Mod installation

Morrowind Mods (such as .esm / .esp plugins, texture replacers, mesh replacers, ...) can be installed and used just like in vanilla Morrowind. However, there is an interesting OpenMW-only feature that deserves explanation: multiple data folders.

Multiple data folders
OpenMW supports the use of multiple data folders. The first data folder is typically your Morrowind  folder. Additional data folders can be added by editing  (see Paths for the location of this configuration file). This provides a very easy way to install and uninstall mods:


 * To install the mod, create a data folder for the mod and add its path to.
 * To uninstall the mod, simply remove the folder from.

The main advantage to this method is that mods coming with loose files are much easier to organize: if you had simply dumped such mods in your Morrowind  folder, then file conflicts (e.g. the same mesh or texture file being overridden by multiple mods) are much more difficult to handle - files must be merged manually and uninstallation is extremely tedious.

When using multiple data folders, the priority of each mod can simply be changed by moving its  line in    to a different place. The last  line has the highest priority (i.e. loads last, and may override material in earlier-loaded mods), and the first listed has the lowest priority.

Detailed mod installation instructions

 * Your mod probably comes in some kind of archive, probably .zip, .rar , .7z or something along those lines. Unpack this archive into its own folder.
 * First, ignore instructions in the mod description that say something like "extract the archive directly into your Morrowind 'Data Files' folder." You want to keep mods in their own folders, and not overwrite original game resources.
 * Make sure the structure of the folder is correct. Some mod archives contain a single  folder and some additional files, others put everything into where they are unpacked, still others put everything which belongs to the mod into a specially named folder and meta files (like readmes) into the folder where the mod is unpacked (plus a few have incorrectly created archives that start at the rot level of the modder's hard drive). You need to normalize this:
 * Put all ESPs into the top level of the folder in which you want to put the mod.
 * Put all resource folders into the top level of your mod folder. The relevant folders are,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,   and  . Not every mod contains all of these folders (and actually most mods don't contain most or even any of them), but if they belong to the mod, they must be in its top level.
 * Open your   in your favorite text editor.
 * If you are on Linux it is most likely at  (Note that this is a file called   that resides in a folder  ). The file is not directly in the   directory.
 * With your editor's search function, search for lines beginning with  and go to the last one of these lines.
 * If you didn't change the   before, there should be only one such line.
 * If you follow these instructions, all of these lines should end up in a single continuous block.
 * Add a new line below the one you just sought out and make a new entry of the format
 * If your mod folder is  you add a line reading
 * Note that a trailing slash is not necessary.
 * Note the double quotes around the path name. These are not optional in Windows! Linux users report conflicting results (that quotes are required, that they must be left off, or that they don't matter). To be sure which will work on your system, add a very obvious mod (something you can see immediately and don't have to go look for) with quotes, open the game, and see if it worked. Quotes are the expected behavior, and this inconsistency has been reported as a bug.
 * Save your.

Load order of .esp files
The following steps are only necessary if the mod relies on any .esp files. Simple texture/mesh/whatever replacers most often do not have any .esp files and in these cases the following steps are unnecessary. The readme of the mod often tells you whether .esp files are necessary.
 * Open the OpenMW Launcher.
 * Select a Current Content List, or (usually) accept the current one.
 * Go to the "Data Files" tab.
 * You'll now see a list of .esp / .esm files that OpenMW knows about. Seek out the .esp that belongs to your mod.
 * Drag and drop the .esp to the desired load order position (lower in the list means later loading, thus higher priority).
 * If a .esp has unsatisfied dependencies (because it is too far up in the load order or because the dependency is not installed or is not enabled in the list yet), a warning symbol will be shown to the left of its name.
 * Activate it by turning on the checkbox to the left of the mod's entry.
 * Activating a .esp that has one or more dependencies will activate the mod or mods on which it is dependent, if installed but not yet also activated.
 * "Installed" in this sense means installed in the Current Content List's "Data Files" tab's list; OpenMW has no idea what you have laying around on your hard drive somewhere. This list is built from what you have added to, plus what (if anything) you have installed the old way (see next section), plus what (if anything) you have created with OpenMW-CS, which saves to a subdirectory of OpenWM's config folder.

You now should be ready to start OpenMW with the newly installed mod.

To check whether your mods of choice work in OpenMW, see Mod status.

The complicated, old way
If you only want one or two simple mods, or just want to quickly test one, the original way to use mods may be more expedient:
 * Extract the mod archive to its own folder. Ignore instructions in the mod description that say something like "extract the archive directly into your Morrowind 'Data Files' folder." You want to install this carefully, and not overwrite original game resources.
 * Put the .esp file in your Morrowind  folder.
 * Put any supplied resources in the appropriate  subdirectories:
 * If the mod provides something like a  directory, put   in the Morrowind   folder; the mod is expected them to remain inside that   wrapper.
 * If the mod provides some files arranged like, then the   goes in Morrowind's   folder.

If it wants you to overwrite any existing resources, you should probably be using the new OpenMW way to use mods, instead. If you continue, you must back up the original files first, or you will not be able to uninstall the mod, other than by starting with a vanilla copy of Morrowind. Another approach is copy Morrowind entirely, install the destructive mod into the copy, and playtest the copy.

Rarely, a mod may require you to adjust something in  (not to be confused with  . Make a back-up copy of this file first.

Leveled list merging
Sometimes, a mod's readme will say that a tool for merging leveled lists (e.g. Wrye Mash and various other Windows programs) must be used. You cannot use such a mod safely, without work, as OpenMW has no leveled-list merging feature. If you're hell-bent on trying it, there are some experimental approaches to merging leveled lists for OpenMW.

See the thread here for how to attempt merging with John Moonsugar's Perl-based tool tes3cmd v.0.40pre1 and later. This appears to be tested, but is complicated to use, and is not directly compatible with OpenMW's modern mod installation method of using multiple data directories. (A workaround for that problem – using symlinks in Linux and MacOS – has been discussed here. MacOS aliases do not work; Windows shortcuts are not tested, but probably do not either. However, Windows supports symbolic links at the command line.)

There is also an OpenMW-specific tool in development, J. Melesky's Python3-based omwllf (OpenMW Leveled List Fixer). It is in an alpha state and has no documentation.