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

OpenMW supports the use of multiple data folders. The first data folder is typically your Morrowind Data Files folder. Additional data folders can be added by editing openmw.cfg (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 openmw.cfg
 * To uninstall the mod, simply remove the folder from openmw.cfg

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 Data Files, then file conflicts (e.g. the same Mesh / 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 data= line in openmw.cfg to a different place. The last data= line has the highest priority.