Nioh 3 Mujina Guide: How to deal with the mimic badger

Mujina is the mimic badger that has been known to surprise many players when opening large treasure chests throughout the Nioh series. It goes without saying that this crafty yokai is also returning in Nioh 3, but it now has more tricks up its sleeve.

Nioh 3 has more treasure chest designs and other interactable facilities with rewards, so it might be getting more difficult to predict a Mujina's appearance. But we will share what we have observed to prepare you for such encounters.

The basics for dealing with a Mujina

As usual, you will first need to get used to opening the Gestures menu (R1+Options on a PlayStation controller, or G on a PC keyboard). If you want to be very safe, you can try a Whistle at the front of every large chest you see, but we'll get back to this later on.

In any case, once a Mujina has sprung up, unless you attack it immediately, it will first mimic your current appearance and loadout. It will then do a gesture, and you are supposed to respond with the exact same gesture. However, it has been known that Mujina will only refer to the first page of your Gesture list. While you can put any of your favorite Gestures there, the defaultly placed "This Way" and "Taunt" may move a bit too similarly, so you may want to swap one of them away to another page.

You only have one chance to get it right. If you do it correctly, Mujina will jump happily and leave rewards without any fight. Otherwise, you will have no choice but to kill the mimic to get whatever is supposed to be in the treasure chest.

But with Nioh 3 now having two separate builds (Samurai & Ninja) for your character, you may want to take advantage of this by Whistling with your weaker build, and then switching to your main build after Mujina has mimicked the former just in case the worst case happens.

Exclusive rewards from a Mujina

The first time you complete a successful gesture quiz, you will unlock the Overjoyed gesture. If you fail, you can instead unlock the Frustrated gesture. Note that you'll also need to actually kill a mimicked Mujina 3 times to have its additional entry registered in the Yokai Encyclopedia.

Once you have done all of the above, for all subsequent encounters with a Mujina, you can only expect several random drops, as well as a rare chance of a Mujina Soul Core and a new skill or martial art if it's from a new map-marked chest.

How to tell a Mujina Chest

Even though Nioh 3 has added Treasure Chest marks on the map, those still won't distinguish chests that host a Mujina. However, you can still utilize the known method of observing the chest's design.

The usual black treasure chest usually has 2 gold platings on each corner, so if it has 3 gold platings on each corner instead, you have a positive ID on a Mujina chest. However, the series staple black chest now only appears in the Heian era map.

The Warring States and Bakumatsu era maps feature a different chest design. It will be more difficult to identify a Mujina chest at first due to already having 3 gold platings with all the elaborate decoration ropes. However, we have determined upon closer inspection that a Mujina chest will have its gold platings rather displaced, especially the topmost ones.

The Antiquity era map has yet another chest design, but it does not have any Mujinas, let alone any Nigitama friendlies to our recollection.

Mujina can appear at more locations in Nioh 3

We did say earlier that the Mujina has more tricks up its sleeve in Nioh 3. If you're only expecting it to appear from treasure chests, be advised that it can now appear on several other occasions.

One of the new possible encounters will happen at a Six Jizo group that has a compulsory offering box. If you're very stingy and only donate a penny or two, a Mujina will be sure to shock you if it resides there. But when we tested a more generous amount of money like around 1,000, the Mujina can just show up simply without any shock attacks.

An even less common situation will be when you have to find a missing Jizo head, as a Mujina can and will hide itself inside that very head. We noticed at least two occasions of this happening in the Heian era map (south of the village in northeastern Sagano) and the Bakumatsu era map (near the Mibu Temple main gate shrine) in the initial run.