(Re)installing Morrowind, Pt. 1: Basic Installation | Morrowind Modding Guide 2023

Note from May 12, 2023: This guide is currently undergoing a significant overhaul. Once all existing steps are updated, this note will be removed. I’m shuffling some things around, which might mean a couple of new entries may be added between the old ones. Some of my previous mod recommendations are also being replaced or removed entirely (I do plan to include archived versions for anyone who might have preferred my older, albeit incomplete, setup). New screenshots are also required in many places. If you check my main Morrowind page you’ll be able to see the most recent updates and current progress. Once all the updates are complete, I’ll be adding a new entry to announce them, and following up with new entries to further flesh out the guide with both purist-friendly and non-purist Morrowind enhancements. I’m also going to modernize the design of the site, but that takes lower priority than finishing the guide.

This entry is 2023-ready and was last updated May 11. The rest of the guide is updated for 2023 up to Part 6.5. Part 7 and onward are not yet updated. This note will change (and eventually, finally disappear) when the entire existing guide is 2023-ready, and then new entries will be added to the end.

So here I am, reinstalling Morrowind for the hundredth time. Hard drive failure and the death of my Xbox’s disc reading capabilities got together and convinced me to do it. This is an epic path which I have trod before, and I decided this time I’ll be intelligent about it and actually write down what I’m doing so as to ease the process for myself when, inevitably, I have to reinstall on the next computer. I have decided to bring you along for this journey. Yay!

The Purpose of This Guide

This guide will lead you through the process of getting Morrowind working on a modern computer, including widescreen resolutions, bug fixes, blurriness mitigation, and more. I will also help you explore modifying your game further with addons created by the Morrowind community. Most importantly, my mission is to teach you the ins and outs of modding Morrowind so you understand how the process works, and empower you to customize your game as much as you want, even if you use mods I don’t cover here.

Naturally, that means this guide will be a bit long. But I’m also trying to include everything that could cause problems with modding Morrowind and the troubleshooting steps to solve it, and the answers to some questions can get pretty obscure — I’d be happy to save you hours of searching! This also means there will be some sections you can skip, which I’ll point out clearly.

(If you’re not a beginner and want something shorter without all the extra information, I’ll be making a summarized version once the bulk of the guide is finished and updated for 2023. It’ll still link back to the main entries when needed for special instructions.)

When it comes to the “right” Morrowind mods to use, there are two main schools of thought. Some players prefer everything to be as close to the original game as possible, which is called being purist. Others want to expand on the game without concerns about how much their changes digress from the original Morrowind experience (there isn’t really a term for them other than being described as “not a purist”). There’s also a third type of player that hovers somewhere in the middle, and enjoys the original Morrowind along with mods that aren’t strictly purist but don’t make changes they consider too drastic. Of course, all these categories are somewhat subjective. They are also all completely valid ways to enjoy Morrowind, despite the strong opinions and occasional arguments that crop up in the community.

This guide supports both purist and non-purist players. My intention is to provide a purist-friendly modded Morrowind setup first, so you can stop with a bare minimum installation if that’s the experience you’re looking for. Then, I’ll continue with other mods that make larger changes and could be considered bigger departures from the original game, eventually working my way up to the biggest overhauls. I’ll make it very obvious when you should stop modding to maintain a purist experience and I’ve included clear notations for whenever something might stray from the game’s original vision, so you can stop modding once you’ve done the minimum, or simply skip anything I point out as optional. (And sometimes, to ensure a more convenient installation order, I may need to mention a not-quite-purist mod early, while we’re still in the most purist areas. I’ll make these clear too so you can choose whether to skip them.)

There are also different preferences when it comes to how you actually install the mods. Some players prefer to use a mod manager like Mod Organizer 2 (MO2) while others adamantly want to stick with installing their mods manually. To quickly summarize, MO2 uses a virtual directory structure that keeps your default Morrowind folders pristine and provides tools for easier mod management and organization purposes (hence the name Mod Organizer). Its filesystem simplifies the process of getting mods to load in the right order and picking and choosing from various files (like textures) that would normally overwrite each other, without having to reinstall anything if you later decide to “go back.” However, some players simply prefer not to use it, and manual installation works fine. This guide is friendly to both MO2 users and manual installation. No matter how you like to install your mods, you can follow along and I will do my best to provide all the necessary instructions.

If you do like the sound of MO2, you don’t need to install it yet anyway, so don’t worry. I will explain more about MO2 shortly and you can decide then.

If you’re ready to get started with installing and modding Morrowind, scroll down to “Things to Know Before You Start,” or you can read a bit more about my motivations behind this guide and how it’s written.

Why This Guide?

There are quite a few Morrowind modding guides available today, and I think there were even more when I started writing this in 2014 (most of the old ones are probably still out there, but outdated now). Many of these guides are excellent, and worth your time if you don’t like mine or you feel something’s missing (and I’ll add an index of them to this site eventually).

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the sheer complexity of Morrowind modding. Tools like MO2 make it a lot easier to experiment and customize your setup, but you still have to know where to find the “right” mods for your goals, how to compare them with others, how to install them, which older mods are still playable today, how and why to clean certain mods, how to merge changes, how to troubleshoot problems, and how to get all your mods to play nicely with each other. Sifting through thousands of mods is exhausting (trust me, I know), so even figuring out what you want to use and which bugfixes are still relevant can leave you confused, and conflicts aren’t always clearly marked. All current guides help with this, but I decided to go more in depth about what you’re doing along the way, so you’ll have the foundational knowledge to go beyond guides in general and make Morrowind yours.

A major reason I started this guide in the first place is to help with a lot of the issues that modders encounter, regardless of their experience level, and to provide a guide that has something to offer to a wide range of preferences. I outlined this in “The Purpose of This Guide” up above, but I want to support both purist and non-purist players, and both MO2 and manual installations. Many guides which include both purist and non-purist mods aren’t clear which is which (and since “purist” is so subjective anyway, the line between them can get blurry), so I feel a bit more clarity can be useful for those who want to limit sweeping changes in their game. Since MO2 is the recommended method for modded Morrowind installations today, some guides also rely on providing a configuration file for sorting load order, which is nice and fast for MO2 but doesn’t support manual installation — MO2 lets you install mods willy-nilly and arrange them later, so initial installation order doesn’t matter with MO2, but is crucial for manual installations in which you are directly overwriting previously installed files. Adapting an MO2-reliant guide for manual installation can be hard, and some oldschool players still prefer manual installation to the point that I’ve seen some dismiss a guide out of hand for relying on it.

As for me, I’ve always been fond of explaining things, and I worked as a professional technical writer in the software industry for several years, specifically to explain complex processes to everyone from laymen to salespeople to engineers, and this is just how my brain works. Detailed cataloguing and documentation are parts of my bloodstream now, and I always like to create “the instructions I wish I’d had.” If my approach can help beginners who feel lost, or oldschool modders who feel alienated by the omnipresence of MO2, then I’m happy. When someone wants to mod Morrowind and gives up on it out of frustration (or gives up on the game entirely), it makes me sad.

You can definitely learn to mod without this guide; the information is out there, for sure. It’s just not always all together or presented alongside actual mods to install. This guide brings together “doing” and “understanding what you’re doing and why” and I’ve received some good feedback that this is helpful to many, which makes me happy. And as I said earlier, I’ll add a summarized version for those that just want the mods without the supplementary explanation.

Ultimately, I want to teach you enough about Morrowind modding to make you confident in your ability and understanding of it. Another of my goals is that my instructions are thorough enough that they can help you use any guide or modlist you want, not just mine!

Things to Know Before You Start

There are a few things I want to make clear before we go further — basically a few small caveats.

First off, this guide is intended for the English version of Morrowind. I really wish I could support all languages, but some of the most important mods are not compatible with non-English versions.

Secondly, this guide does not use OpenMW. OpenMW is a modern, open-source engine replacement for Morrowind that reads from the original game files — you can learn more about it on the OpenMW FAQ page. It’s an incredible project that I’m keeping an eye on, but I’m not using it myself yet because it does not support mods that rely on the Morrowind Script Extender (MWSE). MWSE was developed to expand the boundaries of Morrowind modding beyond what was possible with the original engine, and many of the mods I consider essential are MWSE-based. Now, many of the mods in this guide are OpenMW-compatible, so if you prefer to use OpenMW, you can easily adapt this guide to your own installation. You’ll just have to skip the MWSE mods. There may also be OpenMW alternative mods that can perform the same functions for you, but I might not be aware of them. I’ll try to include them when possible, and I do have tentative plans to better incorporate OpenMW into the guide in some manner at a later date, but once it reaches full feature parity with tools for the vanilla engine, separate instructions may rarely be needed except for configuration. In the meantime, I’m not ignoring OpenMW as there are a few mods in this guide that are important for it or work differently with it, and I point these out as needed. Regardless of the future abilities of OpenMW this guide will never rely on it either, just as it doesn’t rely on MO2.

Lastly, this guide is written around a regular installation on 64-bit Windows, and I don’t know anything about running Morrowind on a different operating system or a virtual machine. The instructions might be the same anyway, but I have no experience with that. Also, some of the tools in this guide need you to have a 64-bit operating system, and there’s no way around that except for you to skip anything that requires 64-bit Windows.

Anyway, on with the guide!

The Big Decision: Mod Managers, or Manual Installation?

Remember a few minutes ago when I said I was going to talk about manual installation versus mod managers/MO2? Here we are.

Manual Installation: for Lovers of the Old Ways

Manual installation refers to moving or copying a mod’s required files into the Data Files folder within your Morrowind directory. This is a reliable way of installing a mod, and many mods are already packaged with the right folder structure so you’ll know where everything is supposed to go, but it can also be somewhat confusing if you’re new to modding and your desired mod contains a large number of files or folders.

You’ll also have to be careful that a newer mod’s files don’t overwrite any of an already-installed mod’s files that you might want to keep — for example, if you’re installing a big texture pack over another, and you’d rather keep certain textures from it instead of using the corresponding ones from the new pack. In this case, you’d have to choose not to overwrite these specific files when copying the new mod into your Data Files folder (or delete those files from the new mod before copying it over). If you make a mistake, you’d have to hunt down and reinstall the older files you’d meant to keep.

The other drawback of manual installation is that you’ll frequently need to make a backup of your Data Files folder so you can revert to it if you end up disliking a new mod that you installed. Some mods aren’t like this, because they keep all their own assets within their own folders, making uninstallation easy — but also requiring an active plugin (.esm or .esp file) to work. In that case, you’d uninstall just by deleting the plugin file and any associated folders. But in many cases, restoring to backup is necessary.

If a mod simply uses the game’s default Data Files directory and only includes assets like meshes, textures, or sounds, Morrowind can use these without the need for an active plugin. These are called “pluginless” mods and are the preferred method for things like graphics replacers. These are the ones most likely to overwrite other files if you use a lot of them, so uninstallation can be very complicated and time-consuming unless you have a backup you can easily restore.

The major benefits of installing mods manually are that you won’t have to learn to use a mod manager, and if you’re already an oldschool Morrowind player you might already be accustomed to the sometimes-irritating process of making sure you don’t overwrite the wrong files. If you’re already comfortable with this, you can happily proceed without a mod manager.

Mod Managers: Convenience Well Worth the Learning Curve

Mod managers are external programs that serve to assist with installation, downloading, and organization of your mods, although their individual functions vary. Wrye Mash is a powerful utility for getting Morrowind mods to play nice with each other, and it does have a lot of functionality, but it’s not the same thing as what people generally consider “mod managers” today. For total download, installation, and management functionality for Morrowind mods, your only valid option is Mod Organizer 2, which supports several games (hence its listing as a Skyrim Special Edition mod — don’t let that throw you off, it’s the right link, although you don’t need to download it until you have Morrowind installed), and also allows you to run tools like Wrye Mash from within its interface. You can get all the benefits of Wrye Mash together with MO2 this way.

When I say Mod Organizer 2 (MO2) is your only valid option if you want to use a mod manager, I mean it. Nexus Mod Manager, and its successor Vortex, have never worked properly with Morrowind, and after spending more hours than I can count browsing the Nexus, Reddit, Steam, and other related Morrowind communities while seeking out the best mods and other information for this guide, I’ve noticed a recurring theme of many, many comments about non-working mods that relate directly to the use of NMM or Vortex. Save yourself the trouble — if you want a mod manager for Morrowind, go with MO2.

MO2 is by far the easiest system for installing and managing your Morrowind mods because of how its virtual directory structure keeps your Data Files folder in its original state, so you can change your load order and choose which files overwrite others at any time. It also has a feature that lets you hide (and un-hide) individual files, so you can load a mod last and still prevent some of its files from overwriting an earlier mod. Since it’s all handled by a virtual directory, it keeps your Morrowind installation clean and seriously reduces uninstallation/rollback headaches. Its main drawback is simply that it has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s really not as hard as it looks. It does require 64-bit Windows, however, so if you’re still on an older 32-bit OS, you can’t use it.

If you want to use MO2, visit Using Mod Organizer 2 with Morrowind – Tutorial. This will get you set up with a functioning MO2 Morrowind installation and you’ll also end up a little “ahead of the game” by installing some tools into it that I go over in later guide pages, like Wrye Mash which I mentioned above. My MO2 tutorial will link back to the entries in this guide at appropriate points as well. My recommendation is to follow along with both simultaneously; I’ve tried to make sure it’s easy to integrate all the instructions and know when to go back and forth between the MO2 tutorial and the guide entries.

If you want supplemental information on MO2, there’s a ton of detail on MO2’s own Nexus page linked above, and GamerPoets also has an excellent tutorial series on YouTube — so good that for a while I felt like I’d just be reinventing the wheel if I wrote my own guide, but not everyone wants to watch videos to learn how to do this, especially if you’re in a hurry to get MO2 and Morrowind up and running. Some of the information in my MO2 tutorial is also specifically geared toward Morrowind and the use of this and other modding guides, whereas many other tutorials focus on Skyrim Special Edition or another game.

So, What Installation Method Does this Guide Use?

I briefly touched on this earlier but I think it’s worth elaborating here: this guide will work fine with MO2 as long as you know how to use the program, but I have not written these steps to require MO2. Morrowind is much older than MO2 (this guide itself is older than MO2, actually) and many players have gotten used to modding manually with support from a few tools like Wrye Mash. If I were to write this guide with MO2 in mind, it wouldn’t be as useful for people who prefer the old way.

Besides, I think that if you’re brand new to modding, understanding “the old way” will make things clearer for you when/if you do start to dig into MO2. You’ll have a better grasp of what it’s doing and how it’s different from manual installation. One of my goals with this guide is for you to understand how Morrowind modding works, not just “what mods to use in general,” so you can figure out your own personal favorite setup with mods I may not use myself.

Please note that Mod Organizer 2 is an excellent tool, and worth your time to learn — not just for Morrowind but for many games (and it’s a near-requirement for Skyrim modding). But if you don’t want to use it for Morrowind yet, like I said, you don’t need to use it to follow this guide. I’m personally using MO2 at this time, but it seems like all modern guides are written specifically for it, which can be hard to adjust to for users who prefer the oldschool method.

Rest assured, though, that even though you don’t need MO2 to follow this guide, you can still use this guide with MO2. Every step I lead you through can be accomplished just as easily in MO2. You’ll just have to do the specific actions in MO2 that correspond to what I’m talking about — for example, if I say “don’t let this file overwrite,” just hide that file in MO2. If I say “drop the .esp and its folders into your Data Files,” I’m pretty clearly saying “install the mod.” If I have you install a utility (like Wrye Mash) I’ll remind you of the necessary steps to get it into MO2 even if it’s also on my MO2 tutorial page. I will still continue to include MO2-relevant instructions when necessary. I’ve tried to make sure that if you’re good with MO2 you won’t have any trouble adapting my instructions.

Okay, now let’s focus on obtaining and installing the actual Morrowind game, which is the first step no matter how you install your mods!

Where to Buy Morrowind in 2023

The first thing you need, obviously, is a copy of Morrowind and its expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, preferably the Game of the Year edition (GOTY) which includes both. Retail CD copies can still be found on Amazon and eBay, but in this day and age, you may prefer a digital download. Digital downloads are more convenient in a few ways: they’re already fully patched with every official update (which saves a few steps during installation), they have fewer compatibility issues with modern systems, and they allow you to safely put aside any Morrowind discs you may own. Give them a nice spot on a shelf somewhere; maybe make a little shrine for them.

The most recommended source for Morrowind GOTY is GOG.com — it’s fully moddable and comes with free copies of Elder Scrolls I: Arena, and Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall! GOG is considered the definitive place to buy Morrowind online these days unless you prefer to use Steam.

Yes, Morrowind GOTY is also available on Steam! Some players prefer Steam due to its various features, including playtime tracking, but there are a few things you should know about the Steam version of Morrowind. Morrowind’s CDs do not come with license keys or any other way of activating them on Steam, so your best bet is probably to purchase through the Steam store if it matters to you to have your game time tracked. Of course, purchasing on Steam also means you’ll need Steam running to play the game.

Be aware as well that we’ll be modding Morrowind’s graphics with external programs that don’t cooperate with the Steam Overlay, so you’ll need to have that feature turned off for Morrowind and won’t be able to use it for screenshots and video (I’ll explain how to turn this off below). It’s totally worth it to sacrifice the Steam Overlay for what we’re going to do with Morrowind, but I’m mentioning this so that you’ll know that the ONLY Steam feature active in fully-modded Morrowind will be tracking of your play time. You won’t be able to capture Steam screenshots or video without turning off a large portion of the game’s graphical updates, and there are no integrated achievements or trading cards, as Morrowind predates these.

Finally, the Steam version of Morrowind is slightly harder to mod due to its internal files having a newer timestamp on them than most of the mods we’ll be using, and while we can fix this within a couple of minutes, it can still trip up newer users. Use this information to help you decide whether you’d prefer to purchase the game on Steam or if another method would be better for you.

Watch Out for DRM That Stops You from Modding!

Unfortunately, some digital Morrowind vendors’ DRM won’t allow you to apply some of the most important gameplay fixes. This is because part of the modding process involves altering Morrowind.exe, and in these cases, their DRM prevents this. I’m not sure how many online stores are selling Morrowind now, but last I checked, Gamefly, Impulse, and MS Game Pass all have this problem and you cannot fully mod Morrowind if you buy it from any of them. If you find Morrowind for sale on another site that you’d really prefer to buy from, make sure to look for forums or other information that could tell you whether or not its DRM prevents altering the .exe. (If you find another Morrowind seller that does or does not include such restrictive DRM, please feel free to let me know in the comments — and also if you happen to know whether the vendors listed here still have that same DRM, as I’m unable to check for myself.)

As far as I know, the Steam and GOG versions are the only downloadable Morrowind versions that are completely moddable, but as I mentioned, regarding Steam, you will need to disable the in-game overlay. Either way, get yourself a mod-compatible version of Morrowind (discs, Steam, GOG or another DRM-free edition of which I may be unaware). You will be glad you did.

Installation (with Tips for Morrowind on Steam)

First things first: as a cardinal rule, do not install Morrowind into C:\Program Files. It hates being in Program Files and generally a lot of games do. If Morrowind is your very first Steam game and you still have a chance to decide where your Steam directory will go, don’t put it in Program Files; mine is under C:\Games\Steam. If your Steam directory is already inside there, Steam has instructions here for moving your whole Steam directory or choosing an alternative location for some games. If you have trouble moving your library because Steam won’t let you make a new one on the same drive, this Steam Library Setup Tool may be able to solve that problem for you.

If you do have the Steam version, just install it normally to ~\Steam\SteamApps\common or whatever Steam does (as long as it’s not in Program Files! I mean it). You can ignore any parts of the below instructions that are specifically about GOG, inserting discs, and installing expansions and/or patches in the right order, since the Steam Morrowind GOTY version already includes the expansions and patches. Granted, you may still want to read all this, as some of it may pertain to you — for example, if any of the extra plugins that come with the GOG version get added to the Steam version without my knowledge, you’re going to need to handle them just like you would with GOG.

How to Turn Off the Steam Overlay

Turning off the Steam Overlay is actually really easy. Find Morrowind in your Steam Library within the Steam program, and right-click it. Then select “Properties…” and a popup will appear. Just make sure the option for the Steam Overlay is unchecked, like below. Then you can simply close the popup.

While you’re doing this, decide whether you want to use Steam Cloud. It lets you access your saved games from multiple computers you use for Steam games. However, it won’t copy anything else over (your mods, mainly) so if you want to play the same Morrowind saves on multiple computers, you’ll need an identical mod setup on both in order to avoid problems with your saved games. It’ll be okay if you have different graphics replacers (although you might get warnings on savegame load, you can ignore them if it’s only graphics), but anything that otherwise adds to or changes the game with an .esp or .esm file needs to be consistent to avoid potentially fatal problems. Besides that, I’m not sure if the Steam Cloud works that well with Morrowind to begin with, so I tend to just turn it off.

Further Installation Instructions (Steam and Non-Steam)

Just like choosing your installation path for the Steam version, if you install a non-Steam version (whether GOG or discs), don’t do it in the default C:\Program Files directory, as that can cause problems with some versions of Windows — well, Vista, mostly, and who uses that on purpose anymore? But still, be aware that Morrowind and the extenders we’ll be installing need administrator rights and write privileges, and the default Program Files directory doesn’t always like that. From now on, here are some assumptions you should make:

1. It’s Windows
2. It’s Morrowind
3. They are both buggy beyond all possible good sense

Keeping those things in mind, it’s better to just go out of our way to make sure problems do not occur, even if your version of Windows SUPPOSEDLY does not have that problem. Morrowind is a game that will crash for unheard-of reasons at any given time, and we can never be sure if your particular issues are caused because you installed the game on the second Thursday of November under a gibbous moon, so let’s just focus on things we know: installing outside the default C:\Program Files directory is best. (I keep saying it because it’s important!)

Also, if you’re using Windows 7 or older, I can’t stress this enough: run everything as administrator. This includes Morrowind.exe and all programs I tell you to use in this guide. Here’s how to do this on Windows 7; use “OPTION FIVE” for best results. And remember, if something in this guide doesn’t work, the very first thing you should do is make sure that “Run as Administrator” is checked! This is not necessary on Windows 10 or 11, so you don’t have to worry about it.

It’s also a good idea to exclude your Morrowind folder from all antivirus shields and scans — this is REQUIRED if you use Avast (and probably others), otherwise one of the patches we add later will cause the game to not even open (IT TOOK ME 3 HOURS OF FRUSTRATION TO FIND THIS OUT. BE GRATEFUL). If you can’t exclude whole folders, as a rule of thumb just exclude all the .exe files. If anything in this guide pops up with a warning just allow it through.

You may wonder how well Morrowind works on modern Windows operating systems, but in my experience, on Windows 10 and 11 Morrowind GOTY from Steam or GOG both work right out of the box. Most people with Windows 10 problems seem to be using the original Morrowind discs. I started writing this guide on a Windows 7 machine and I now have both Windows 10 and 11 on different computers, so these instructions should work for all of them — although please note that I don’t mod on Windows 7 anymore, so my support in that regard will be limited.

If You Bought Morrowind from GOG, You Have to Delete Some Files

While this section is aimed at GOG users, it might be worth skimming if you bought Morrowind from somewhere else, just in case this stuff is packed with your purchase. As of May 1, 2023, Steam doesn’t have it and is unlikely to add it, but you never know.

Besides the bonus copies of the two previous Elder Scrolls games, the GOG version of Morrowind GOTY also comes with all the “Official Plugins” created by Bethesda themselves. Now, don’t get me wrong — this is truly an act of kindness on GOG’s part, as while these addons were all free originally anyway, they got harder to find with time.

However, you shouldn’t use these. Despite coming straight from Bethesda, the official plugins are known for being buggy and of dubious quality overall. I think they were mostly created to encourage players to experiment with the Construction Set, and as “proof-of-concept” addons to demonstrate some of the things you can do with mods. But their subjective quality isn’t the main issue, it’s that they can cause problems in your game. I’ll go into more detail about them later, but there are fixed and improved versions available from the Morrowind modding community, and some are worth your time to consider. Either way, we are not going to use the official plugins that come with Morrowind from GOG. In fact, we’re going to completely delete them!

Why? Well, if you’re not going to use them, they’re just taking up space on your computer and cluttering your launcher. And if you install the fixed community versions later, you won’t need any of these original files anyway.

Find your Morrowind folder and open “Data Files.” Here’s what you need to delete:

• All eight files that end in .esp. These should be:
  • adamantiumarmor.esp
  • AreaEffectArrows.esp
  • bcsounds.esp
  • EBQ_Artifact.esp
  • entertainers.esp
  • LeFemmArmor.esp
  • master_index.esp
  • Siege at Firemoth.esp
• All files that end in .txt (these are their readmes)
• The contents of these folders (if you’re going to use MO2 for your Morrowind mods, or if you want to install mods manually but don’t mind potentially recreating these folders later, you can simply delete each whole folder instead of its contents):
  • BookArt
  • Icons
  • Meshes
  • Textures

Don’t be afraid to delete these things. All you’re deleting are parts of the official plugins that we are trying to completely eliminate from your installation. You are not deleting anything the game needs!

Installing Morrowind from Discs

If you have Morrowind on CDs, things are going to be slightly more complicated since you’ll have to switch discs out during the installation process. Install Morrowind first, and then Tribunal, and then Bloodmoon (you may be asked each time if you want to “Register online now;” it’s unnecessary).

In case you have reached this point and are wondering: Yes, you really do need both expansions. They both add some core functionality to the game that you will seriously miss out on unless you have them. Additionally, most modern mods require both expansions to work. If you have Morrowind on Steam or from GOG, you will have both expansions as well as the correct patch already. Yay!

But if you are using discs, you’re also quite likely to need the official patch I discuss in the next section.

Wrapping Up Installation

Anyway, we’re almost done! If you have the Game of the Year edition from Steam or GOG, you won’t need the official patch I mention shortly, but either way the installation instructions are going to be the same up to that point.

Now, if you’re not sure as to whether you actually have GOTY and may need the official patch, start the game (if you’re using discs, reinsert your Morrowind CD — it’s the only one needed for play). When you get to the main menu, check the lower left corner of the screen for the version information. If you start the game and you don’t see a number at all, quit the game, change the resolution in the launcher menu to 1024×768 and restart.

If it doesn’t say 1.6.1820, you only need the official Bloodmoon patch which can be found here. There are both US and EU versions available, so make sure you download the right one. It will be an .exe; just run it to update your game. If your copy of Morrowind is already at 1.6.1820, the patch is not needed and might actually cause problems.

Now, if you changed your screen resolution specifically to look for the version number, you might be wondering about changing it to something that better fits your monitor. If you have a widescreen display (as most do) and you set the game to fullscreen, your aspect ratio is going to be messed up since Morrowind predates widescreen monitors and will stretch to fit. Additionally, some resolutions may cause part of the game screen to disappear off the side of your monitor (which is why the version number may have been invisible earlier; just use 1024×768 or smaller for now if you have this problem). We will finalize our resolution and fix the stretched screen later, but for now just deal with it for a few minutes to make sure everything is working, and because some of the things we are going to upgrade require the game to have been opened at least once.

NOTE: Resist the temptation to make a character you intend on keeping for the entire game. We are in a testing stage, and some later addons may recommend starting a new game for best results. There is a definite possibility that later in the modding stage, your first character may need to be taken out back and shot. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So, here I am going through character generation with the completely unmodified game. The aspect ratio is fine (not stretched), and I honestly don’t remember why — I think on some computers it just puts black bars on either side of the screen since it’s using a non-widescreen resolution.

All right, everything seems to be in order! The NPCs are, by turns, condescending, rude, bored, and annoying. Looks like a functioning Morrowind to me! Maybe this is strange, but later in the game I actually miss the beginning when most people barely tolerate you and you have nothing but a set of smelly-looking clothes and a stolen dagger.

Continue to Part 2: Morrowind Code Patch (and More), in which we patch the .exe to fix issues that addons can’t touch.