I’m starting up Morrowind + Expansions + An Assload of Modules for the first time as a Nordic Knight and I’m feeling a bit intimidated by the size of the world and the scope of all the things to do. Also by the complete boredom of getting negro elves and purring furries to like me. I was wondering if anyone had any good tips or tricks for a beginning player.
Like, for example, “if you find some moon dust that sells for a thousand virtual gold, but Elfy McJustSayNo won’t let you sell your soiled dungarees to him unless you dump the stuff first, don’t put it in one of his chests, quick save, then try to reclaim it.”
If you get multiple items that sell well ( like that Bone-whatsit armor ) sell them one at a time if you don’t have great Merc skills. You’ll build your skills faster and make more money.
If you happen to find “Skooma” it’s worth shitloads, not sure on people that buy it, I’ve got one bottle on my current character and keep forgetting to sell it. Limeware is also fairly good as a low level character to sell.
As a low level character don’t even try to attack a Betty Netch, they hurt.
The biggest concern you should have in morrowind is not breaking the game. Finding some daedric goodies, selling them to creeper or the mudcrab merchant or to a plugin merchant and then training all your skills up…well, you’ll be left far stronger than anything in the game and it’ll devolve into a collectathon or into questing for the top spot in the factions.
My suggestion would be to join a house (hlallu, redoran, or telvanni…I like telvanni), join some other factions like the morag tong or fighter/thief/mage guild, work your way up and use the opportunity you’ll have as they send you all over the game world to explore a bit, find those out-of-the-way dungeons and shrines and whatnot and have a good time.
Make sure you set aside a house for yourself to hoard your goodies (as a warrior type you’ll probably want to keep lots of scrolls and potions on you, but you’ll be sure to accumulate more than you’ll want for a single trip). Personally I find the most convenient house to be the council club in balmora (talk to the leader of the nearby legion fort). Alternatively you can get a house plugin from Morrowind Summit or wherever in a location you prefer.
Again, it’s very tempting to min/max your character in morrowind and become a tankmagethief god that flies around at level 5. But there is actual challenge to be had in the game if you just hold yourself back from that, or if you get a difficulty mod.
Make sure you take advantage of the enchanting system, which is by far the best part of the game. One of your first goals should be to make a ring (or somehing) that casts Soultrap, because that spell lets you capture enemies’ souls, which are then used to power enchanted items.
Edit: another enchanting tip: put enchantments that just deal damage on faster weapons, like knives, because you can maximize the damage that way. For slower weapons, use enchantments that cause damage and have some kind of debuff.
Another tidbit: the damage “range” listed on weapons isn’t a range at all; the low number is what it does every time if you just click, the high number is what it does every time if you hold it down and release. So if a weapon has a wide range, you should do the hold-down, and if it has a narrow range, you should do quick shots.
A good tip, however I’d suggest you enchant whatever weapon you are good with to cast Soutrap when it strikes. No clicking back and forth between menus to select spells and you don’t have to switch between casting and attacking.
I really enjoyed joining one of the Great Houses and getting my own Stronghold. Fortunately, you don’t need any plugins for that.
Since you said you had an assload of modules I’d guess you already have it, but make sure you get the Multi-Mark mod. It makes the back-and-forth main quests alot easier to deal with and makes the game 100x more enjoyable. Other than that if you don’t go with a merchant mod the Creeper in the town just north of Balmora is the best normal merchant out there. He buys pretty much anything for full price and has a large cash pool.
The journalling system in Morrowind is somewhat pooched. As a result, you can have quests completed and still have them as active in the journal. I found that taking on a two or three quests at one time was all I could tackle without taxing my memory too much.
Since you said you had an assload of modules I’d guess you already have it, but make sure you get the Multi-Mark mod
These are the mods I currently have installed:
All the official Morrowind mods
Ultimate Giants Mod
New NPC Replacer 3.5
Better Heads
Cliffracer - Less Smaller Aggro
Real Sign Posts
Objects & Game Balance Mod
All the Rhedd Heads
Sound Enhancement mod
Better Bodies
Dwemer Headache Fix
I suspect all those head mods are redundant. Anything I’m missing that’s a must have? I’m not interested in mods that exploit the system, just cool and/or useful ones. If you recommend anything, a link to the mod would be helpful as well.
Well for staters, the List O’ Mods here is a nice place to start. Looking at your list though you’re missing the Visual Pack mods. They make the general land textures Much better ( in the List O mods, look under graphic replacers - world) and it’s usually the first mods I install. Other than that the list is pretty fun to look through. It’s amazing how many damn mods Morrowind has ( take that Doom3!! :-P )
How’s the performance hit on the Visual Packs? I’m a little concerned, because it claims that its Graphics Intensive, and I’m only running it on a 1ghz/512/9600 Pro machine.
Use alternate beginnings, it’s a way better way to start the game. The shipwreck start is my fav. (note that it makes the game much harder to start off in though)
also an NPC one, morrowind advanced I think, is great, adds a lot of roaming npcs and people to bars, whores etc…
and The Underground is kinda neat, it’s almost a gig of new shit and doesnt conflict at all. Balmora expanded is nice too, and vivec expansion, makes them into more dagegrfall-esque cities (larger! but not filler, actually better than balmora used to be, adds museums, bath houses, quests like mad)
oh and there is finally a horse mod that works ‘ok’ pegas horse ranch or something.
On my old machine with my 9500pro I didn’t notice too much of a degradation. There was a little loss of FPS, but the visuals made up for it easy. In my experience the CPU played a bigger part in how the game played and so the visual pack only knocked me down about 5 FPS or so. Maybe less. But I was playing on an AMD1800xp so I’m not too sure how a 1 gig’er will handle it. If you have the space I’d try copying the game to a seperate directory and giving it a shot. Morrowind doesn’t need any registry settings to run so, space permitting, it shouldn’t be to much of a hassle to try it out.
This was crucial for me. I think part of the reason many people quickly felt “overwhelmed” in Morrowind is because they talked to everyone they saw and accumulated a metric fuckload of quests. I mean the number of miniquests is beyond astronomical. I quickly got fed up with the journal, which unlike Jade Empire won’t categorize your entries by quests that are completed versus those that aren’t. Thus it became a ridiculous hassle trying to sort through which ones I had to do and which ones I’d completed.
Once I took the approach of “get a quest, do what I could to complete it and only give up if it was simply impossible, then go for a new quest”, things became far more managable.
This might seem like I went overboard, but I was playing the game on the XBox, and while playing I had an Excel sheet active on my PC so that I could keep my own list of what quests I had, hints for them, were they completed or not, etc. I don’t know if the PC version will let you alt-tab or not, but if so, this may prove very useful.
This might seem like I went overboard, but I was playing the game on the XBox, and while playing I had an Excel sheet active on my PC so that I could keep my own list of what quests I had, hints for them, were they completed or not, etc. I don’t know if the PC version will let you alt-tab or not, but if so, this may prove very useful.
I did something very similar in MS Word for the PC version. I think I was able to copy and past the journal text or something to that effect and then I would add my own hints. IIRC, the Bloodmoon expansion fixed the journal entries but I never played it.
I picked up the Game of the Year edition (or whatever the version that packs in all the expansions) just a little while ago. Since I deperately wanted the Bloodmoon expansion for the journal fixes, does it mess anything up with the main quest to go ahead and install it, i.e. should I beat the regular game before installing either of the expansions?
