MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

So, if you're like me, the FoV probably feels awful to you! And probably other stuff, too! You're REALLY gonna want Kanan and AstralWorld. If, in the distant future, the AstralWorld link is busted or outdated, you're gonna have to find the new one yourself. the Kanan one should stay up to date, though. If you don't know how github works, you can find the install to the right side of the page under the "releases" section. Just drop those funny files into the MabiPro directory and open the game (you don't have to login to a character) to make sure they installed correctly. If the Kanan window pops up a few seconds after launching the game, click the fat AstralWorld button on the window and make sure theres an AstralWorld Patch menu visible.



Once that's done, close the game and start messing with astral.ini because the in-game settings don't really explain what anything is. The in-game settings for Kanan are better than editting config.txt yourself though. Make sure to click File > Save Config whenever you change stuff you wanna keep in Kanan, and Save Settings to INI for AstralWorld if you edit those in-game.

For recommended settings, in astral.ini I recommend changing these from default:
EnableSelfRightClick=0
-Theres probably some funny tech with being able to right-click yourself, but it kinda gets in the way most of the time as a new player.
TargetProps=0
-This ones already default but I tricked myself into thinking setting it to 1 was a good idea longterm. Don't do that.
ShowClockMinutes=1
EnableCutsceneSkip=0
-I assumed this would add the option to skip cutscenes if you pressed ESC or something, but it just autoskips all of them.
DisplayNamesFar=0
-That seems to be further than I need as a new player. Can change later if needed.
ShowSimpleFPS=0
-Even on Simple mode, the AstralWorld FPS display is very fat and distracting so I don't recommend keeping it on at all times. If you have another program showing FPS, that'd be better.
ModifyRenderDistance=25000
-Change depending on your own performance. Even with my good 2026 computer, some big towns still lag my shit. I still only get like 5 FPS in the worst towns at 50000 render distance. This ones gonna depend on your own hardware or if you manage to fix whatever bottleneck causes those issues, but my personal value is 25000 as a balance between good visibility and being able to actually still walk around the laggier towns.
FasterInterfaceWindows=0
-That settings just for people who have 4000 hours in the game. The animations of the interfaces popping in is pleasant to me, but if you're impatient and wanna save a tiny fraction of a second for every UI element you open then keep it at 1.
ShowUnknownQuestObjectives=0
ShowUnknownSkillRequirements=0
ShowUnknownUpgrades=0
ShowUnknownTitles=0
-These ones are just developer intent. If youre the kinda person who doesn't care for secrets that you have to go and figure out in MMOs and you just wikisearch everything, yeah you can enable these. Similarly, you can scroll back up and set ClearDungeonFog=0 but I prefer to keep that one on as its just randomly generated dungeon layouts.
TimeAlarm=0
-By default, AstralWorld will yell at you every 5:00 am that it is TRANSFORMATION TIME! That's a toy you unlock later and you can reenable it if you get that toy. There's also a bit of an annoying side-effect the alarm function adds where you can't see how many Naos you have left.

Once you got all those settings how you want them, go in game (you dont have to login to a character) and press INSERT if the Kanan window isn't popping up by default. I won't go into the details of Kanan becaues most of the settings in Kanan are pretty self explainatory and easily changeable in-game. I dunno what the fuck a Nagle is, though..

Keep in mind the only things you can do that are truly permament is your characters name, and your characters race. Picking the race that you wanna main is honestly kinda hard to decide! Though keep in mind that regardless of if you wanna main an Elf or Giant, you should still probably start human. This is for a few reasons.

For one, if you DON'T pick human, you are permamently missing out on 2 character slots, as you can only unlock additional Elf and Giant slots if you start human. Elves and Giants can't unlock more character cards. Missing out on those alt slots means you're functionally missing tripling your bank space. For me, this is one of the most annoying limitations of the server so hopefully the devs can find a way to bypass this. It's apparently pretty hard to try and fix on their end. Thankfully, unlocking an Elf and Giant card is extremely quick and easy if you have someone helping you. Ask in global chat, tell them youre completely new to the game, and hopefully someone will help you out!

The second reason you should probably just play human is that currently, Elves and Giants can't do the first 3 main quests, G1 G2 and G3. These are called the Generation quests and they're pretty good for getting you into the game and showing you around. As an Elf or Giant, after their tutorials are over, you're given almost no direction and your only main quest is a very tedious one that I still haven't gotten around to doing. This is also something I hope the devs are able to fix eventually.

The third reason is that Elves and Giants are, by design, VERY limited in what they can do. Elves are rather squishy, can't really wear much heavy armor, can't use twohanded weapons, and aren't even better at magic than humans. Giants are VERY limited in what they can wear, meaning most clothes you find, you won't be able to put on and see what it looks like. Additionally, Giants are incapable of using Bows and Crossbows at all, so all of the skills relating to those weapons are also unuseable.

The final reason is that if you want to play an Elf or Giant because you heard they're optimal for ranged or melee...well that's true, but it's a good idea to get a feel for what those combat styles feel like before you dedicate your main to them. If it turns out you don't like ranged combat (because you missed a 99% shot 2 times in a row) but you're an elf, then you're forever very gimped. If you're a giant but don't want to play melee, you are entirely missing out on having ranged combat as an option. They're also mildly more inefficient at magic than Elves and Humans, but i'm unsure as to how much.

For all of those reasons, I suggest you play a bit of human first as a tutorial, then if you want to make the swap to Elf or Giant, ask someone to help you unlock them. Keep in mind that if the person helping you is an Elf or Giant themselves, they can only really help you get to the spot where you unlock them during the day. If its a human helping you, it just costs them 10k to teleport you to the place.

Here's some of the settings that you may want to change:
(Keep in mind that if the translation of the game is updated, some of the names here might be different.)
System > Video > Use 3D Interface: Toggle it off, it looks really bad and makes in-world text unreadable.
System > Effect > Critical Effect: This flashes the screen when you get a crit, it's a bit disorienting so I recommend turning it off.
System > Effect > Glow Effect: This is the horrible bloom thats present in many 3D games of this era, turn it off unless you enjoy the Oblivion experience.
Game > Control > Press Esc to cancel skills: You probably want a better hotkey for this because cancelling skills is very important, turn it off before you build a bad muscle memory.
Game > Control > CTRL-Key Target System: Probably Mouse Cursor, I got a bit confused about why I couldn't target the correct thing sometimes with it on Current Target. Experiment with this setting once you got some personal combat experience, though.
Game > Control > Reserve Attack: Once is my recommendation, but you can experiment with the Multiple Times option. This settings kinda sorta functions as an input butter. If you have it off, then your attacks might come out too slow to react in time. Kindly enough, the game also indicates what skill you have buffered currently, so you can just press the cancel hotkey to stop doing it before it goes off.

So... the way keybinds work in this game is kinda weird. Despite there being an action bar at the top of the screen, you can't actually rebind the F1-F12 keys, so if you want to use skills on sensible keys, there's a bit of an odd way to go about it. Let me list some keybinds you can unbind for space, first. Also be sure to press Apply after every change.

Non-Obvious Unimportant Binds:
Explore using L-Rod: You can just do this from the emote menu, you don't have to do it that often. It's also fine to hotkey onto the F1-F12 action bar at the top.
Change Weapon Set: I'm pretty sure this just does the same thing as tab, and tab is unchangeable. If you dont like to press tab to swap your weapon set, you can set this to something comfortable.
Eat Food: You don't do this often enough to need a keybind, imo. Low priority.
Switch to Skill Window #1-7: These just swap your skill tab i.e. All, Combat, Life, etc. Not too useful and it can mess up your skill keybinds.

Important Binds+Recommendations:
Pet Window: Pets are very important for everything you do in the game, and you might need to swap them around a lot depending on what you're doing. Put this one on a comfortable UI key. There's also keybinds for summon specific pets and unsummoning them, use those keybinds when you need to.
Cancel Skill: This is VERY important for combat, and seeing as this game doesn't let you jump, I just put this on space. If you're a freak and wanna press ESC to cancel instead, yeah don't bother. Take care of your hands and wrists, though.
Mount/Dismount: Your mountable pets have to be mounted manually because summoning them doesn't auto-mount you.
Take Off/Land: There's no jump button in this game, so there needs to be a dedicated key for getting an applicable mount to start flying.
Pet Inventory: Every pet has an inventory of some size, and it's pretty good! Right clicking them and opening their inventory is gonna get annoying after a bit, so def bind this.

The way binding abilities work:
So if you don't wanna reach over and slap the F1-12 keys, you can use the "Use the skill #1-#9 on the skill window" keys to function as that, instead. If you open the skill window, you'll notice that the first 9 skills over there (once you unlock more than 9) have those numbers next to the icon. That's assigned to those keybinds. You can reorder the skills in your skill menu, but only those first 9 skills' position will be saved after you close the game. Additionally, if you swap to another tab in the skills menu, like Life, your keybinds will be set to that tab until you swap back. Seeing as you can use useful magic while you have a non-magic weapon out, and you can use useful melee skills with a bow or wand out, i recommend you choose based on the All tab, as those skills arent accessible if you have another tab selected.
A handful of combat skills, not a lot of them, have cooldowns. If you wanna keep track of a cooldown, I recommend you put it somewhere on your action bar at the top of the screen. You can use the rest of the action bar for uncommonly used abilities and skills, or you can use the software for your ugly gamer mouse or keyboard to rebind the F1-12 keys to more comfortable positions if you need more than 9 skills (you probably will).

I already covered the race choice problem, which is probably the biggest mistake you can make. Here's a collection of smaller mistakes early on that can be nice to avoid.

-Most of the maps on the first continent are no-fly zones, so don't save up for a flying mount if you're mostly in Uladh. Definitely get one before you do too much in Iria, though.
-As of writing this guide, the translation is still very half-finished, mostly machine translated, and not very proofread. Don't be afraid of looking up how to do a quest if the info it's giving you isn't helping as much as it should.
-ill add more once i can think of them!!
-The NPC Intimacy system is, as of writing this, presumeably bugged? I've tried my hardest to find out how it works and nothing I can find online is consistent with the things I've seen in-game. Getting an NPC to open their secret shop is a HUGE pain in the ass, so unless you're reading this guide a couple of months/years into the future and they've changed how it works, my recommendation is to just not bother and wait to get Likeability Potions instead. Anyone mildly levelled in potion making will probably make them for you if you have the materials.

Since this is an older version of the game, all of the info on the wiki for the official game is likely outdated, especially the quests. Additionally, as of me writing this, you can't view page history. Thankfully you can just quickly make an account on the wiki, and that allows you to view history. Any edits before April 27, 2011 are probably accurate, but keep in mind there's a lot of backported content, so some things they added later in the game might be in here.

Theres also a datamined library of all the items, enchants, upgrades, and titles in the server that you can find here. I'm unsure how up to date it's kept, though. It is very useful to check what items have been backported, though. If the site throws some errors at you when you try to search something, use a different browser. It seems to not be a fan of my firefox-based security browser.

-This is actually the video guide that convinced me to try the game out! It showed me how interesting and unique the combat is! If you need some tips on basic stuff that might be confusing, this very short playlist will help a lot.
-If you have inventory and storage issues, this guide should help.

From my experience, it doesn't really matter as much as some of the guides I read make it out to be. I recommend either 10 or 17 though. If you pick age 10, then you can get a title with good stats pretty early if you kill a bear before an IRL week goes by and you age up. If you pick 17, you get proficency with your weapons faster, which means you can upgrade them quicker. You also get more skill points initially, though it's not a huge amount. Also keep in mind that when you rebirth you can only pick your age younger, not older.

Pros:
10% faster movespeed than humans
Mildly higher potential HP, STR and WILL
Can only dual-wield Blunt Weapons as opposed to humans only being able to dual-wield swords
Can use two-handed swords with one hand (meaning they can use a shield off-hand while holding one)
Have access to comically large weapons and Large Shields which block a decent bit more than any shields humans can use
Smash charges in 1.6 seconds vs humans and EVENTUALLY elves 2 seconds
Counterattack hits harder
Unique skills: Throwing Attack (Atlatls), Stomp, Taunt, Wind Guard
Big

Cons:
Not able to equip any Bows or Crossbows, nor can they learn any Ranged Attacks. Throwing Attack is technically a melee attack.
Mildly lower potential INT and MP, levelling Magic Mastery gives them less MP, and most spells cost more MP. Damage output is mostly unchanged, though.
Can't learn Play Dead
Can't fit on most mounts summoned by humans or elves
Finding clothes and armor that fits you can be a pain

Pros:
30% faster movespeed than humans
Decently higher DEX potential, mildly higher MP potential
Can move while charging with a bow or crossbow
Can use bow and crossbow attacks while mounted
Charges Magnum Shot a full second faster than humans
Unique skills: Mirage Missile, Hide, their Final Hit variant is with bows instead of melee

Cons:
Can't use many two-handed weapons
Can't dual-wield
Can't use most (all?) heavy armor
Counterattack is weaker
Windmill is weaker
Defense doesn't provide as much passive defense as it levels

Placeholder until i get some more pets and find out how useful they are. so far id recommend a Thuroughbred Horse as pretty high priority because its A LOT faster than the wretched Shire. If you want a combo of a pet faster than the Shire + combat pet, the White Tiger is pretty good. If you wanna get started on doing stuff in Iria, get an Eagle. Also having at least 1 Magic Wardrobe helps store a lot of spaces worth of gear, plus has a lot of space. It's a bit expensive, though.