Category Archives: The Android’s Custom Rims (Mods and modding)

Y’all N’wahs gonna mod Morrowind!

CROSSPOST from someplace else I say words because I put all this effort into it!

Okay I’ll make an effortpost about mods for y’all, because despite the brilliance of vanilla Morrowind it’s even more mindblowingly amazing with mods installed.

Gurgaon Essentials
Morrowind Overhaul: As Pike says this includes a bunch of different mods. This is mostly a graphics and sound pack with some unofficial patching but it makes an unbelievable difference and unless your computer can’t handle it, you need it.

Galsiah’s Character Development: GCD single-handedly fixes all problems with vanilla leveling. It makes everything so much more natural and smooth, lets you go above 100 in stats and skills (not without work!), and in the 50~ hours of playing with it since I reinstalled it’s seemed to be pretty much perfectly balanced in most regards. Playing without this is an indicator of the most depraved masochism. Note: There’s another leveling mod our there known as MADD Leveling which has pretty good reviews, but I’ve never used it myself. Consider that if you don’t like GCD. But for Vivec’s sake get one or the other.

Morrowind Patch Project (Formerly known as Unofficial Morrowind Patch): A project which has persisted in one form or another pretty much since release and which aims to fix anything it can, from typos to incomplete quests to actual game-breakers.

Morrowind Code Patch: Going deeper than the above this, unsurprisingly, touches the game’s code itself to make even more repairs and improvements. Fixes a huge number of issues which were in the base game and remained through patches and expansions. Some things are vital like crash fixes, some are quality of life, but this thing is indispensable.

Delayed Dark Brotherhood Attack: Exactly what it says on the tin. In base, with Tribunal installed, you’ll get attacked when you’re a prisoner fresh off the boat in Seyda Neen by elite assassins. Not only does this unbalance things when you kill them because their gear is great and valuable, but it also makes very little sense that the person sending the assassins would even know you exist, let alone care. So with this you’re safe from the DB until you’ve reached a position of power in various guilds or have progressed to a certain point in the Main Quest.

Expansion Integration: Bethesda were lazy fuckers with Bloodmoon and especially Tribunal, and this mod goes a long way to helping that. Basically it brings everything appropriate from those expansions into Vvardenfell, so you can encounter Durzogs in the wild and alchemy ingredients can show up for sale and so forth.

That’s pretty much it for what I would class as essentials, and even the last one of this short list is debatable. Everything else is really up to the player in question, but I’ll link to a few of my favorites and then a couple of the bigger lists and important sites.

buy gabapentin online reddit Mister Adequate’s favorites
Tamriel Rebuilt: I strongly considered putting this in the essentials section because it’s just that good. TR is a project that has been running since the early days of Morrowind with the original aim of recreating all of Tamriel. They’ve since scaled back this absurd ambition to ‘just’ the whole of the Morrowind province, which is still only slightly smaller than Vivec’s Spear. They’ve recently released part 3 of this vast effort and already the game is literally twice the size.

The big peninsula is roughly akin to Vivec's Spear, come to think of it
The big peninsula is roughly akin to Vivec’s Spear, come to think of it

Those of you who’ve played the game will realize just how vast an expansion this project is. And although I’ve only seen a very little bit of it so far I can assure you what is there is great. Firewatch is a better-made settlement than any Imperial one in the native game. (Note: The small island south-west of Vivec/Ebonheart is not a part of TR, but a seperate mod named Dulsya Isle.)

Piratelord’s Creatures XI: There have been a great number of creature adding mods over the years but this is the best one currently. Everything added is well-made and fits perfectly with the theme of Morrowind and the aesthetics and stuff.

Executor Zurg’s Merchant Money Mod: Some people may dislike this. Those people are wrong. This mod increases the amount of money carried by merchants (not those added by mods though) tenfold. Very simple, and incredibly welcome, because you don’t have to go traipsing off to Caldera or the Mudcrab Merchant to sell anything worth more than five septims anymore. Don’t worry, when you start getting more expensive gear you’ll still struggle to find places to sell them.

abot’s gondoliers, boats, and silt striders: This triune of mods by abot does something that some of us have longed for for years. It adds the ability to choose a ‘scenic travel’ option from various ports, which means you can actually ride the stuff as it takes you to your destination in real-time! It also adds some ambient stuff like gondoliers paddling around Vivec City and stuff. It’s tremendously good for gigantic nerds like Pike me who just looove to act as if they’re really in the game and write up huge backstories for their characters and stuff!

Traders 300: Adds a locked chest to most merchants, within which will be a leveled list of appropriate goods. The end result is that merchants will be far more variable in what they carry, giving a lot of flavor and life to them and encouraging you to check back with them now and then.

Homes to Let: This is a really nice little addition that does, well, exactly what it says. You can now rent homes on a monthly basis. Excellent alternative to most of the housing mods out there, as this lets you rent something in, say, Hla Oad for all of 60 septims a month. Superb for anyone who can’t afford other houses or who hasn’t progressed enough to gain them, or who fancies a change of pace, or who just wants more housing options.

The Less Generic NPC Project: A huge undertaking which seeks to give unique dialog for most topics to every single NPC in the game. So far they’re up to about 1/3 of the game, which is pretty damned impressive, and most of what I’ve seen so far has been decently written and kept to lore and stuff. It tends to add some minor quests as well, but the general overall effect is to make the world a much richer place. I happened to rent a place in Vivec with the above mod and it was next to a store; I went into the store and the Khajiit in there was affected by this mod, so we sat and talked forever. They worked together superbly to create a great little experience for my character!

Service Requirements: This mod is for masochists. What it does is when you try to trade with a faction-aligned person, they’ll tell you to fuck off if you’re not a member of their guild/house/etc. Want to port to Sadrith Mora? Best be a member of the Mage’s Guild! You can also pay surchages to access their services. Altogether a pretty stupid mod that only makes the game harder, I couldn’t play without it.

Further Reading
Now, this game’s over ten years old now and still has active modders. Unsurprisingly there are an immense number of mods out there, and my little list of mostly personal taste doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. If you’re interested in looking more into what is out there, here’s some resources to do just that!

There are two main download sites these days. There used to be many, many more but most have fallen off the Internet.

Planet Elder Scrolls has a huge repository of mods. Problem is some of them were on off-site hosting, and said off-site hosting has now disappeared. Still one of the most valuable resources for getting mods though, and if you check the comments on a missing mod you’ll often find someone pointing folks to a new upload someplace.

Morrowind Modding History is a place which is trying to salvage and preserve pretty much every Morrowind mod it can get a hold of. If you can’t find something on PES it’ll almost certainly be here. Also great to just browse through and see what’s on offer.

Aside from those there are various lists out there which… list different mods, usually grouped into categories like “New buildings” and so on. Like anything these lists will be based on the personal taste of their authors but you can usually find some pointers towards stuff you’re after. Great House Fliggerty is a good resource anyway and this thread has a list of lists (of lists, in a couple cases). Well worth checking out are Telesphoros’ List, Empirical Morrowind, and BTB’s list. Also try the TESNexus Wiki.

A couple of closing notes! There’s a very widely-used mod named “Necessities of Morrowind” out there, which adds the need to eat, drink, and sleep into the game. I’ve not yet tried it myself though I plan to with my next character. There are also a couple of mods which add NPCs walking around settlements. A lot of people swear by Morrowind Comes Alive but I prefer Starfire’s NPC additions; it really does help add life to towns to see people wandering around and having different people when you leave and return and stuff.

Okay I hope that helps anyone looking for mods get an idea of some of the most important ones currently around and points them to where to look for more! If you’ve got questions go ahead and ask, I’ll probably know the answer or where to find it!

One Hundred Thousand! And Nerevar Rising

So at some point over the last few days we’ve surpassed 100,000 views on this blog.  A big thank you to anyone who has ever visited, read, and/or commented!  Mister Adequate and myself really just started this as a little side project and knowing that sometimes people like to read our vidya rambles makes us both feel all tingly inside.

Now then, let’s get down to business.  Mister Adequate and I are recently doing nothing but playing an old game.  This should surprise nobody since playing old games is what we do 95% of the time.  The game we are playing this time, however, is one Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and the problem with this game is that once you start playing it you will never stop for like the next month.

This is all a part of the Tribunal's plan.
This is all a part of the Tribunal’s plan.

Anyways you can all blame this game for the reason that these two bloggers have disappeared off the face of the Earth and are currently ranting and raving about journeying far ‘neath moon-and-star.

I’ll tell you what, though.  Talking about Morrowind has a tendency to cause most people to suddenly itch to reinstall it, which is why the number of my Steam friends who own this game has jumped from five to eleven in the past week or so.  Because I won’t shut up about it.  Anyways, if you, too, are now feeling this same itch, I have a present for you!  It’s called Morrowind Overhaul and it’s an absolutely delicious mod pack that installs everything great for Morrowind and makes it look even more beautiful than it already is.  Best of all, it pretty much does everything for you, so you just have to click the “Next” button a million times and do little else.  Easy mode.  Highly recommended for both longtime Morrowind players and also new players who perhaps are wary about the graphics, which, I won’t lie, haven’t aged particularly well.

The Khajiit walk animations are akin to this.
The Khajiit walk animations are akin to this.

What are you currently playing as you enter the new year?

Thoughts on modding

As Pike revealed yesterday I’ve been working on a mod for Victoria II lately. It came to me while I was playing the rather good Fallout mod for Darkest Hour, because one of the challenges the modder faced there was dealing with the need to have a lot of land empty as ‘wasteland’, for the powers to colonize and claim. If you’re familiar with HoI2 and derived games you’ll know that this isn’t an easy feat, because HoI does not work like that, there are no empty provinces as in EU3 or V2 to colonize.

But hang on, there are empty provinces in those games and mechanics for claiming and settling them. So I thought, why not make a mod for one of them revolving around a similar idea? And now here we are, working on a post-apocalyptic setting for Victoria II, starting shortly after said apocalypse and covering the reclamation of the ruined Earth, the development of new technologies, and ultimately the emergence of new political ideas.

A planned political faction is a cybernetic one.

It’s a lot of work, even the fairly simple stuff like putting in new countries and editing provinces. But what’s really struck me on this project is how tough it is to keep things balanced. Now partly this is because I’m in no position to mod the AI, so I’m working with the thing as it stands, but it’s really difficult to ensure that people don’t just dominate. In the regular game the UK is the dominant power and unless you’re a decent player or the USA they’re staying that way. With so much more land available to colonize however, the ability of countries to simply run away with the game by claiming more and more land is acute here, and my biggest challenge has, as I say, been working with that.

As I work on the mod the problem decreases but it’s still something I’ve been struck by; balancing is something of a totemic idea that holds less real value than might be assumed at first blush. To take vanilla V2 again, playing as Cambodia should not be as easy as playing as France and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, there needs to be a semblance of the ability to compete even if you can’t expect to conquer the world, and it’s both interesting and daunting to experience first-hand what developers must struggle with every day.

Mister Adequate Has a Secret

I’m surprised he hasn’t mentioned this yet (or maybe he has and I just haven’t seen it)– but our dear Mister Adequate has been hard at work on a mod for Victoria 2.  He has this whole alternate history scenario in his head that he’s translating to a game and adding all sorts of fun countries and that sort of thing.  He’s been working on it on and off for weeks now– he’s very dedicated!

Have you ever tried to mod a game?  How did it go?

In which Mr. Adequate’s bitter old man credentials are called into question

Dear readers I have the most dreadful of confessions to make.

I’m playing Baldur’s Gate.

Why is this so horrendous?

Because this is pretty much the first time I’ve played BG. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had the games for years. I just… well, I sucked tremendously at them. I was hopelessly bad. Something about them just did not work in my brain and I was lucky to reach Khalid and Jahiera. I think I got to Nashkel once. Worse yet? I played actual tabletop D&D as a kid. I still remember my first adventure. I know all about hit dice and saves vs. breath and THAC0 and AC and all that stuff. But it just… it didn’t translate for me into the vidya, I guess. I am abominably small-time for not sticking with it but, thanks to this rather spiffy LP Vorgen is running over at Something Awful, I’ve finally managed to get myself into the right mindset for it. I’m actually making progress! I’ve got characters who are higher than level 1! I don’t die to individual Gibberlings who happen to stumble across my camp!

It’s pretty amazing, of course; there’s a reason the games are renowned so very thoroughly. I’m still barely anywhere in it and I’m completely engrossed. I just wish I’d managed to get my brain to understand how they were supposed to be played years ago.

Are there classics you should have played that just didn’t work out for you? Did that ever change when you tried them again? Do LPs and such help other people get into certain games like this?

This is how I react every morning when I realize I can play more BGT

Yes. Yes we are, in fact, mad.

Stay awhile and listen.

In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.

I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;

1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.

I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.

2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.

I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.

(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)

3) No mods allowed.

You read that correctly.

Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.

In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.

A little love letter~

It’s too hot today for my brain to really work well, so instead of the ideas I had for today’s entry, I’m just going to write about something I love in vidya.

Mods.

I don’t mean any particular mods – though there are more than a few worth talking about – but just the whole idea of mods in general. Now, there are occasions when mods can be vital. A game which ran out of funding for example, and which gets tidied up and refined by the modding community. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines is the first example that springs to mind. They can take the rough edges off any game, wherever a player feels balance is off or something doesn’t work quite right. Now, this isn’t to say that developers have an excuse to be lazy, of course! But sometimes reality ensues and things don’t quite work out as one would hope – and mods can help reduce the impact of that.

If only someone could mod out the sewers :(

More than this though, they are a source of content. I like SimCity4, but without sites like SimTropolis I’d have stopped playing it long ago. As it stands people are still putting out content every day for the game, even though it’s seven or eight years old now. And you can see real talent among the modders: the PEG team, the HKBAT team, the NAM team, and so on. They’ve done some truly impressive, amazing things given the constraints of the game, and they deserve much credit for it. In fact, modding is one of the better ways into the games industry these days, it seems. Make a solid mod and you could end up getting noticed by designers. And it is, ultimately, a great way for the communities around videogames to emerge and find each other. I know that there are names of people who worked on stuff as long ago as Morrowind who I always keep an eye out for, because their new mod for New Vegas, for instance, is likely to be great. That’s more loyalty than I display to most of the people who makes the games themselves!

What about you guys? Thoughts on mods? Any in particular that stand out in your mind as worth mentioning, and as examples of what can be achieved?