MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

I've seen folks bring this up from time to time and I thought I might as well throw my own idea in. Currently Mining is really not too great. You have to go to a specific dungeon (I guess giant caves/ant hell works too but not really?) and then find the plots on each floor, mine them dry, and then leave. The only good thing about this, or should be the main draw, is that said location is also the main place to refine those ores! So it's a win/win right? Wrong. Ores are 2x2 in size, only stack to 10, and 5 are needed of one type to try your hand at turning them into an ingot.

The problem now comes in with Metallurgy. This is a skill you rank, that increases your chance to actually find something on one of the many beaches all over Iria (or even Nekojima) where you can find up to 3 ore (based on rank) and even a gem rarely, used for upgrades and ego food and other things here and there, or nekojima gems at nekojima which are just alt ego food more commonly. Metal can also get the gathering % bonus of rain without requiring rain cast to do so, unlike mining, but this isn't a massive upside, just a small one. The real upside comes in the form of the ore stack sizes. Ore from Metallurgy is 1x1 and still stacks up to 10 while only requiring 5 per refine. In a completely empty player inv (6x10), you can store...

15 stacks of 2x2 ore, that's 30 attempts...
or
60 stacks of 1x1 ore, 120 attempts!

That is a CRAZY advantage on space and lets you go crazy at the refining post. Who cares if your ore isn't coming from the mine right there, this is much more space and time efficient! The worst part, even if we double the stack size of the 2x2 to 20, it's still only 60 attempts ontop of the fact you have to run around to each new area in the dungeon that has the spots once your spots are dried up (unlike that of the long beaches that have spots that refresh fairly quickly all around you) and you have 0 chance at getting gems from mining as well.

Yes, you can upgrade your pick for faster gathering and targeting a specific ore, but it's really not much of a boon honestly. I know we can't add a skill for mining so people are always going to go after Metallurgy for at least the stats, but this is just absurd how powerful one is compared to the other. There is literally NO reason to mine, unless you don't have the ap to spend on Metallurgy.

Edit: Checked to see if mimics should be brought up and yeah.. Mimics can't fit an ENTIRE inv of 2x2 ore, they have 6x9 bag space, so another advantage to Metallurgy.

Ore stacks increased to 25 (From the example before, that's 75 attempts), harvestable ore from a node increased to 10, and the chance at gems, both neko and Metallurgy ones, but at a rate similar to Metallurgy if not slightly less.

This way Metallurgy isn't overshadowed by mining, mining can still be very good to use if you don't want to spend AP, and it has a small bonus as well in the form of gems rarely.