Installing MW & Tools

Once you're done with this wall of text, you'll have a nice stable vanilla Morrowind to play.

✨Morrowind

Install Morrowind anywhere but in Program Files.

Once the game is installed, take a look at the folders:

• Your Morrowind folder contains Morrowind.exe, Morrowind.ini and the subfolder Data Files. This is also where you will find the document warnings.txt and MWSE.log later on when Morrowind complains about problems.

• The Data Files folder is where Morrowind finds pretty much everything: the items you see, the textures on the items, the music you hear, the images in the books, etc. This is also where the plugins are.

• We have 2 types of plugins: esp and esm. esp are mods, esm are the files those mods rely on. We call them Masters. Right now there's only Morrowind, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, but many mods we're installing have extra esm requirements.

• Still in Data Files, you'll find bsa files. Those are basically zipped archives that the game uses. Some mods come with their own bsa files and will need to be registered i.e. tell Morrowind to use them. More on that later.

Run the game to make sure it's fine. A couple of things you'll want to do:

Go though the "tutorial" until you have Fargoth in front of you and SAVE. Call it "zero mods no nothing" for example

Press "esc" to open the options menu and change the following

• CONTROLS "E" to activate and "spacebar" to jump

MAIN Always Use Best Attack=OFF (unless you want to simplify combat)

MAIN Subtitles=ON

VIDEO Real-time shadows to OFF, i.e. the slider all the way to the lef

After you have installed Morrowind make a backup of Morrowind.ini

DXVK

A Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D that boost fps on most setups.

Open the archive with 7zip

Open the archive within the archive

Open the x32 folder

Put the d3d9.dll in that folder into your Morrowind directory.

✨Morrowind Code Patch (MCP) + Skunk Works

MCP patches the Morrowind.exe and fixed many bugs. It also introduces quality of life features.

The Morrowind Code Patch (MCP) fixes many bugs in Morrowind.exe and introduces several quality-of-life features. Necrolesian has written a very detailed description of all MCP options if you're interested.

Extract the content of both archives into your Morrowind folder and overwrite when prompted.

Locate Morrowind Code Patch.exe and run it (double-click)

Select the options as below and click on "Apply chosen patches".

Only enable "ownership tooltip" if you don't plan to install "Ownership Indicator". The MCP option added a line to the tooltip with the name of the owner, the mod turns your cursor red.

MCP Options

Now, let's make sure that Morrowind runs properly. Double-click on Morrowind.exe for now. Later on, we will launch the game through Mod Organizer 2.

✨Morrowind Graphic Extender XE (MGE XE)

MGE XE is the tool that brings Morrowind to the 21st century. It adds distant land and shaders, as well as quality-of-life features like widescreen, window borderless mod, and common Morrowind.ini edits.

To install MGE XE, extract the files to your Morrowind folder and find MGEXEgui.exe. Double-click to launch it and select the options as shown below. Then, close the program.

• Note that if you're playing on a big screen, you may want to upscale the UI because the letters can become tiny.

  To find out your maximum Antialiasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF), go to the config panel and click on "Report Max AA and AF

Distant Land

Now it's time to set up Distant Land. Note that we'll have to repeat this process after you've installed new mods, but for now, we just want to make sure that MGE is running correctly. Here's what you need to do:

Go to the Distant Land tab

Click "Distant Land Generator Wizard," and a new window will pop up

Select all the plugins and click continue

It's technically sufficient to select only the ESP files that modify the exteriors of Morrowind for generating distant land. However, selecting all plugins is a foolproof way to ensure you don't miss any. Keep in mind that selecting all plugins may result in a long distant land generation time. Additionally, if you choose to "use current load order," any grass mods you have installed won't be included because they are never actually enabled in the game.

Select the size of the land textures. Personally, I use 1024 for world textures and 512 for world normal maps.

Click "Create Land Textures"

Select the World Mesh Detail, I use high.

Click "Create Land Meshes"

Here's the next set of options:

After setting up Distant Land, you can adjust the MGE XE options to suit your preferences and hardware limitations. Keep in mind that increasing certain settings, such as Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering, will improve image quality but also require more processing power. Lowering grass density can also help improve performance.

Always "Mesh detail level" at FULL.

MGE distant land options

Back on the Distant Land panel, we can select a few more options:

• Locate MWSE-Update.exe and double-click. Let it do its things.