Skulls and Rubies

Rarely do we see ourselves involved in a mystery, so obvious and blatant, as the Mysterious Skull room we found this year. This article is a continuation, but take this as a warning: you will not find any answers in this article, you will only find yourselves with more questions. Isn’t that the whole point of our fansite? Sharing the secrets that make the world of Tibia so interesting is what keeps us all going. We hope that by the end of this article, your curiosity matches ours, and together we can find a solution to this odd finding.

Museum Of Tibian Arts

This museum, accessible though the Games Hall in Thais was initially introduced with the Cults of Tibia Quest, and although to the untrained eye it might look like a regular museum with an exhibition for each important area of Tibia and it’s religions, it’s actually all a facade for the cult that steals the money from donors and that praise a certain cultish object in the middle of the museum…

… Besides this quite interesting piece of lore, the museum itself was looking forward to expanding itself, since the wonders of the world of Tibia grow in numbers rapidly. This is where our investigation starts.

When we talk to the NPC Gareth, the manager of the Museum, about the extension, we read the following:

Player: extension

Gareth: It is planned to extend the MOTA. But this will take time, because our workers have faced a little problem.

Player: problem

Gareth: Well, the situation is this: We have explored a portal, I would say a very aggressive, capricious and dangerous one. Through this gate monsters entered the construction site and attacked our workers. …

Gareth: With enormous effort they could have been dispersed. When my fellows tried to fill up the portal, it appeared again and again. So the only thing they could do was to stop working for the moment. Are you eventually interested in further investigations?

Player: yes

Gareth: You are a true patron of the arts! I have opened the construction site for you. Start your work right now!

And so with this premise we start one of the missions for the Secret Library Quest. Inside this place we will find a lot of mysterious places that seem to have a strong relation to rituals and blood as its main ingredient.

A room with many “Old Branches” and ashes in the middle along with specs of blood.

A room filled to the brim with blood, bodies and with a very peculiar-looking sacrificial stone next to a coal basin.

An unmovable chimney with an extreme amount of lava nearby.

These are only some of the many strange places we can find in the extension, but there are many more. What call’s our attention today is a certain skull found in two different places in this museum and an item called Sample of Monster Blood.

First floor of MOTA’s extension

At the entrance floor of the extension we can find a chest near a throne made of skulls. We can grab this vial every 20 hours. We will need this to continue with this mystery.

Middle floor of MOTA’s extension

In the middle floor we can find near another throne made of bones and a skull with a peculiarity… It’s called “Mysterious Skull”. This skull can’t be walked over and when we use the Sample of Monster Blood on it, we get teleported to the room to the easternmost part of this floor.

In this room we find a Demon, a Chest containing another Sample of Monster Blood that can only be obtained once per character and a skull with a different peculiarity: this skull is called “Skull”, it can’t be moved, it can be walked over and nothing seems to happen when we use the Sample of Monster Blood on it.

Furthermore, we can go to the lowest floor and find the following right at the end:

Last floor of MOTA’s extension

We will find two unmovable skulls and a mysterious skull in the middle. When we use the Sample of Monster Blood in the skull in the middle, the two other skulls will burst into flames for a second and our character will be granted access to a room in the south containing a Broken Compass which is obtainable only once per character…

This is what we know so far…

Oh! But there’s so much more…

Hidden in Plain Sight

Have you ever wondered if there’s more to the ultimate challenges of Tibia than just a boss with a tricky mechanic, interesting pieces of lore and a juicy reward in the end? We’ve also wondered that a lot. Sadly, like many of our readers, we’re definitely not the most leveled players in this game. We spend so much time reading books, over-analyzing dialogues and finding ways to break open a certain lock of a certain demon cage in the cellar of a certain scatterbrained sorcerer that we don’t really have time, or sometimes even interest in killing the infinite waves of evil monsters that plague our world.

We don’t let this small issue become bigger than us. We have a great deal of friends and allies that have helped us over the years to inspect and analyze places that have a level of difficulty that makes us shiver in our seats.

Our expedition to Mirrored Nightmare, which we will share in a future article.

Thanks to these expeditions we found a very interesting thing in one of the five seals that hold the aspects of Goshnar… The Soul Wars.

According to Lore, Soul Wars take place in Zarganash, a place where the souls of the dead will lurk around when they still have unfinished business in the land of the living. This place under regular circumstances should not be shown in the regular map since it doesn’t take place in our base dimension, which is what happens to Winter and Summer courts that take place in the dream-realm.

The place where Winter/Summer courts are on the world map.

What they look like on the minimap

But there’s a place that doesn’t follow this rule: The Furious Crater. This place has extremely dangerous creatures in several levels until we reach the bottom of the crater, which in the world map is shown like a mass of water but in the minimap we can see the true nature of this place… The Goshar’s Cruelty lair.

World map view

Minimap view

An Ominous Discovery

It was in this place, the Furious Crater, where we found something quite familiar… Rivers of blood, unmovable skulls everywhere and a certain chest on the bottom floor. It all looked too oddly familiar… Until we found something we were definitely not expecting at all…

Thanks to Chrixz and Sahul for the amazing help

We also found something odd with the chest located at the bottom of the furious crater, since it gives a huge variety of items. These are what we got from our testings:

So we can assume that the diabolic skull is the rarest of them all. Let’s take a look at the item and its description:

You see a diabolic skull.

It weighs 2.10 oz.

It is made of gold and rubies.

Don’t you find it odd?… maybe when you look at the sample of monster blood’s item and description you’ll see what’s weird here.

You see a sample of monster blood.

It weighs 0.85 oz.

The blood in this test tube is of a very deep ruby red.

Alright… there’s definitely something odd here… Let’s take a closer look at what we have in our pockets since the last expedition to MOTA. We should have the Sample of Monster Blood and a Broken Compass. But wait a minute, why would anyone want a broken compass when you can buy it for 10.000 gp afterwards when you’re doing the Carnivoras part for the Dream Courts Quest? We have the following theory: the compass is actually a map.

They have the same shape.

Like a match made in heaven… or hell.

And the more you look at it, the more sense it makes. All the entrances fit perfectly with the compass sprite.

Not only that, you remember the boss room that was hiding itself under the blue mantle of the seas? This is the only part of the furious crater that’s not visible though the minimap although it’s on ground floor.

Worldmap View, floor 0

Minimap View, floor 0

Both overlapping, with the same shape on them.

Well, there’s an item that fits perfectly with this shape, and has a “use with” option…

Charged Compass (blue), one of four colors of compasses.

It fits perfectly as well.

Not one, not two, not three…

What’s even more puzzling is that we have four colors of compasses, but we not only have one, but four mysterious skulls in Furious Crater. All of them very well hidden in plain sight. We made a map to illustrate them all.

In the following map, the glowing skulls are mysterious skulls, while the skulls without glow are unmovable skulls that can be walked over.

Floor +4, two mysterious skulls, four unmovable skulls.

Floor +3, one mysterious skull, one unmovable skull.

Floor +2, one mysterious skull, one unmovable skull.

Floor +1, one unmovable skull.

Groundfloor, no skulls, only the chest to the west.

Let’s recap:

4 mysterious skulls

4 colors of the compasses

A sample of a ruby color blood

A skull with ruby eyes

What’s hidden in this strange place? There’s a piece of extra information that will help you to solve this mystery once and for all. The Diabolic Skull is also dropped rarely by a monster that’s also found in Soul Wars: The Brachiodemon. This evil creature lurks in the dungeon called Claustrophobic Inferno, where we can also find Infernal Demons and Infernal Phantoms. Perhaps we can also find a Mysterious skull there?

To be continued…

Stay tuned.