Last updated May 13, 2023
Continued from Part 7: Fixing Mod Conflicts with Merged Patches, or start at the beginning with Basic Morrowind Installation.
Now that we have fixed most of the bugs, we’re going to make a few improvements to gameplay, most of which are optional. Remember, this guide is meant to be purist-friendly, but that doesn’t mean purist-only. The addons on this page are well worth a look even if you’re a diehard vanilla Morrowind fan, but it won’t hurt you to skip them (beyond not receiving their benefits, of course).
If you’re at all familiar with modding Morrowind, you may think it’s strange that I’d choose now to add these, as opposed to waiting till after installing extra landmasses or other things, or even before other fixes like mesh corrections in the game world. I have reasons for this — first, the addons on this page will round out what I personally consider to be a bare minimum installation, even if you leave the rest of the game in its original state. I’ve played through the game a couple times with the mods on this page as my stopping point.
My other reason is that the next page of this guide is going to focus on mesh fixes and texture resolution improvements, and if all you want is “high-definition vanilla Morrowind,” you can stop there, or even just use the mesh fixes and skip the retexturing. But the mods on this page don’t fit neatly between the upcoming steps, and moving them after the next step would break the flow, since the next few entries are all going to focus on various graphics upgrades that you may not even want. There will be more QoL-related suggestions later but they don’t fit my definition of “bare minimum” enough to warrant inclusion this early.
My other other reason is that I want to get the “most necessary” things done first, before adding to the base game, so if you wanted, you could just quit modding and play through it before trying anything world-changing. My goal is “Good-looking, bug-fixed Morrowind GOTY with a few optional slight feature enhancements.”
This will also allow you to experience Morrowind more closely to how it was designed, albeit with fewer bugs and better gameplay. When we reach the point of anything advanced enough to be game-altering rather than game-improving, I’ll let you know. Remember, vanilla first. I just consider the below to be essential mods that should have been part of vanilla or (in the case of the first one) are needed for modern resolutions.
Clearer, High-Resolution Text
This one requires no introduction or justification at all: Morrowind’s text is noticeably blurry on modern displays and really benefits from enhancement. Better Dialogue Font does this job admirably. It’s a crisp, clear version of the same font Morrowind already uses (Magic Cards). Later on, I’ll give you more details about how to completely change to a new font, if you so desire, but this is the best addon for purist-friendly clearer text.
Putting Off the Expansion Packs
Tribunal and Bloodmoon both add a great deal more adventure to Morrowind, but the game tries to point you toward them far too early — and in both cases, this can get you killed (or otherwise make you completely miserable). Every single person in the game is eager to deliver a single line about Solstheim, the island where Bloodmoon takes place (including characters who aren’t supposed to have any dialogue topics!), and if you decide to go there too early, you probably won’t live long. It’s also annoying to see the Solstheim topic everywhere. And thanks to Tribunal, you’ll start getting nasty surprises as soon as you’ve started to level up at all, and if you investigate these occurrences, you’ll end up in a quest line that isn’t supposed to be started until you’ve beaten the original main quest of Morrowind or are at least pretty far into it (complete with spoilerish, incongruous dialogue that doesn’t account for the fact that you may not have accomplished anything yet). Expansion Delay is the perfect mod to fix this problem by lowering the amount of Solstheim rumors and putting off the beginning of Tribunal until it makes sense. It also works perfectly with Patch for Purists (it’s made by the same developer) and is recommended to be used together with it. It should definitely be in your load order.
Improving the Way Health is Calculated
Even if your only concern is fixing bugs and you’re not interested in modding beyond that, there’s one more type of addon which I consider an absolute necessity: a mod to change how your hit points are calculated. This isn’t 100% purist, but hear me out.
Vanilla Health Calculation
A bit of background: Morrowind uses your Endurance attribute to calculate the hit points you gain when you level up (among some other factors, but Endurance is the most important). What’s wrong with this? Well, your gained hit points are calculated only from your Endurance score at the time you leveled up, and raising your Endurance later on doesn’t retroactively help your health (not even when you fortify your Endurance, even though logically it should).
Why do I think this is wrong? Well, every other one of your attributes scales up in a more straightforward way when you level. Your maximum Magicka at a high level doesn’t depend on how high your Intelligence was during your level-ups, it depends on how high your Intelligence is now. Fatigue (which the later games call Stamina) works similarly although it pulls from more than one attribute. Calculating Health differently effectively penalizes you at later levels for starting the game with a low Endurance, while the other attributes don’t work like this.
Start two identical characters, and focus on raising your Endurance early on one while leaving it till late on the other. The character who went for Endurance first will always have more health than the character who focused on other attributes, even when both characters have all stats at 100 and have leveled up as much as they can.
The “Endurance Rush” and how It Penalizes Organic Gameplay
The need to raise Endurance early leads to the dreaded “Endurance rush” in which players try to max out their Endurance as soon as possible in order to receive the best level-up health benefit. This is usually done through all manner of metagaming and/or exploiting that takes away from the fun of playing and harms immersion. Sure, you can just choose not to rush Endurance, but what’s your roleplaying justification for having worse Health than another character who otherwise has the exact same stats, race, class, and birthsign as you, and just raised their Endurance at a different time? This is why I think the vanilla Health calculation is a developer oversight — I doubt they were going for diversity via hit points in a game where some races have only about five heads to choose from and every character is the exact same height and weight as everyone else of their race and sex. Arbitrary hit point amounts (that you barely get to see unless you fight someone, and even then, you’ll just have a vague idea as the numbers aren’t shown) do not strike me as an attempt at variety, but rather as a mistake.
It also makes the Lady birthsign more tempting than it ought to be, since having an extra 25 Endurance at the start of the game becomes a long-term strategic decision, despite the fact that once you’ve leveled up enough to have 100 in both Endurance and Personality the benefit of the Lady birthsign is effectively nullified — no neat powers, just a shortcut to higher stats you would have gotten eventually anyway (but you neeeed to pick it if you’re rushing Endurance!). And, it makes any class with Endurance as a favored attribute objectively superior for maximum hit points, since your favored attributes always start out higher. In a game that gives you as much freedom as Morrowind, I don’t think Bethesda intended to steer melee-based characters so strictly in this direction just to reach their real maximum potential. I feel you should be able to make more of your development decisions during play, and I do think that if they’d really wanted to so thoroughly tie endgame hit points to birthsign choice, they would have done something similar to what they did with the Magicka-affecting ones like the Mage or Apprentice, which use a multiplier.
On another note, I did say you can just choose not to rush Endurance, but… can you, really? If you can, great! But as for me, I feel compelled to do it, because otherwise I’m constantly aware that I’m not developing my character to their “full, ideal potential.” I can’t really explain why this bothers me, but I know I’m not the only one, and if it bothers you too, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. I can’t resist getting pulled into the numbers game of maxing my stats, and it diminishes my enjoyment of Morrowind to know that I’m making a “mistake” by not rushing Endurance, or that it’s a “sacrifice” to play a mage or other character that isn’t specifically built with the Endurance rush in mind. I hate “missing out” on hit points. It’s just how I am. It took me years to stop taking constant notes on my level-up progress so I could go train appropriately to make sure I’d have x5 modifiers.
Anyway, that concludes my TED talk; now onto the mod! There are actually two options for this specific change. Well, sort of, because one of them is a lot older and can be hard to find, and the other is newer and more recommended. But I’m covering both for reasons that will be apparent shortly.
Killing the “Endurance Rush”
These mods eliminate the “Endurance rush” by recalculating your hit points every time your Endurance changes. Even temporarily fortifying your Endurance actually has a benefit to your health, making those spells much more useful. Even if you like the “Endurance rush” because you prefer min-maxing your character and normally don’t care about leveling up feeling seamless or organic, it’s worth it to avoid needing to train Endurance early on to the expense of other skills (and if you are a min-maxer, you’ll appreciate not missing out on hit points due to early decisions). Overall, I consider this type of mod a must-have, regardless of playstyle.
(Note that there are other options that further change the way you level up, even so far as to attempt to make it happen invisibly in order to yet further increase immersion. Those tend to be much wider ranging in the changes they make to the game, and not really appropriate for a purist playthrough — but there is one leveling mod I recommend later in this entry because it follows the theme of improving, not completely altering.)
MWSE State-Based Health
MWSE State-Based Health is the modern and recommended take on recalculating hit points. It relies on MWSE (as you might have guessed from the name). It’s actually pluginless, as it’s just an MWSE script, so you don’t need to worry about another .esp file in your load order! It also works out of the box on existing characters without you needing to do anything special, so you can install it mid-game as long as you aren’t using anything incompatible with it.
It does require MGE XE, though (relying on its built-in MWSE), which is a problem if you can’t use it. It also has some compatibility issues with other mods that try to manage health, including one listed lower on this page (Improved Vanilla Leveling), but you can fix that with a tweak to the settings if you want to use them together. I recommend you take a quick look at that section (it’s next after Talrivian’s State-Based HP Mod) and familiarize yourself with it first so you can decide whether you want to use it alongside this mod or alone.
If you can’t use MWSE State-Based Health, here’s another option:
Talrivian’s State-Based HP Mod
Talrivian’s State-Based HP Mod works similarly to the above, but it’s a little less precise and uses a much older method (and it’s not pluginless, so there’s an .esp file). It’s still an excellent mod for what it needs to do, and although I’ve now switched to other mods, I used it for many, many years. It’s also compatible with OpenMW, so it might be your only option for killing the “Endurance rush” on that engine.
You can apply Talrivian’s State-Based HP Mod to an existing character, but you need to follow the steps outlined on the mod’s Nexus page linked above. Look in the “DOCS” tab.
I do encourage you to try MWSE State-Based Health instead, if you can, and/or the leveling mod in the next section. Or just skip this if you prefer the original Health calculation method.
Further Improving the Vanilla Morrowind Leveling Experience
Sadly, the “Endurance rush” isn’t the only problem you can run into if you really want to get the most out of your character. Each time you level up in Morrowind, you can choose three of your Attributes to increase, and some of them will have multipliers allowing you to raise the Attribute by up to 5 points rather than just one. These multipliers appear depending on which skills you have raised in the course of gaining this level.
The points you gain in a skill go toward increasing the level-up multiplier for its governing attribute. Here’s the formula, reproduced from the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (feel free to read through that whole page if you want a feeling of how obnoxious efficient leveling can truly get):
- No skill increases = no multiplier (1 point)
- 1–4 skill increases = 2×
- 5–7 skill increases = 3×
- 8–9 skill increases = 4×
- 10 or more skill increases = 5×
This can be one skill or many of them, as long as they’re governed by the same attribute. So you could raise Acrobatics 10 times to get the coveted x5 modifier to Strength, or any combination of Strength-based skills, as long as you’ve gotten 10 total skill increases among them. Ideally (i.e. the minmaxing way), you level up in such a way that you have 3 Attributes with x5 multipliers on them when you level up, so you get the largest possible increase across the board.
So, what’s the problem here? Well, much like the “Endurance rush,” many players feel compelled to chase those x5 multipliers. So that means 10 skill increases applying to each of the three desired Attributes, for a total of needing to raise specific skills 30 times each level! Not only is this tedious and usually requires spending gold on training, but… hold up. Leveling up only takes 10 skill increases in one of your Major or Minor Skills. So how are you supposed to get 30 skill increases per level?
Simple: you identify the skills governed by Attributes you want to chase, and put a bunch of them into Miscellaneous Skills during character creation. Miscellaneous Skills don’t count toward level-ups, but they do count toward gaining multipliers. BUT THIS IS ACTUALLY TERRIBLE.
Your Major and Minor Skills are supposed to represent the skills your character uses most, with Miscellaneous Skills just being “everything else.” Miscellaneous Skills start out much lower than Major or Minor ones, and increase more slowly. Having to tuck some of your favorite skills, that your character is meant to use (otherwise you wouldn’t be chasing their Attributes), into Miscellaneous is the opposite of building the character you want to play. Combine this with the “Endurance rush” and it’s even worse; you’ll probably need Endurance-based skills designated as Miscellaneous (and there are only three of them: Heavy Armor, Medium Armor, and Spear) just to help ensure you can get that x5 modifier before leveling. Want to play a spearman with a mix of heavy and medium armor, but still have the best health possible? Your favorite skills are now Miscellaneous!
If you’ve played Morrowind before, you’re probably quite familiar with this issue (and even if you haven’t, you probably get the idea as to how annoying and counterintuitive this system is). You should note that it also makes many of the built-in character classes completely useless for always getting all three possible x5 multipliers, since they have their skills where they ought to be, instead of hiding them in Miscellaneous for multiplier contributions. So this means carefully built custom classes, all the time, if you really want to max out your stats.
Call it efficient leveling, call it minmaxing, call it smart gameplay decisions, call it whatever you want: it’s an unmitigated disaster.
So let’s mitigate it.
Improved Vanilla Leveling
If you’re going for a purist-friendly-yet-slightly-improved-gameplay experience, Improved Vanilla Leveling is the mod that will address the above “multiplier chasing” issue, and will also solve the side problem of “wasted multipliers” (in which you achieve a multiplier that’s less than x5 or have more than three multipliers available on leveling up). It carries your progress to the next level, including excess multipliers, so you don’t have to worry about this anymore. Please read through the mod’s Nexus page (you should be doing this anyway — although I’m flattered if you trust me enough to install everything I tell you to without investigating further, I don’t duplicate all the instructions and information for each mod here) to get an understanding of how this works; for example, don’t be surprised if you see one of your Attributes go up along with a skill, as this is part of how the mod preserves your unused multipliers.
With this mod, you can set up a character and play your class as you intended, without having to track modifiers, minmax training, put skills in weird places, or even pay any attention to skill increases at all (beyond “Hey! My Axe skill went up! Sweet!”). You can play Morrowind instead of playing the Morrowind Numbers Game.
Just a couple important things to know: this mod is MWSE-based and requires MGE XE, and it conflicts with MWSE State-Based Health because they both adjust health calculations. This is why I told you to read this section before you decided to use MWSE State-Based Health! But, you can use them together as long as you make a change in Improved Vanilla Leveling’s settings and turn off its built-in health calculation. I personally like to use these mods together because I slightly prefer MWSE State-Based Health’s retroactive health calculation over the method in this mod.
Here’s how to change this setting, and it’s very easy to do. After installing MGE XE, a new option named “Mod Config” was added to Morrowind’s main menu, below “Options” (I mentioned this a few entries ago, when I explained how to increase the size of your UI if needed). Click on “Mod Config” and you’ll be brought to a new menu where you can adjust the settings of any mod that has a Mod Configuration Menu (MCM) implemented. From here, choose Improved Vanilla Leveling and turn “Retroactive Health Calculation” off. Now it will work seamlessly alongside MWSE State-Based Health. (You should probably do this from the main menu before you load a save, but it might not mess anything up if you don’t.)
There is also an option for a more detailed tooltip, which I like to turn on, as it has a lot of good information. At the time of writing, these are the only options available for this mod, but it’s possible something might get added and you may see it before I do. If you see other options here, I recommend checking the mod’s page on Nexus to learn more about them so you can adjust everything to your personal preference.
Improving Item Placement in Morrowind
If you’ve ever played Skyrim, you’re familiar with how items can fall or fly all over the place when you walk by — this is because placed objects in Skyrim have physics attached to them, which led to the need for decoration mods to allow players to place things where they wanted and then “lock them down” to stop them from being moved by normal activity of the player and NPCs. Morrowind never had this problem, because items didn’t have physics; generally, you’d just place the crosshair where you wanted the item to be, and then drop it.
It could still be a bit fiddly, though — it wasn’t always easy to put things exactly where you wanted them on the first try, and if you wanted to place items in unexpected places (like mounting a shield on the wall), you’d have to do unorthodox things like creating a stack of other items to place the shield on top of, and even then the results were rarely great.
Thankfully, today we have the wonderful Perfect Placement by the intrepid modder Hrnchamd. Perfect Placement allows you to place and rotate items on flat surfaces as well as walls. You can line up books on shelves, hang shields and weapons on your walls, and much more.
Even if you’re going for a purist playthrough, and you want to keep the rest of the game as vanilla as possible, there’s simply no reason not to use this if you care about decorating at all. It adds a lot to the game in regards to both fun and immersion!
The only reason you may not be able to use it is if your Morrowind installation doesn’t meet the requirements — you need MGE XE 0.11.0 or later, along with its built-in MWSE 2.1 or newer.
Improving the Behavior of Books in the Game
Morrowind is rife with books and ways to display those books, including bookshelves, mantels, and even lecterns. But in the unmodded game, if you pick up a book and drop it, you can only lay it flat. This leads to player homes full of empty bookshelves (or shelves stuffed with armor and weapons instead) and unsightly towers of books piled in corners or on tables, leaning precariously (or just hidden in containers). Wouldn’t you like to place books neatly on shelves? Feel free to skip this if you don’t care about collecting books, but I never, ever play without a mod of this type, and book management was by far the worst part of my years stuck on the Xbox. There are two possible solutions to this. Only install one of them!
Switchable Scriptures
Perfect Placement allows you to line up books on shelves, so if you’re using it, that’s half the problem solved already. However, during your journeys in Morrowind, you’ll find books lying open as well as closed, and you might want to close those open books to put them on a shelf with others.
Switchable Scriptures allows you to open and close any book or scroll, and also sets all books to be closed by default when you drop them (where you can open them back up, if you wish). It’s intended to be used alongside Perfect Placement and has the same MGE XE and MWSE requirements.
The mod comes with multiple optional folders to make it compatible with various book replacers. For now, if you plan to use it, just install the main mod (found in the folder named “00 Core”) and the icon replacement (found in the folder named “01 Closed Book Icons”) to reflect the fact that all the books are closed when you drop them now. If you’re doing this manually and the folder names confuse you a bit about how to install their contents, just open “00 Core” and drag the “meshes” and “mwse” folders into Data Files, and put the readme from “docs” into your Docs and Readmes folder. The lone “icons” folder in “01 Closed Book Icons” goes right into Data Files as well.
Save the other folders in case you decide to use one of those book replacers later. In MO2, you can just reinstall the mod and use the applicable patch at a later time.
Book Rotate
The original mod for improving book behavior is Book Rotate. While it’s been made obsolete by Perfect Placement and Switchable Scriptures, you may want to use it if you’re using OpenMW or otherwise can’t meet the requirements for those mods. However, it’s very old and getting harder to find now, and the Mod History link above is reliant on the Wayback Machine.
Book Rotate changes the positioning of a book every time you pick it up and drop it, cycling through vertical to be placed on a shelf, and two different flat orientations (including the default). If the book was originally open when you picked it up, it will also cycle through lying flat and open, and open at an angle (to be placed on a lectern). All you need to do is pick it up and drop it again until it’s positioned how you want it to be.
-
- Without Book Rotate.
-
- With Book Rotate.
When placing books on shelves, there’s a bit of a “snap to grid” feeling that helps space them properly. They may not all line up perfectly, but it’s not hard to get them to look good. How far back on the shelf your crosshair is when you drop a book will also affect how far forward it sits on the shelf, so keep that in mind when trying for a neater or messier look. You will also find books that are way too tall to fit inside a bookshelf, and will clip through the top. I usually put these on a mantel, top of the bookcase, or other standalone shelf, with an object on either side to look like “bookends,” or I just lay them flat in an empty part of the bookcase so they look like they’re stopping the other books on the shelf from falling over.
Be aware though that in addition to being old and script-heavy, this mod has a minor conflict with Patch for Purists – Book Typos. Even if you run the BR Patcher to apply the rotation behavior to the Book Typos .esp, some of the books still won’t rotate — specifically, it seemed to be any book that I originally found lying open and flat (not on a lectern). If you don’t care that the occasional book won’t rotate, then it’s no big deal; just remember to run the BR Patcher so the rest of the books will still rotate.
It really is better these days to use Perfect Placement and Switchable Scriptures. But if you use Book Rotate, be sure to read the readme before you install, so you know which files to use, and how to use the BR Patcher.
NOW AN IMPORTANT NOTE.
This is the last of the entries that has been updated for 2023, and the next ones are probably going to focus on graphics updates (true to vanilla) and mesh fixes and the like. But the good news is that you may decide to stop modding here anyway, and still get the “bugfixed, gameplay-improved, close to purist” Morrowind you desire. The high-resolution graphics haven’t been installed yet, but you might not even want those. You may not even care about mesh fixes. In short, as it stands right now, this is a perfectly functional minimalist Morrowind mod setup.
If this is as far as you want to go, go play! You’ll still be able to install the graphics upgrades on an in-progress game without problems, if you decide the world is too low in resolution.
Feel free to ignore the link below, as it doesn’t go to the “true” Part 7 anyway, and it’s just there for those who want to continue with the older “legacy” version of my graphics updates.
Continue to Part 7, in which we apply a few more fixes to the world, and bring Morrowind’s textures into higher resolution. Note: as of April 28, 2023, this next step still brings you to the old “characters and clothing” page but is being replaced with a new entry that covers different topics. New, updated entries about body and clothing replacers are on their way as well. This will happen soon and this note is just temporary to avoid confusion during this reorganization process.
4 pings