not mentioned by Gamer Guides, and worth doing immediately given what else is in this cavern.

Mois is on the left fork: save point, Mogster lesson two, and a letter for Gumo in Dali.

When does the cavern actually close?

Two answers in print, and they are hours apart.

• GameFAQs: “Once you leave Dali, you can never return to the interior.”
• A Steam missables guide: the area becomes unrevisitable “at a later point in the game (Disc 2).”

GameFAQs is the precise one. The cavern remains reachable from the world map right through your stay in Dali, and shuts when the Dali sequence sends you on. A player following the Steam guide would believe they have until disc 2 and would be wrong by a whole chapter.

Against both of those: neither dedicated missables FAQ lists anything in the Ice Cavern at all. Jegged’s missables page and the long-standing GameFAQs missables FAQ both skip the area entirely.

Game Notes

The interesting thing about this area is not the disagreements themselves but what they are disagreements about.

Nobody disputes the chest list. Seven publishers, one dataset, same eight items. Where they fall apart is everything that requires reading the game rather than playing it: what the numbers are, what the elements are, what a steal percentage even means. Three publishers give three incompatible answers to “what are the odds on the Mythril Dagger” and none of them says which convention they are using.

And there is one thing none of the seventeen sources we checked covers at all: the sequence where the party freezes. Every walkthrough goes straight from the fork to the boss. The scene where Zidane ends up alone — which is the entire reason the fight is what it is — is documented by exactly one publisher, in one clause, in passing.