Best Morrowind Mods: 2012 Edition?

[codexian reject]

I've just downloaded it from modDB, just in case... I hope they will be back online soon.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Just got done installing the Graphics Overhaul 3.0 on my new computer, props to those guys. They do some amazing work. I planned on installing it for shits and giggles then getting rid of everything and beginning to port over the 225+ mod 'perfect' edition I had saved from the previous meltdown...but I can't. It just looks so amazing! So it appears 60 entries will have to be removed from my carefully chosen and balanced list to make permanent room for the Overhaul. Tough times ahead.

 

[Stabwound]

I haven't been able to play the game lately. It seems to crash every 5 minutes, and even worse, my saves inevitably reach a point where the game will crash instantly as soon as I load one. The game is virtually unplayable and I have no idea why. I guess a wipe and reinstall of everything might help, but fuck.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

That's *one* thing that was improved with later games; keeping a modded game functioning and stable was much easier Oblivion onwards. Remove a couple mods here, tweak this, etc. It just doesn't care.


Remove one or two in Morrowind and I'd invariably have to fire up a couple programs like Wrye's to work out shit.

 

[Regvard]

things

Do tell us what you are left with afterwards.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

things

Do tell us what you are left with afterwards.

I can tell you a number of them that won't be going anywhere;


-Building up Uvirith's Grave
-Rise of House Telvanni
-The White Wolf of Lokken Mountain
-The entire Tamriel Rebuilt package, natch
-Vvardenfell Libraries
-Daedric Sorcery
-Dulsya Isle
-New Suran Extended+Suran Underworld
-Havish
-Sedya Neen Docks+Haldenshore
-Stanegau Island



For that matter I've got to rebuild my mod libraries for Oblivion, Skyrim and New Vegas. Didn't get theirs backed up in time. I did for FO3, but it's a mess that had been put on the backburner months ago. I honestly think I get more of a kick out of modding the games than I do playing them these days.

 

[Regvard]

stuff

Thanks, will check some of them out when I can. You should just abandon Oblivion and FO3 though.

 

[Stabwound]

After some fuckery, I believe the Census and Excise Office mod was causing a lot of my instabilities. It's a pretty neat and unique mod: it lets you sync and upload your save to a site that displays your characters on a leaderboard, plus your statistics, has achievements (lol) and a bunch of other shit. Very cool mod but very unstable by the sounds of it. It keeps track of NPC kills, so that's what tipped me off regarding the constant crashes when I killed an NPC.

Avoid that mod, as cool as it is, is my suggestion. Very few people seem to use it anyway.

 

[Stabwound]

FFFFFFFUUUUUU it's still crashing. This is excruciating, especially since there's no way to tell what the problem is.

 

[Stabwound]

Another crash problem solved: the keyring mod (which gives you a keyring to consolidate all of your keys) was crashing my game a lot when I loaded a save. Removing that mod made the savegame function properly again. Reading online someone said that the mod is known to cannibalize keys anyway, so it's no big loss. Thank fuck I solved that problem.

I'm spamming the shit out of this thread, but I hope this info might be of use to others when it comes to mods that are known to make the game unstable.

I just want to play this game without spending more time reloading and replaying sections than advancing. It's still an awesome game and I haven't played it in so long that I forget almost everything, but I've never played such a rage-inducing game before.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

I remember going through a 200+ load list trying to hunt down whatever was borking up my LOD generation program, and causing the game to crash anyway if you just skipped that step.


Turned out to be some pissant COBL addon that populated a pond with fish. Always the smallest things.

 

[Stabwound]

Yeah, as another thread put it: "Morrowind mods are a fucking jungle"

I'm still getting crashes and I'm about at my wits end. Now I'm getting a crash while fighting certain NPCs. It may or may not be related to them casting spells, whatever that means.

If I didn't love this game so much I would have given up long ago. At least now I can play along for a while and then reach a part that crashes over and over consistently. At this point I'm running almost nothing more than what MGSO 3.0 installs other than MADD Leveller and a few misc mods that shouldn't be causing crashes.

Fuuuuuu. You're right - Oblivion/Skyrim engine is MUCH more stable in general. It doesn't help that most current Morrowind mods rely on hackery and injected dlls, probably making it even more unstable.

 

[roll-a-die]

Yeah, as another thread put it: "Morrowind mods are a fucking jungle"

I'm still getting crashes and I'm about at my wits end. Now I'm getting a crash while fighting certain NPCs. It may or may not be related to them casting spells, whatever that means.

If I didn't love this game so much I would have given up long ago. At least now I can play along for a while and then reach a part that crashes over and over consistently. At this point I'm running almost nothing more than what MGSO 3.0 installs other than MADD Leveller and a few misc mods that shouldn't be causing crashes.

Fuuuuuu. You're right - Oblivion/Skyrim engine is MUCH more stable in general. It doesn't help that most current Morrowind mods rely on hackery and injected dlls, probably making it even more unstable.

Are you using MWE/Morrowind Enhanced/Morrowind Combat Enhanced, ETC?

 

[roll-a-die]

Yeah, as another thread put it: "Morrowind mods are a fucking jungle"

I'm still getting crashes and I'm about at my wits end. Now I'm getting a crash while fighting certain NPCs. It may or may not be related to them casting spells, whatever that means.

If I didn't love this game so much I would have given up long ago. At least now I can play along for a while and then reach a part that crashes over and over consistently. At this point I'm running almost nothing more than what MGSO 3.0 installs other than MADD Leveller and a few misc mods that shouldn't be causing crashes.

Fuuuuuu. You're right - Oblivion/Skyrim engine is MUCH more stable in general. It doesn't help that most current Morrowind mods rely on hackery and injected dlls, probably making it even more unstable.

MADD leveller from what I recall is pretty bad as far as compatability goes.

 

[DraQ]

After some fuckery, I believe the Census and Excise Office mod was causing a lot of my instabilities. It's a pretty neat and unique mod: it lets you sync and upload your save to a site that displays your characters on a leaderboard, plus your statistics, has achievements (lol) and a bunch of other shit. Very cool mod but very unstable by the sounds of it. It keeps track of NPC kills, so that's what tipped me off regarding the constant crashes when I killed an NPC.

...And the cool part is?

Anyway, can't you fucks not keep your mods down to necessary minimum?

The only three things that use anything but built in mod support in my MW are MWSE (used sparringly), MGE (compatibility and limited distant land), and MCP.

Yeah, if you inject shitload of code, including several conflicting versions of the same functions, replace everything with something the engine wasn't meant to support to begin with, it will crash constantly.

 

[Stabwound]

MADD leveller from what I recall is pretty bad as far as compatability goes.

Really? It seems to be the best levelling system replacement to me, since you can basically just play the game and completely disregard levelup modifiers completely. I hate the default system where you have to powergame for 5x multipliers, and everyone says Galsiah's mod is strongly balanced toward single-class characters and I always play hybrids.

I'm not really running many mods outside of the ones used by MGSO 3:

-The official plugins released by Beth
-Unofficial patch
-MADD Leveller
-Tamriel Rebuilt
-Neverhalls dungeon addon mod
-Hotfusion economy adjuster
-all of the Less Generic NPCs mods
-Fair Magicka Regen (popamole, whatever)
-Herbalism For Purists
-Random Passive Cliffracers (added long after all the crashes started)
-Teleport Mod (allows multiple Mark locations - also added after crashes started)

I can make the game consistently crash at a specific NPC fight (the woman with boots of blinding speed) but never at the same time; sometimes I can kill her. I tried using an original Morrowind.exe without any of the code patches and it still crashes, so I have no idea. I guess I could try disabling all of those mods and see if it fixes the issue.

 

[DraQ]

I'd first disable most stuff relying on heavy, often non-standard scripting.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

That's why I was so proud of the 'perfect' Morrowind I had saved, all those mods but carefully tested and put together so they worked fine. Had to toss ones I really liked because it turns out they'd make boats float away over in Dagon Fel or something due to conflicts.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

i already forgot which gameplay/levelling overhauls were the best. i just looked at btb which i sorta combined once with galsias character developement.

and now for something completely dif- actually no, something totally related, the list of spell effects that idiot banned from enchatning and spellmaking:

(Levitate *1.50 (instead of 3.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking are you shitting me?)
Lock 60.00 (instead of 2.00) & off-limits for spellmaking
Slowfall 1.00 (instead of 3.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Water Breathing 1.00 (instead of 3.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Water Walking 1.00 (instead of 3.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Command Humanoid N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Damage Skill N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Drain Attribute *0.20 (instead of 1.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Drain Fatigue *0.02 (instead of 2.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Drain Health *0.10 (instead of 4.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Drain Magicka N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Poison *2.00 (instead of 9.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
(Weakness to Fire N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Weakness to Frost N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Weakness to Magicka N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Weakness to Shock N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Weakness to Poison N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking lolwtf bro?)
Charm N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Chameleon N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Invisibility *1.00 (instead of 20.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Paralyze *1.00 (instead of 40.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Absorb Magicka 12.00 (instead of 8.00) & off-limits for enchanting
Dispel N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
(Soul Trap N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking now it's getting ridiculous)
Telekinesis *2.40 (instead of 1.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Fortify Health *0.20 (instead of 1.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
!Fortify Magicka *0.20 (instead of 1.00) off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Fortify Fatigue N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Fortify Attribute N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Fortify Skill N/A off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking
Restore Magicka *1.20 (instead of 5.00) & off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking

note: some of those spell effects were already "off-limits for enchanting & spellmaking" by virtue of not being available as a spell in the first place.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

DraQ Brofists this.

The idea is that he wanted to have a reason to bother with the default, buyable spells, which were very quickly oversahdowed by enchanting / spellmaking. He made them better to compensate for the limitations.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

yeah. so an endgame mage ends up with crappy ~80 points levitation for 20 seconds. great.

this is not the flyspeed my privileged telvanni is accustomed to.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

This is Morrowind, by endgame you'll be accidently killing people with boogers you fling off your little finger while walking past them at Mach 7 speed, anyway.

 

[DraQ]

DraQ Brofists this.

The idea is that he wanted to have a reason to bother with the default, buyable spells, which were very quickly oversahdowed by enchanting / spellmaking. He made them better to compensate for the limitations.

Ok, I'll bite:

What kind of useful spells can you still make with BTB?

Because I have a feeling the guy could have saved himself a lot of work just modifying the handful of NPCs offering spellmaking services to not offer them anymore, instead of having to tweak each and every effect separately.

...
Except I already own Skyrim, so no point turning Morrowind into it.
/

 

[wwsd]

This thread made me do a clean install of MW and start a new game again after about half a year. I've got a long list of mods, but many of the ESPs are actually components of the same set anyway.

I always install LGNPC, but this time I decided to skip the Seyda Neen and Pelagiad mods. More than the others, they seem a bit frivolous and they don't really fit in with the rest of the game. Whenever I start a game, I tend to do everything possible in SN, then walk to Balmora with a detour through Pelagiad instead of fast-travelling. All the quests added to these towns by LGNPC kind of feel like chores. Plus they also both add a quest where you help people fall in love, when "Maurrie and Nelos" is probably one of the first quests you encounter already. All the other LGNPCs, especially the ones relating to Redoran, are great though.

One of the mods that I installed for the first time is BTB's version of HotFusion's Economy Adjuster, which makes the game a bit more difficult. It makes life much more expensive, but it also removes the Barter option from the Creeper and Mudcrab merchants. The merchants were of course intended as easter eggs, but now everyone knows about them before they've even started playing, and it's just a great way to get rich quick. Combined with making fast travel rather more expensive (though within reason), I find it actually makes you think about money.

BTB's edit of the adjuster also tries to make merchants smarter in a nonobtrusive way (better mercantile/speechcraft), by means of a script that runs at the beginning of a conversation with them. Apparently he fucked this up, because the result is that whenever I walk near any NPC that offers services, it goes "Hmph!" and opens a conversation with me without me actually asking for it. Pity that, because I do like the idea of actually making mercantile a somewhat useful skill. I think I'll remove it before I go crazy from all the NPCs huffing and puffing at me.

What he does seem to get mostly right is his version of "Service Requirements", which actually changes guilds and factions in a significant way. It actually makes factions much more difficult to join (better attributes and skills required), and many more faction characters will refuse service, or require an extra fee. The only thing I wonder about is whether it's a good idea to include guild guides in this. I'm not sure if they are meant to be a public service or not. In any case, the surcharges are such that they once again force you to think about whether you really need that service, without being prohibitively expensive. And training is now quite expensive. If you want to train up a skill that you've never invested anything in, that's still affordable.

What I like about these mods is that they change the way I play. Morrowind is just too easy normally. It used to be that I would fast-travel all over the place just to do lots of quests for every faction, get every possible artifact, sell them to the easter-egg merchants, become a millionaire, repeat this process until you're the head of every faction. Now what I'm doing is the opposite, doing quests locally just to pay for future travel expenses, and I find myself looting caves and ruins again to sell to merchants, instead of just neglecting all the loot until I find Glass armour to sell to Creeper or something like that.

My game is still too easy because I'm playing a Redguard warrior, but that's because I want to play a Redoran character. At least with these mods, this character can really only advance in the factions that are suited to him. I only just got allowed into the Mages Guild (after raising some stats) to make the guild guide a bit cheaper, instead of advancing to lvl 5 membership within a few hours. The end result is that there's actually some purpose to playing again, as well as some thought about everything you do, just like when you first played MW without having 100 mods and knowing all the exploits.

A bit of self-control that I add is that I don't instantly go for one of the Sword of White Woe/Shadowsting/Goldbrand trio, even though I know where to get them. It's a bit too much when you can just kill anything.

 

[Stabwound]

I'm lucky that I played Morrowind so long ago that I actually forget where the artifacts and cheat shopkeepers are. Having a shitty memory has the sole benefit of being able to enjoy games/books/movies every 5-10 years.

Someone really should make a mod (or mods) that change the locations of things like that, though. Seems like an easy enough and pretty obvious mod to do. I agree that the Hotfusion Economy Adjuster is a must-have though. I never tried Service Requirements. I don't think there's anything that will stop you from eventually becoming a god that can run 1000 MPH and kill everything by breathing on it though.