Mystery of the Unjaga

There are some Tibian creatures which earned legendary status due to their rarity or aura of mystery that surrounds them. You have most probably heard about the Yeti, Midnight Panther, or Crustacea Gigantica. But there is one creature out there, somewhere in Tibia and it’s so incredibly rare, that even the most experienced players have never heard its’ name. I, myself have doubts if it exists, but let’s investigate the subject thoroughly. Let’s try to find the Unjaga.

The only hint that we can find fairly easily is the official creatures list in the library section of tibia.com

As we can see in the first sentence the Unjaga is mentioned along with Midnight Panther and Yeti, as one of the mythical creatures. Apparently, this is the only place among all Tibian sites, where this creature is even noted. This article is the first public and solid attempt to find anything else about this subject.

Unjaga – the meaning

Let’s focus on the creature’s name first. Midnight panthers can be associated with the jungle, Yeti with some snowy and cold regions, Crustacea Gigantica – underwater and humid locations, Undead Cavebear – probably with other undead. This is pretty straightforward, but Unjaga is not the case. At first, nothing special comes to my mind when I think of this name.

Let’s try with google then:
“unjaga” – 1130 results
“the unjaga” – 202 results

This is surprisingly low, especially taking into consideration that most of these results are quotes from the tibia.com library. There are however some interesting hits which we will focus on.

1. The first hit leads us to Canada, where in 1792 explorer Alexander Mackenzie reached the territory of the Dane-zaa, known as the Beaver tribe. There was a river which they called “Oon-cha-ga”, “Unchagah’” or “‘Unjigah” which means “large river” or “peace” and was written down by Mackenzie as Unjaga.
   Unfortunately, this is not very helpful. Should we look for the mysterious beaver? Let’s move on to the other finds.
    
2. There was an incident in the Louvre museum in Paris, in 1956. Bolivian tourist threw a stone at the famous „Mona Lisa” painting, scratching her left elbow. His name was Hugo Unjaga Villegas.
   The only hint here would be the country – Bolivia. This also not any good for our research.
    
3. I have also found a touristic blog where someone mentions that some part of the Zanzibar island is called “Unjaga” by the local people.
   Apparently the blog owner misspelled Unjaga with Unguja. :/
    
4. There is a specific word used by the Zulu people. It’s „unyaka” and it’s pronounced as unjaga. It means “year”.
   Finally, something interesting, as it at least leads us to the specific part of the earth and a specific environment. Zulu live in South Africa. We have some locations in Tibia which may resemble the African areas. Personally, I find it the most valuable hint out of those three.

I have also tried searching through other search engines and I used about 10 overall, more and less known. No interesting results.

Anagrams

If you carefully look around, you will find out that there are lots of anagrams in Tibia. What exactly the anagram is? Let me quote Wikia:

Anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once (…)

I don’t want to spoil much of them, as we will probably write a separate article about anagrams, but let me give you one nice Tibian example. Do you remember one of the bosses on Rookgaard, Teleskor?

If we swap some letters, we get…

But, let’s get back to the topic. I used a very useful site to find all possible combinations of letters taken from “Unjaga” word. The result was 720 combinations which is quite a big number. There are some duplicated values however, so after quickly filtering them out in Excel we get a total of 361 unique combinations.

I analyzed all of them and chose the most interesting ones:

• Agajnu – name of the city in game The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
• Gajuna – village in India
• Gujana – it’s Guyana in polish. Maybe a hint about the creature’s possible location? If Guyana is in South America, then some jungle areas should be possible
• Jguana – iguana? It’s getting interesting. That could be a hint that we are looking for some kind of a big lizard
• Jungaa – jungle?
• Ngujaa – it means “sore” in some Australian dialect, one source also states that it means “hero” in Swahilli (African language)

Just by looking at the letters and these combinations I think that there can be some association with Africa or if we think of Tibian realm, some desert/very hot places. Jungle could also be the key, so it may be even Tiquanda.

Tibian languages

We can find various races monsters or creatures in the Tibian world and some of them developed their own languages. If we analyze the spelling and pronunciation of the word “Unjaga” it’s clear that it doesn’t fit most of the languages used in Tibia. There are however some potentially interesting ones, where Unjaga could actually mean something. That would also be a very good hint, as some of the NPCs who speak such languages could react to the keyword and shed some light on the origin of the mysterious creature.

We have 3 interesting languages to be checked. We have done it by asking some NPC representants mentioned below. Languages such as human or elven were excluded straightaway, as they are quite complex and Unjaga just doesn’t sound good there.

Unjaga and Tibian NPCs

I questioned some NPCs which I thought could have some kind of connection with the Unjaga or other mysterious creatures. Some of them were chosen based on the fact that they speak one of the above-mentioned languages.  By “question” I mean asking about really big numbers of keywords – several thousands.

NPCs which I talked to:

• Hairycles – in the jungle, in close proximity to midnight panther
• The Blind Prophet – the same as above
• Angus – Explorers Society representant in Port Hope, could possibly know something about jungle mysteries
• Rottin Wood – hunters’ leader in Outlaw Camp, should know a lot about hunting and animals
• Sinatuki – speaks strange language, where the word “unjaga” could actually fit
• Navigator – he speaks deepling language and it’s also worth mentioning that “Deepling race” translates to “Njey” in their language. That sounds quite similar to Unjaga
• Lothar – has great knowledge about tameable creatures, also midnight panther.
• Kazzan – leader of Darashia, very old NPC, present in-game since 2002, social and spiritual leader with potentially great knowledge about Darama, desert, and the region overall.
  
  Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about the Unjaga. I have of course asked them about different combinations of this word, also making it plural, like “unjagas”, “unjagi”, etc.

Interesting fact: Unjaga in Njey would be written as C”J^8^.

Cipsoft’s statement

Sometimes the simplest methods are the best, so I decided to… Ask Cipsoft directly about Unjaga. Why not? I didn’t expect any spectacular answer, but it’s not just a simple copy/paste too. Take a look:

So at least we have a confirmation that Unjaga is indeed a mythical creature and it perhaps (?) exists in Tibia. Moreover, there might be more than one creature of this kind somewhere. Actually, I’m satisfied.

Some theories

As we already mentioned in the article, there was an American Indian tribe which called themselves “Unjaga” which meant “beaver” in their language. Are there any beavers in Tibia? I totally forgot about it, but my team mate Mogh reminded me that there is one specific NPC who mentions these animals and moreover there is an item called “a flask with beaver bait” which is used during The New Frontier quest.

Could this be a hint that our Unjaga is a giant beaver? Such beavers actually existed in real life (same as Yeti is believed to exist in rl), so that could be a point. We will write about it in the next section of the article.

As we know, all bosses have defined time range which specifies how often specific boss spawns and moreover there is another attribute which specifies how often given boss stays in the game before it disappears. My own theory is that Unjaga can possibly be in game and maybe even uses a known sprite of existing creature, but it spawns incredibly rarely – like once a year for some minutes. That would make it practically impossible to meet, yet the legends would be true.

Cryptozoology vs Tibia

Let’s start with a short definition of cryptozoology:
Cryptozoology is a pseudoscience and subculture that aims to prove the existence of entities from the folklore record, such as Bigfoot, the chupacabra, or Mokele-mbembe. Cryptozoologists refer to these entities as cryptids, a term coined by the subculture. Because it does not follow the scientific method, cryptozoology is considered a pseudoscience by the academic world: it is neither a branch of zoology nor folkloristics.

One of the best examples of a cryptid is Yeti, well known both in rl and in Tibia. Midnight panther can be also treated as one (both in Tibia and rl), as it was excessively hunted by lizards, nearly to extinction. The question is, can the Unjaga also be a cryptid? I think it’s very likely, however it doesn’t help us much in terms of our research, as there are lots of cryptids among lots of animal species. We talked about giant beavers before, is there a giant beaver cryptid known in real life? Of course, there is. Giant beavers roamed territories of North America during the Pleistocene epoch, but went extinct at the end of the Ice Age (about 10.000 years ago).

According to the Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology, there are some reports nowadays of giant beavers sightings in Canada and the USA. That could mean that these are the same prehistoric beavers that survived and can be very rarely spotted up to this day.
It is now totally understandable that dwarfs could mount beavers of this size and that Unjaga could probably be a unique, giant beaver, maybe big enough to be mounted by a human. This is just a theory, but in my opinion, it fits surprisingly well.

Even if the creature is not implemented to the game, then dear Cipsoft – feel free to use my ideas from this article.
And I encourage you, readers, to look for Unjaga on your own. Every idea is worth checking and who knows? One day you may be the one to solve the mystery, just like the co-founder of this site – Mogh was among those who ultimately solved the mystery of the Mahatheb.

Sources:

https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/Languages

https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/A_Wrinkled_Bonelord

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoology

https://allthatsinteresting.com/castoroides-giant-beaver

https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Giant_beaver