Tibia’s Excalibug Mystery: Tracing the Hidden NPC Dialog Chain from Partos to Chatterbone

The Sword Nobody Has Found

The Excalibug — listed in Tibia’s item database as the Magic Longsword — is the game’s longest-running unsolved mystery. CipSoft’s MMORPG has been running since 1997 and in all that time no player has documented a legitimate, reproducible way to obtain it through an in-game quest. King Tibianus asks you to retrieve it. An undead NPC admits to hiding it. And buried in old server-side scripts are dialog blocks that were quietly commented out before most players ever saw them.

Partos and the Commented-Out Grape Quest

When RealOTS — a recreation of early Tibia built from original server data — became accessible to researchers, people started reading through NPC script files properly. One of the finds that came out of that work is an NPC named Partos with a fully written dialog chain that is entirely disabled in the code.

The mechanic is a classic item gate. Bring Partos one grape (item type 3592) and he opens up. Ask him about the Excalibug after handing it over:

Topic=2,"excalibug" -> "My late mentor once told me he found a wallcarving about this sword in a cave beneath the castle."
Topic=2,"wallcarving" -> "That part of the dungeon was recently blocked by a cave-in. It was unsecure before, and only a fool would have entered there. I stayed out and alive."

Without the grapes he shuts the conversation down instantly: “Excalibug? No way that I tell you something about it!” That hard block is almost certainly why this link in the chain was never widely discussed. Every player who walked up and just asked got a wall and moved on.

The cave-in detail is worth holding onto. Blocked passages that open under specific conditions have precedent in Tibia design. Whether the passage Partos describes corresponds to actual geometry in the old map data is something RealOTS could in principle be tested against.

Bozo’s Demoncarving and the Ruthless Seven

The keyword “wallcarving” — the exact term Partos introduces — is also recognized by Bozo, the court jester living in Thais Castle. He mentions hiding in the dungeons after a prank gone badly wrong, and seeing carvings on the walls there. Press on “demoncarving” and he gets specific:

"demoncarving" -> "Yes, they showed demons, seven actually, dancing around a sword! In a flaming pit of some kind."

Seven demons. A sword at the center. A flaming pit. That maps cleanly onto the Ruthless Seven — Tibia’s seven demon overlords who appear across the deeper dungeon content — with what sounds like the Excalibug either imprisoned in or bound to the scene. Ask Bozo about the flaming pit itself and he deflects toward mages and mystics.

The Bozo connection matters because it stitches the keyword Partos gives you to a completely separate NPC in a different part of the city. It suggests these dialogs were designed as a chain players were meant to follow, not isolated flavor text.

Muriel, Chatterbone, and the Words “We Hid It”

“Flaming pit” leads to Muriel, who identifies it as the Pits of Inferno — also called the Nightmare Pits — said to be hidden somewhere in the Plains of Havoc to the east. That part is familiar to anyone who has played through the Pits of Inferno quest; the location exists in the live game as a major dungeon tied directly to the Ruthless Seven lore.

Chatterbone is the most pointed NPC in the whole sequence. Speaking in the fragmented cadence of the undead, he gives two responses that stand apart from all the others:

• On “flaming pit”: “… we conquered them… held them so long… long ago…”
• On “excalibug”: “… we hid it… so long ago… so long…”

That pronoun is the detail that makes this more than passive lore. Chatterbone is not describing events he witnessed. He is describing events he took part in. The sword was not lost — it was deliberately hidden by a group he belonged to. That implies agency, intent, and probably a specific location that made sense to whoever chose it.

Who “we” refers to is not spelled out. Chatterbone is a skeleton, suggesting he died at some point and remained as an undead presence. If he and his faction hid the Excalibug long ago, the hiding place predates whatever killed them — which puts it potentially deep in content that was never fully activated on live servers.

King Tibianus Then and Now

In Tibia version 7.7, King Tibianus had an active quest hook for the Excalibug:

"excalibug" -> "It's the sword of the kings. If you could return this weapon to me I would reward you beyond your dreams."
"reward"    -> "Well, if you want a reward, go on a quest to bring me Excalibug!"

On live servers today the dialog is softer. He still calls it the sword of the Kings and still promises a reward — but a player who triggers the topic without the item gets brushed off: “I don’t see how you would deserve a reward right now.” The quest hook survives. The open invitation to go fetch it does not.

The change is telling. CipSoft pulled back the explicit call-to-action, possibly because the quest’s implementation was never finished, or possibly because they made a deliberate choice to keep the sword as permanent mythology rather than a solvable puzzle. Either way, the underlying quest structure was real enough that the king’s dialog was written to receive the item.

There is a long-standing community claim that a player known as Honken owns an actual Magic Longsword — one of the earliest examples of the item found in the game. If that’s still accurate, having him approach Tibianus and document whatever the current triggered response is would be genuinely worth capturing.

Reading the Chain as a Whole

The full sequence runs: Partos (grapes required) introduces “wallcarving beneath the castle” — Bozo picks up “wallcarving” and returns “demoncarving” — “demoncarving” reveals seven demons around a sword in a flaming pit — Muriel names the pit as the Pits of Inferno in the Plains of Havoc — Chatterbone says his faction hid the Excalibug. The trail starts under Thais Castle and ends pointing east toward major endgame dungeon content.

Whether the Excalibug is actually retrievable in the current game through a hardcoded quest that was never publicly documented is genuinely unknown. CipSoft has never confirmed it either way. The commented-out Partos dialog at minimum shows that a player-facing acquisition quest was written and then pulled, which is different from the sword never having been intended as obtainable at all.