User:Darklocq/Mod testing notes

This is a [draft] page for extended notes about testing various mods with OpenMW, so the main Mod Status page can be kept more concise. Specific mods' entries here can be set up with link anchors. The info on this page is the result of "live" playtesting with various mods, and is not the one-mod-at-a-time testing used, per the Mod Testing Guidelines, for the Mod Status page.

Need to add more version numbers, authors, links. Also codes for MW, TB, BM, etc., as required by the mods. The companion mod advice can probably be broken out into a separate page on that.

Companion Mods

Companion mods in general have proven challenging to work into OpenMW, other than rudimentary pack animals. A large number of more complex NPC companions appear to be based on Grumpy's Companion Project v3.1 (let's call that "generation 1"), often as improved by Emma in some of her companions ("generation 2") in various stages, and later by numerous others in different and inconsistent ways in later companions ("generation 3"). Some particular gen 3 companions (e.g. Jasmine and Dawn) appear to be the most functional, with many gen 2 mods failing to perform as expected (or at all, beyond stationary NPCs that can hold stuff and chit-chat). Gen 1 mods: not sure, since Grumpy's ZIP files and installation instructions are often faulty, and the companions have to be consoled in, and appear to provide little utility other than as guard-AI NPCs, so no one seems to be testing them. There's also the huge companion systems like CM Partners and its forks, plus A Lord's Men, and Staff Agency; I have not tested these.

General Advice on Companions

The five most frequent companion-mod issues encountered in OpenMW:

1. The companion eventually disappears, usually after restarting OpenMW, taking all of their carried gear and loot with them – This is most often caused by adding or removing some other mod in mid-game, or some other form of savegame corruption. Sometimes the companion has ended up in the off-map void, and cannot be relocated in-game even if they have a teleportation/telepathy/control ring (they may appear to respond verbally, but this is item scripting, not NPC AI). Sometimes this problem also occurs after using a transportation ring for a specific companion, e.g. Jasmine.
   • This disappearing act can usually but not always be resolved with PositionCell, e.g. "JAC_Jasmine"->PositionCell,492,457,-240,16200,"Balmora, South Wall Cornerclub" (that's "NPC_ID"->PositionCell,x,y,z,facing-direction,"Cell_ID")
   • In other cases the companion is simply screwed up. In this event, you can try to spawn a new copy with PlaceAtPC in the console, at the cost of the gear and any training and companion quests to date, but this does not always work (especially if the companion has elaborate "complete these steps to earn me as a companion" scripting; you may not be able to re-do those steps. Jasmine is one such mod. This eventuality may necessitate that you remove the companion mod, clean your save, then reinstall it and re-do the companion quests to restore the companion to working order (you hope). Sometimes, however, just changing the mods loaded is enough to further corrupt your game.
   • Some companions also have a particular location they return to by default; try looking in the same place you originally found that character, or see if some other option has them show up somewhere. E.g. Wolf Companion 3.1 has a "Have you seen my wolf?" NPC dialog thing that causes the wolf to reappear in Arrille's Tradehouse (not its original location) if you ask that question of a random NPC in Seyda Neen (only). So, read the companion's documentation carefully. Some companions that supposedly have this feature, e.g. Jasmine and returning to her house, do not have it working properly in OpenMW (Jasmine in particular will go there if you tell her to, but will not by default when she goes missing for inexplicable reasons).
   • Some strategies for preventing lossage: When you are done gaming for the day (and periodically just as a form of backup), remove all gear you care about from the companion, make sure the companion is in "follow" mode, do a full (not quick) save, in an indoor cell, with no combat active (no combat music is still playing), and after being at rest for several seconds and certain that the companion has followed and is also at rest. Then quit and restart the game, reloading that save. If the companion disappears, it was already corrupted by something, and you need to load an earlier savegame. If you added, removed, or reordered any mods in the interim, undo those actions first. Do not leave any companion for 72 game hours or longer without interacting with them (and put them in follow mod to be sure they've interacted sufficiently); so, be careful about using "Wait" several days in a row with merchants (it helps to bring the companion to the merchant with you, and keep him/her in follow mode; then you can do the Wait trick for many game days if you want). Never leave a disappearance-prone companion in "guard this spot" or "stay here" (AI wander) mode and then exit the game, and save before you move from one exterior cell to another if they are in this mode (do lots of quicksaves while wandering the landscape with them). This methodology may not be foolproof; generally, do not give companions any irreplaceable equipment and do not rely heavily on anything their mod provided, while also treating quests that came with them as optional diversions not central gaming goals, because you may lose all of these things.
2. The companion will not follow, and is just a stand-around NPC/container – This seems to happen with several Emma mods (Laura Craft Romance and Imperial Boyfriend Indiana James, for starters), as well as some by others, like Panther Buddy. The forums have suggested that this has something to do with a) scripts with names that begin with numerals, and/or b) scripts with version numbers in their names, and/or c) NPC IDs that exactly coincide with script names. So, systematically patching the mods to change the script names and references to them may fix this.
3. The companion goes into combat mode for no apparent reason and cannot be taken out of it – Also affects many Emma mods, possibly for the same reason as refusal to follow (see previous bullet point), and with the same potential solution, though it may also be endemic to the scripting logic. A harder-core fix may be extensively rewriting the mods using generation 3 scripting from mods that do not have this problem and are otherwise similar at the basic interaction level. The "fighting forever" issue is a known problem with Beryl and Hurd, as well as the fighter companion Ingred of Domehome, and (with a variation) the domestic staff of Domehome if you teleport them out of that location (they'll actually fight each other on sight as soon as the second one arrives). It may also affect Thief Companion Constance, but does not affect Witchgirl Adventure's Morgana, nor Tribunal's own Calvus Horatius, or the Dawn Companion (by another author but also based on Grumpy's Companion Project scripting).
4. The companion's control options disappear when another companion is added – This (which also happens with the original Bethesda game engine) is usually due to two companions sharing scripts or dialogue options with the same names, and can presumably be fixed by systematically patching them to be unique. No one seem to have tested this approach on any existing mods. This is a known problem with running Laura Craft Romance and Imperial Boyfriend Indiana James at the same time, among others (sometimes their own documentation will warn of this, as do Grumpy's Cally and Grabran readmes). Many mod authors have used Grumpy's scripts without doing much to adapt them to be unique to their specific mod.
5. The companion's elaborate quests don't work – Why this happens will be entirely dependent on the nature of the scripting. Sometimes the fault is OpenMW bugs, sometimes it's script syntax errors on the part of the mod author, and sometimes both. See again the Julan thread for an example of how many errors of both sorts can arise in testing a single mod.

Specific Companions (Humanoid and Creature)

• Jasmine, a Morrowind Companion 2.7 by Gulfwulf (GHF) – Fully functional (aside from occasional disappearing – see above), until player character reaches Reputation 3, then her quest scripting causes her to break (she tries to give you a telepathy ring, and fails, and goes into a loop. Giving yourself the ring via console does not fix this. Using the ring makes her disappear and become unrecoverable even with PositionCell). She's my favorite companion mod to date for lower levels of game play, but even then is highly sensitive to changes in other mods, and may have to be restarted from scratch as a result. Find Jasmine a) after you are certain what mods you want to run with this time and that they're in a functional order, and you've started a new game; b) before you start the main quest; and c) without mods that greatly alter the MQ, if you want her to be stable until her breaking point. She is pretty tough, but I have gotten her killed in testing several times, so she's not over-powered, though may make things rather easy for a level 1-3 character. The house she comes with in Seyda Neen is very modest. A minor bug is that the crap armor she comes with she will not use, and she won't equip anything comparable (leather stuff, mostly). You must give her Chitin or better or she will not armor up; but you would do that anyway. Getting her to trigger properly as a companion requires specific undocumented steps: after you find her, you must acquiesce to her two requests, take her to her house, dialogue with her again inside it, then click on her closet, then dialogue with her again to configure her behavior, and all in that specific order; only then is she ready to go. A great thing about Jasmine is she does not suffer from the potion-guzzling bug; you can stock her up with 20 health potions if you want to, and she'll use them as needed. (Not so with scrolls though – if you give her ten Fifth Barrier Scrolls she'll use them all in a row while fighting nothing but a Kwama Forager, so don't give her a scroll except right before taking on an enemy where you're sure she'll need it right at the start of the fight. I had her burn through a stack of them fighting a rat.) Like most companions, she is not at all careful with missile weapons and will happily stick arrows in you if you get in her way. Like others, she'll waste all her missile ammo trying to shoot fish which can't be done in OpenMW (if you are near water put her in melee mode; if it's too late, kill the fish yourself as fast as possible to conserve her ammo). She's smart enough to not turn into your enemy if you give her a minor wound during combat (she'll issue verbal warnings instead), but will of course turn enemy if you attack her outright, or if you injure her seriously or repeatedly during combat. Her quests so far have one and only one right answer, seemingly always the first one; if you don't give the right answer, that avenue is permanently closed to you, so save frequently in case you click the wrong one. Her ability to stay out of your way is very good; she has the smartest AI I've seen in a companion mod so far. She also comes with some real voice acting, which is not overdone or frequently triggered. She's also compatible with Companion Role Play Plus; you can use this to raise her rather neutral disposition to something that makes more sense given what you do for her upon meeting her. Her disposition will vary on its own (mostly going up, though it drops temporarily if you try to talk to her while actively wielding a weapon). She seems to have abnormally high Agility, like many companions; I've seen her jump down a long distance and not get killed. She auto-levitates and auto-waterbreathes.

• Wolf Companion 3.1 by Emma and Grumpy – Fully functional, and my second-favorite companion mod. Previous versions have serious problems, at least in OpenMW. The wolf, named Spot, is over-powered for new characters. With a level 1 PC (and thus weak enemies) this puppy can and happily will slaughter all wildlife (land and sea, but not air) and most smugglers and such, from the Ascadian Isles all the way to Caldera and beyond, in a single session, for just the cost of a few healing potions, and without the PC much bothering to fight. Spot is best added after there is less discrepancy between your and the wolf's power, and the enemies can fight back more. If you wanted to, you could re-mod this mod in OpenMW-CS to be less powerful. While you're at it, reduce its speed to the same as or close to that of the PC (he's +70 PC speed!), and reduce his scale slightly to 0.9 so he gets in the way less. Must be fed a potion manually; this companion cannot carry anything. Has highly desirable "follow me, but wait outside interior cells" feature that I wish all companions had, especially creature ones. Does not levitated, but does auto-waterbreathe.
• Dog Companions by Emma and Grumpy – Seems to work. Uses essentially the same scripting as the wolf, above. In wait mode, the dogs have unnecessarily loud barking; this can be fixed by altering their sound files with an MP3 editor.
• Companionable Cats by Emma – Partially working. I got the kittens to follow me home, two or three at a time, but the adult cats appear to be missing; they cannot be added with the console. These are not come-fight-with-me companions, but house/stronghold accents, basically. Part of their animation cycle causes frame rate problems, but only for a few seconds. It helps to put each kitten in a different cell.

• Dawn Companion 1.3 by Korana (based on Linsner's comic book character of the same name): Fully functional so far, but I've only been testing this for a day. While very simple (her disposition does not vary, she has no quests, and doesn't have very unique dialog, nor any Calvus-style mercenary demands, etc., etc.), her scripting is very robust, and her navigation and combat AI is as smart as it gets, other than she'll happily injure you if you don't get out of her way. She's become my go-to companion. Technically not lore-friendly, except you don't have to interpret her as Linsner's character, just as some random human with some tats. And it's nice to have a redhead in the game, a bit like running around with Red Sonja. Some aspects of the readme actually pertain to an earlier mod this one is based on (e.g., you can ignore the instructions to console her in, since she's actually already in-game at Desele's House of Earthly Delights, with a "luggage" chest). The same modder's Lady Death Companion (based on the Chaos Comics character) probably is equivalent, with mostly the same scripts, but is much harder to rationalize, lore-wise. Dawn comes with over-powered gear, other than her good but unenchanted sword; the un-cheat is to put the mega-armor away until you earn comparable gear in the game, then let her wear one of her saucy outfits. I think this is the intended idea, since she has 4 of them in wildly varying armor classes, from pretty darned good to Daedric level. She auto-waterbreathes, but must be told to levitate and to stop levitating (she'll clip into the ground temporarily if you forget the last bit). Her agility is super-high; if you can survive a jump/fall, so can she. She's not over-powerful, and you can get her killed pretty easily, so be protective. Like many companions, she will not use a healing potion until desperate, and will not use one between fights, so use a Restore Health on her after every fight, and during them in big fights.

• Beryl and Hurd by Emma: Severely malfunctional; they go into unresolveable "I'm in combat against nothing and will fight the air forever" mode at the drop of a hat. About the only present use for these two (alone or as a pair) is to pick them up as a level 1 PC, and use them as cannon-fodder against the smugglers in Adamasartus and other nearby caves and tombs, and hope they die in the process. If they don't, just leave them in there when they inevitably flip out. To even do this with them, you a) need to not have any fish around Seyda Neen who can see you, or B and H will go into combat freakout mode the instant they walk out of Arrille's, and b) If you have both installed, you probably need to lead each of them to Adamasartus one at a time, since just leaving Arrille's together can sometimes trigger their fight response. Also, do not use their "Put away your weapon" feature, as it has the opposite effect and sends them into combat mode (against you!). Update: Apparently this inappropriate combat behavior can be stopped after a fight with a strong Calm Humanoid spell (use Fortify Illusion first if you need to), then opening a dialog box with each in turn and putting them in wait mode, then back in follow mode).

• Panther Buddy: Will not follow or dialog; if you click on her after purchase, she's just a container. Her control pearl does not work. The only use for her is (after using console to move her) as a non-functional guard pet outside your manor, for the cool sound effects, and to use as a really weird form of storage. "Yes, I hide my diamonds and other jewels in my panther's butt. Who's gonna try to steal them?" >;-) It would be highly desirable for problems with this mod to be fixed, since it is a much more balanced guard-pet for lower-level characters than Wolf Companion is. In a back-to-back test, picking an unarmored and unarmed fight as a level 1 PC with Panther Buddy resulted in being killed by her after she scored six scratches, while the wolf killed the PC with a single bite.

• Laura Craft Romance 2.2 by Emma: Will not follow, but all other functions appear to work, except perhaps her specific trainability-for-a-cost (however, this might take effect after you level up yourself). So, can still be used as a girlfriend mod, just one you have to manually visit. Her teleportation ring might be usable to move her into your own stronghold; I haven't tried. She has various abilities, like armorer, that I have not tested personally yet. The creature in Laura's basement will follow, but seems to serve no purpose but amusement. One issue with this mod is Laura's house includes over-powerful stuff, like Ebony armor; while she'll get angry with you if she catches you using it, you are free to do so as long as you don't interact with her while wearing it. Not cool, unless you are already at a level where you have access to this sort of stuff. The home also has excessive storage, though this is typical of many house mods. Some may find Laura's lovey-dovey dialogue overrated, but "Romance" in the mod title was fair warning! Some of her extensive back-story dialogue may not match what you envisioned for your own character, though.

• Indiana James Imperial Boyfriend by Emma: Same problems as Laura Craft; they use the same scripting (literally – they cannot be added to the same game or they will conflict with each other).

• Domestic staffers and fighter companion of Domehome (see below): The fighter, Ingred, has the same the same broken combat AI as Beryl and Hurd, with the same after-fight fix (see above). The three domestic staffers have a similar but peculiar issue: they'll fight each other if you attempt to use the Staff Ring to teleport them to a new home. They can be manually led to one, but it needs to be in the same town, or with the path pre-cleared (as with trying to move Mudcrab Merchant) since any encounter with hostiles will put them into combat modes they will stick in. It is possible they can be individually teleported to different rooms in a new home and allowed to mingle by manually leading them into the same room; I have not tried this. I would ensure that they are kept out of any place you plan to teleport into with any other companion in tow (e.g. out of your front yard if you've done a Mark there). Another trick for moving them might be using a "portable home" cheat mod temporarily, for the sole purpose of putting them into it and moving them to another regular house in a different city. Or just move them with the console.

• Cally and Grabran by Grumpy – These "generation 1" companions do not work in OpenMW at all. They simply do not appear, even if you attempt to console them in. (Yes, I know they cannot be loaded simultaneously even in vanilla MW; I tried them one at a time.) These appear to be early beta versions of Grumpy's Companion Project. Other companions based on late versions of it (before Grumpy's cancer got the better of him), including Dawn Companion, work famously well.

• Witchgirl Adventure – Fully functional so far, other than the problem (also occurring in vanilla Morrowind) that your instructions to her to no summon atronachs during combat will not "stick"; you have to tell her this again and again (or just let her do it and keep well clear of the carnage, or bulk up on Resist Shock; the always wants to summon a Storm Atronach, and a skeleton, even to fight a rat). This constant summoning is ruthlessly exploitable: Wander the landscape with her, let her summon her minions, do a ranged, area-of-effect Soultrap, trap the enemy and any minions that died, then attack the surviving minions, and individually soul-trap any more she summons. In a single rat fight, you can net several atronach and skeleton souls along with the rat's. Just be careful not to hit her with the soultrap, nor issue a new soultrap on any minion unless at least one regular or summoned fighting enemy is still alive, or she'll interpret you as attacking her and go hostile. Anyway, she's overpowered and dangerous, will kill your other companions through summoning negligence (and maybe you, too), and is not of much use except for distracting Gaenor and other "boss monsters" with summons while you hit them from behind. With her in tow, Gaenor (who has super-human Luck) is beatable at around player level 15 as long as you have a large stockpile of Restore potions and wear him down over the course of half an hour or so; he'll direct most of his hostility to Morgana's summons, as long as you keep him away from her personally and from you. A good positioning is: M  S  G    Y (Morgana, her summons between her and Gaenor, and you out of his reach and hitting him with everything you've got). Move around a lot to preserve this combat layout, and keep the fight away from bystanders (harm done to them by Morgana's summons will be blamed on you).

• Thief Companion Constance – Installable, and I was able to pick up the companion, get her to follow, take inventory, and fight. However, she went into constant-combat mode like some other companions do. I need to do a cleaner test with her, without other companions around and without abot's Guars 1.19 (see below) which badly messes up companions and their combat behavior. Still, I expect that this is the same combat bug as the same author's Beryl and Hurd mods, and the Ingred fighter in the Domehome mod. Her Morgana mage companion in Witchgirl Adventure (see above) does not have this problem.

• Julan, Ashlander Companion – Functional so far. I sent him to go wait for me in Ald'Ruhn, and haven't gone back for him yet. I think the forums suggested his quest stuff breaks at this point, but people have been working on getting that mod to work in OpenMW a lot, so this might be resolvable. I haven't tried yet. Anyway, see the OpenMW forums. There are extensive threads on getting this quest-laden mod to work properly (of which I was unaware when I installed it, so I may have already messed up my version of him in this game).

• Pack rats:
  • Those added by Bethesda's official Tribunal mod in Mournhold are to be fully functional.
  • Those added by Balmora Expansion (see below) are fully functional.
  • Those added just outside Pelagiad by Pack Animal Merchant 1.1 by Baratheon79 are not usable; the NPC who has them will take your money but you don't get a rat or a guar that will work. Update: I seemingly actually got one pack rat here for free, just by walking up to it and telling it to follow me. I'm not certain it isn't one I didn't buy elsewhere and leave here, though. (I leave them all over the place, and like other NPCs their position migrates a bit over time.)
  • Those added further from but still nearby Pelagiad by [mod name here – I think this is Grumpy's version] are not usable; the NPC who has them doesn't respond with any purchase options.
  • Side note: The prices of the rats in various mods are inconsistent, but the carrying capacity and behavior appears to be the same.

• Pack guars:
  • Those added by Guars 1.19 by abot (the ridable ones) are not compatible. After you get on one, its navigation seems to be broken. Clicking makes it zoom into super-speed mode, plow through the landscape, and fall with you into the water table under the landscape geometry. It also adds guar-riding dialog options to nearby NPCs, including companions, and badly interferes with their behavior (e.g., they will not follow until told to dismount a guar they are not actually riding, and this problem is permanent, even if you respawn the companion NPC elsewhere). Other broken things are that it warps to the player too much, and will often overlap the player character, obscuring vision, and impeding movement until told to move. Ordering it to follow until a fight does not work; it will join in the fight instead of stay away. It does not teleport or transport as advertised. On the up side its unique ability to heal from alchemical ingredients you give it does work, as does it ability to learn on its own (though I'm not sure what it is learning).
  • Those added by Balmora Expansion (see below) seem to be fully functional.
  • Those added just outside Pelagiad by Pack Animal Merchant 1.1 by Baratheon79 are not usable; the NPC who has them will take your money but you don't get a guar that will work.
  • Those added further from but still nearby Pelagiad by [mod name here – I think this is Grumpy's version] are not usable; the NPC who has them doesn't respond with any purchase options.
  • Side note: The prices and carrying capacities of the guars in various mods are wildly inconsistent.

• Pack donkeys:
  • Pack Donkey 1.0 by Emma (those added in Suran) – May be functional, by itself. In one game, another mod I added broke this one (donkey will not follow), but I'm pretty sure the donkey did follow in a previous test. May just be a load order problem, and I'm not sure what the conflicting mod is. Warning: version 2.x by same author is for TES4: Oblivion, not TES3: Morrowind.

• Horses:
  • Pegas Horse Ranch – Not tested yet. Was able to install it without the game crashing, but I have not tried using the animals, or even gone to where they are yet.

• Wildlife and farm animals:
  • Cait's Critters Unleashed – Working flawlessly so far, including audio and their limited AI. It's fun getting killed at level 1 by a chicken you pick a fight with when you're out of stamina. Some of their locations are a cute surprise, like finding a rooster high up on ... you'll see. Because their locations are specific and not random, it is possible for some individual animals to conflict with other mods. I have found no incompatibilities so far, even with mega-mods of Seyda Neen and Balmora (see below), other than one mostly-buried pig. The ambient animal noises work fine with both Ambient Town Sounds and Better Sounds, below. Presumably they also work with Atmospheric Sound Effects or its Expanded Sounds fork, but I have not tested them. It's easy to console-clone any of these animals with PlaceAtPC if you want to add some to your stronghold. They also respawn, can be attacked without bounty or other consequence, and thus can be used as Marksmanship, Destruction, etc., practice, if you're mean-spirited.

Companion and NPC Utilities and Misc.

These generally seem to need to load before companion mods, but for some it might be the other way around, or might not matter.

• Companion Role Play Plus (a.k.a. Companion RPP) 1.01 by ManaUser – Partially functional, to the extent it has actual functions. Much of this is trivial "just in your own head" roleplay stuff, but it does have some actual game-affecting features, like the ability to raise and lower disposition with "favors", and to have some requests complied with or denied based on disposition. Those appear to work. The features for having companions change their outfits do not appear to work; I have a suspicion that these are MWSE-dependent and that the author did not mention this in the readme.
• Universal Companion Share – Seems to work, other than for some "non-standard" companions that use custom scripting (e.g. Panther Buddy, who seems to actually be a container, not an NPC). This lack of functionality with those does not appear to have any negative effect on anything.
• Move or Take My Place 1.0 by abot – Despite the fact that the readme says "MWSE required", this actually seems to work, aside from the quick-key trickery. However, it is frustratingly dependent on NPC disposition, which means it will not work most of the time for low-level characters, or at all with NPCs who aren't you best faction buddies. This is worth hacking to make it always work, so NPCs who have totally blocked you with no way out but console tricks, can be forced into moving, as a player requirement not a PC roleplaying request. Someone please make that version, and call it Move or Take My Place, Dammit. (In the mean time, two console tricks are TCL then TCL again after you move through them, or Player->SetScale,0.1, then setting it back to 1.0 after you run at mouse size between their feet. Use the former if you have a companion the NPC is also blocking.)
• NPC Commands 8b by Horny Buddha [MW+TB+BM] – Partially functional, to the extent it has actual functions. Much of this is trivial "just in your own head" roleplay stuff, but it does have some actual game-affecting features, like getting NPCs to face you or turn away (good for testing companion outfits, as long as they're not in follow mode, since they'll face you against instantly). With high enough disposition, it can be used to get random NPCs to do things like follow you, and this has obvious cheat potential, so, well, don't cheat (hint: if you're not powerful enough yet to get the same effect with Command Humanoid, you're cheating). One highly desirable feature, the ability to force NPC merchants to sell gear they have personally equipped, does not work. This would be desirable because if you sell something good to a merchant and want it back, you can't buy it back if it was better than what they were already wearing and they've thus equipped your item. The only fix I know of for this is to figure out the item ID, console them another copy of it, then they'll sell that one to you (aside from just consoling it back to yourself, even more of a cheat). There are also various strip/disrobe mods that may work (though with a nude NPC side effect, and thus just as immersion-breaking); from testing several weeks ago, I know that one of these works and several do not, but I do not remember which. I just remember feeling some "virtual shame", and giving the merchant some clothes for 1 coin, just so they weren't buck-nekkid any longer.  :-/ A practical use for "Face me" is to get an NPC that has slowly migrated to an in-your-way spot to turn in a different direction and either let them migrate that way over time, or forcibly move them with the console, and keep them facing a direction that will keep them out of your way later.
• Dancers 0.8 by Nicholiathan – Working, including in other mods that use the strip-club resources to add dancers elsewhere. This just diversified the (human) races of dancers instead of them all being the same. You get a Redguard, a Breton, and a blonde who is either an Imperial or a Nord. Still a bit sexist of course. I think it would be amusing to mod this further and put some elf boys in the mix, ha ha. Desele's House of Earthly Delights sounds like it should cater to more than one interest.
• The Regulars – Abject failure, which is bad, because it has a cascading effect on many other mods. The Regulars adds seated NPCs in various taverns, but in OpenMW they are almost always levitating in mid-air, at butt-to-eyeballs height. I think I've only seen a single one seated properly in three weeks, and he did not stay that way. Unfortunately, many third party mods, including mega-mods like Balmora Expansion (see below) include "Regulars" as resources they've imported from this mod, so the more mods you install, the more likely you are to see levitating Regulars even if you never install The Regulars itself at all. Nothing is said about MWSE or other engine hacks in the readme, so this appears to be a genuine OpenMW bug situation. I have not checked yet whether it has been reported on the bug tracker. I also have not tried manually moving them on the z axis, but may attempt that, since it is annoying.
• Lying-down NPCs added by various mods (e.g. sleepers in tavern bedrooms, drunks in the club in Carnithus' Armamentarium as included in Balmora Expansion) have a tendency to not stay that way, to migrate around on the floor through walls, etc. I experimented with using the console to put some of them in beds in my character's home, and have noticed two things: They actually spawn in the room in standing position, then quickly fall to their prone one; this is similar to posable armor mannequins, who actually start standing normally then quickly drop into combat stance and freeze. Sleepers also seem to conflict with the bed itself, and will often quite rapidly migrate on the x or y axis (x, I think). I think a modder solution to resolving this would be to use low, invisible walls to "box" them into position on the floor or bed you want them to stay on.
• Skirts and male characters: I've noticed that some male companions, including Tribunal's Calvus Horatius, will dialogue with a male player character as if female if the PC is wearing a skirt or anything that equips as a skirt (e.g. kilts added by various mods). This is unexpected and undesirable, since skirts are unisex in this game, and even part of some uniforms, like those of Mournhold guards. I suspect this a problem in the vanilla game, not OpenMW. It really doesn't make sense that any NPCs would trigger off a clothing item instead of just checking the PC's actual gender.

Major Overhauls of Vanilla Places

As single mods or as combined collections of previous mods, various add-ons make major changes to some game locations.

• GS Seyda Neen Complete 2.5 by Gianluca, et al. – A merged compilation of mods to the locality, it seems to be functional, though some of it is over-powered for new players and characters (e.g., a big free home with lots of storage, and access to powerful stuff in new shops). Some may also object to the large amount of rapid transit to many destinations. However, this is highly convenient for experienced players who just want to "get on with it" and get through the baby stages of the game quickly. Depending on your load order, you may get some odd visual quirks, like harvestable fungus growing in mid-air from a tree that was removed, or a shade not quite attached to a wall over a bedroll vendor added by another mod because the wall was moved. By itself, this mod works fine. PS: Those playing the slavery angle from either direction will like the inclusion of buyable slave companions at an estate in the newly developed Seyda Neen, to either exploit or set free (I have no idea if they count toward freed-slave totals, though I doubt it). I have yet to try hiring any of them, though had my eye on the expensive battlemage; all-fighter companions get a little dull after a while. Seyda Neen Complete includes three house mods for some reason, providing too much housewares loot for a balanced start. If you just ignore this stuff until you are level 5 or so, and no longer desperately stealing silverware, one of the houses has a small "secret" cave full of semi-tough baddies. I took it on at level 3 with a companion and died seven times before beating them, so it's a fun enough diversion. I don't like any of the houses well enough to use them other than as temporary storage.
  • GS Seyda Neen BB Market 1.3 by Gianluca, et al. – This add-on for the above appears fully functional, though trivial (just some clothing vendors, and not exactly kid-friendly ones). It incorporates some other mods; one of these is Silver's Dresses which was not compatible with OpenMW as a stand-alone mod. Another is a goth chainmail dress one (which did work stand-alone). There are four or five such vendors in one spot combined into one mod here. If I were to re-work this, I would put them inside a building, since it doesn't make sense that lingerie models are hanging out outdoors in the town. I would probably also put them in a new room in the House of Earthly Delights instead of in Seyda Neen. All that said, one or two of the items really do look great on female characters, especially when combined with some of the nicer vanilla skirts and pants or some from other mods.
• Seyda Neen Village Expansion 1.3 – Severely buggy in OpenMW, and over-powered. Everything good about it has been incorporated (and re-balanced to some extent) into GS Seyda Neen Complete, above.
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 with Slarti's BE Fixes – Another merged compilation of local mods. Fully functional with few visual problems, and compatible with a surprising number of other mods, though sometimes with some visual defects, and highly dependent on load order (some must be added before BE and some after, and some before/after each other). I did not and would not try this without Slarti's BE Fixes. I also did not try some third party's Balmora Expansion 1.5, because it fixes fewer problem than Slarti's patch did. As with other such mega-mods, some of what BE adds is basically trivial and some of it may be over-powered for newbies (not free, just available rather soon), but overall it makes Morrowind seem more like a real place with people doing stuff and with a vibrant economy. Some of the shops are only added with an optional add-on, so you can skip some of it. ** There are various patches (some included with it) to make BE work with other mods, including dh Homes, Houses for Sale, The Soothsayer, Better Looking Morrowind, Callenwald, and Wizard's Islands, and there are additional mods for it, including Balmora Ghetto, but I did not go through all of them.
  • One virtually mandatory add-on, if you like your ears, is BE Waterfall Volume Patch. The BE team added sound effects not in the original Heremod Balmora Waterfall but forgot to normalize the volume. I almost broke my headphones ripping them off my head, then went looking for this add-on. Another solution would be to identify the offending audio file and just remove it (or edit it to reduce the volume); that would free up a mod slot.
  • The biggest sources of conflicts involving BE are: a) things that affect the hillsides on the east and west sides of town, which are frequent locations for house and merchant mods; b) mods that affect Caius Cosades's house and its immediate surroundings; and c) those that affect the riverbanks. Sometimes conflicts are unexpected, and have effects nowhere near their main locations (e.g. a travel mod that adds a boat outside town to the south may raise the shore north of town, and a house mod in the west-central part of town may cause a landscape fracture north of town). Elsewhere in this page I've given load-order notes to work around these problems when I have figured out how to do so.
  • BE includes the magnum opus Carnithus's Armamentarium, an underground, monster-laden, gothy vampire and werewolf gush (which can only be entered at night, at least through the obvious entrance), with a hot outfit shop and a "dark side" club you can join. This is hardly TES lore, but if you're already playing goth mods, you'll love it, and if you're not, just don't go down there. You have to look for it to find it.
  • BE also includes a buyable home mod already, so you may not want to add another here.
  • One slightly annoying thing is the inclusion of a prominent fletcher crafting shop (full of typographical errors in almost every sentence in the fletching kit manuals). Major, complicated crafting mods (especially half-baked ones) should not be included in town mods like this except as optional add-ons; this one is harder to ignore than Carnithus's, since it's right there, and it's also a regular archery shop you'll have use for.
  • See also The Regulars, above, for an issue that affects many mods and is clearly an OpenMW bug.
  • I've discovered BE has one outright cheat in it, the availability of a Corprus cure spell or item somewhere. This will just have to be ignored; the one patch I've found to remove this also attempted to patch allegedly too-high lighting levels, but botched the job and just made every interior in town ridiculously dark (in OpenMW, anyway), so it is not usable.
  • If you want to use Domehome (see both above and below) with BE, it is only partially workable (its front door and top deck door are partly occluded, and its top deck is broken). It must be loaded before BE. It cannot be used with Balmora Balcony House.
  • Balmora River House (see below) requires the BE-compatible variant, and should load before BE. It must load after Domehome if using both, but before Odai Boat Service if that one is also used. If you also use Canoe Travel, then BRH will mostly bury the closest canoe, but it actually remains usable.
  • Concept Exterior Abode conflicts with BE, and seems to be alpha-ware.
  • The useful and practical Adul's Arsenal and more silly Adul's Arcane Armature (using the same door) are compatible, though the shack entrance does not fit the milieu and looks out-of-place.
  • Balmora Candle Shop IV by Nathaniel "Wolfzen" Schrader – Is compatible, though it partly occludes the Adul's doorway if you install both (they both remain functional). I loaded both of these after BE. In one test, the candler did not actually sell any inventory, but this might have been due to load order.
  • Balmora_Trader_Market 1.7 by NinjaOcean is compatible.
  • Clean the Apartment by Grumpy – Introduces issues, but they may be resolvable with load order. In my tests, it caused some wall duplication in the nearby guard barracks, wrecked the house of one of Cosades's neighbors, and blocked a shop and some walkways, when BE was also installed, though CtA worked fine as a stand-alone mod. CtA will also conflict with various other house mods that affect the Cosades home, of course. The fact that the apartment's closet has infinite storage will be an issue to some (Then again, it is such a tiny and dark space, no one would want to use it long).
  • Heaven's Lookout Updated will have its access ring go missing if BE is installed, since the tower is changed. The shop can still be accessed by consoling into it. It doesn't seem to have a functional exit, anyway, so you'd need to use the same method to get back to land if you can't fly for a long time.
  • Fighter's Guild Home – Works fine, other than if you open that rooms door and the door to the vanilla "dorm" room at the same time, they stick to each other and become unusable. This has no real effect on gameplay and is just cosmetic.
  • Balmora Mages Guild Abode 1.05 – Works fine with BE.
  • Private Tower Balmora 4.0 – Not compatible with BE. OpenMW crashed when I tried using this, but I had other mods installed, so a clean test is needed.
  • Sgaillach Estate – Not compatible with BE; despite being outside of town, it modifies some landscapes also modified by BE and they clash.
  • Balmora Balcony House 1.002 – I think this was compatible but imperfect; I would have to reinstall it to be sure. It conflicted with Domehome and with another Balmora house mod I tried. Don't need multiple house mods in the same town anyway.
  • Balmora Grocery – Not compatible with BE, at least not in my tests. If your a Necessities of Morrowind fan, you could try running NoM, BE, and this mod only, in some tests to see if a particular load order will get them working, then add your other stuff one bit at a time until you get a game that will go.

Major Quest Mods

Some ambitious mods provide expansive quests, sometimes with new types of creatures, their own cutscenes, etc. Some work, some do not.

• The East Empire Expansion – Caused 12–20 sec. delays in saving (even with Quick Save); did not test further. Sounds exciting, but I'm not sure what issues it may have.
• Balmora Keep 1.0 by Pinthar – This big quest, place, and home mod is full of dirty references, and caused my OpenMW (on a Mac) to crash on load, but I had other mods installed. May try it again with a new game, if I can find a Windows box on which to run a cleaning tool.

New Places

• Altmer Town of Illiandria 1.0 [or is it Iliandria?] – Badly malfunctional. It has overlapping structures, and numerous textures are glowing white, presumably due to "fake bumpmapping", plus ultra-dark interiors. Doesn't seem to do anything useful, just provides merchants with powerful items. Has a very alpha-test feel to it.
• Glenfinnan – Couldn't load this; caused OpenMW to crash on my system (Mac), but I had other mods installed. May try it again with a new game.
• Morrowind Public Library – working so far.
• Balmora Waterfall by Heremod Productions. Working and fun for low-level characters. Note: This mod is integrated into several others, including Balmora Expansion (see above); do not install is separately with them. This will also, obviously, conflict with any other waterfall mods in the same location (at the bridge between Balmora and Caldera), though I accidentally ran it with one of them and it worked okay, other than it made it difficult to get in and out of the area behind the waterfall.

Homes

• Balmora River House – Fully functional, including the alchemy sorter. This is a very practical and compact user home base for a player who is not a hoarder. Compatible with Balmora Expansion if the correct variant ESP is loaded (see details above).
• Domehome – Seems fully functional as a house, but see above about issues with its NPCs/companions, and compatibility with Balmora Expansion. Not lore-friendly; it is full of Dwemer tech that the PC should not be aware of until late in the game (and which is not stuff Balmora residents would be using in their houses). It has a bunch of Imperial stone block architecture looming above Balmora, so it's very out-of-place. Its conceptually interesting, but someone needs to re-do it, and in a different place on the map, e.g. near one of the Imperial forts. It's principal value is its domestic staff NPCs, who can be relocated, but only very carefully, to a different manor that needs some. It also comes with too much sellable silverware for a new character, and the low price of 2,000 septims makes it available to one.
• Kahleigh's Retreat 2.0 – Fully functional, but highly dependent on load order if used with other mods, as it can end up floating in the air or partially buried if anything else is also used and affect the same ground area (e.g. Gothic Clothing Complete or Imperial Airships mod). It actually interferes slightly with the Imperial Airship's ramp regardless of load order, but both remain playable. This home is very nice and conveniently located, but is over-powered and full of free stuff. It has enough storage (counting its basement) to store probably 1000 copies of every item in the game, which is silly. If you want to use this, I would suggest using the console or other tools to clear it out, then use a furniture mod to set it up as you prefer, paying as you go for plausible roleplay. The amount of silver tableware in here, by itself, is a bit much. Definitely invest in lighting, as half of the rooms are too dim to be usable. The way I've modded it in-game, it's turning into a good PC home, though.
• Private Tower Balmora 4.0 – Caused OpenMW to crash on my system (MacOS), but I had other mods installed, so this may be worth a re-examination. This is more than a house mod, as it has quests and dungeons, and modifies 10 exterior cells. The odds of this being compatible with Balmora Expasion or anything similar are very low.
• Bob's Armory [I] – Seems to be working, though I have not tried out the clothes in it, nor the third-party add-ons like the alchemy lab. Bob's Armory II is a shop (see below).

Merchants and Items

See also Balmora Expansion, above, which adds a metric ton of shops and gear. So does Seyda Neen Complete.

• Balmora Market 1.22 by ivegotabettername (cameronvsdwayne) – Seems functional on its own, and probably with many Balmora mods, but is incompatible with Balmora Expansion, since it puts vendor stalls exactly where BE merchant shops are.
• Donner's Toolkits – Not working. I tested the quest variant, and the NPC will not initiate dialogue relating to the toolkits. The toolkits themselves have broken meshes/textures and just show up in game as giant "!" markers. I did not test the vendor variant, since broken items are broken items. Update: This could have been due to mod load order issues; if someone wants this mod, it may be worth testing it by itself then, if it actually works, trying to add other mods, and keep testing it after doing so, in a new game each time, until you have the mods you want and this one still works.
• Cali Starstone Outpost by Calislahn – Significantly broken in two ways: About 3/4 of the items have broken meshes/textures, such that the character's body is visible through highlights on the clothing models, and (worse) the armorer guy in the basement has a dialogue loop that locks up the game and forces you to quit the application to get out of it (or perhaps there's a console way to escape).
• Silver's Dresses – Not compatible with OpenMW as a stand-alone mod (the NPC vendor never appears). A functional variant is integrated into GS Seyda Neen BB Market (see above).
• Chascoda's Armored Dresses – Totally malfunctional: the NPC vendors shows up nude, the items are broken, and her shack, with a mis-coded door, cannot be exited, even with Intervention.
• Bob's Armory II – Seems to work fine.
• Map Tapesty – Works fine.
• Correspondence of Morrowind [actual archive has a typographical error name, Correspondances of Morrowind] – Working fine.
• Morrowind Kilts 1.0 by dg a.k.a. Horatio – Working, but extremely brittle, in that adding another mod to an ongoing game (even one that seems to have nothing to do with clothing, only dialogue, and regardless of load order) often caused kilt textures to disappear (e.g. clothing PC was wearing turned into neon-pink "missing texture" color).
• Ultimate Kilts 1.0 by Silaria – Seems to be working. These are less garish than the dg/Horatio ones, but those come in multiple quality variants (think enchanting value) while Silaria's do not. Both of these kilt mods use the stock skirt mesh, which isn't quite right for a kilt (and they don't have sporrans), but oh well.

Core Game Mechanics

• Speed and Stamina Tweaked 1.0a – Working, though some may feel it is a bit over-powered. Regardless, it should be used with Better Fatigue Usage (below) or it definitely is over-powered. So is the original Speed and Stamina which I have not tested, but which inspired the Tweaked version. Honestly, this makes the game much more playable and less frustrating; some will argue that the whole point of TES3: Morrowind is to take the game at a snail's pace, but many of us have better things to do with our lives than spend a real-time hour walking through grass and fighting the same rats just to get to another town, especially if we've already played the game several times and have seen it all before. This mod lets you run more without becoming exhausted so fast, and replenishes stamina. It also increases base speed just a little. Purists will hate it, but I highly recommend SaST, along with BFU, FMR, and NPCMR below.
• Better Fatigue Usage 1.01 – Working. While intended to re-balance Speed and Stamina Tweaked even further (by increasing the fatigue expenditure of combat, more so with heavier gear), you can use this alone to make the game harder.
• Fair Magicka Regen – Only works if fixed; see the main Mod status page entry. This is a must if you are used to spellcasting in Oblivion or much of any game, for that matter. Actually, hardcore players of AD&D will remember that spellcasting was something that took study and recovery and wasn't something you could wander around doing a lot of. But this is a video game, and some of us really just want to get on with the action, not spend all our time on a bedroll, bartering for magicka potions, or slaved to a lab bench crafting more of them.
• NPC Magicka Regen – Working, and balances FMR, above. You can also use it alone to make the game harder, which was the original intent. As the readme notes, if you can survive the first part of an encounter with a vanilla magicka-using foe, you generally find them too easy to kill once their magicka reserve is depleted. Now they don't run dry so fast.
• Yet Another Herbalism Mod – Essentially working. The behavior is not entirely consistent from plant to plant, but this is true of the mod in Bethesda's engine. Not compatible with many other alchemy-changing mods, though this does little, other than help indicate (usually) when a plant or whatever has already been harvested so you waste less time trying to re-pick the same ones. If I remember correctly, this is also the mod that allows you to mine additional bits out of ores if you install the add-on for that, and also get a miner's pick, though I have not tested that part yet.

Fast Travel

As far as I can determine, zero mods with scenic-travel options (where you get to watch the travel as it happens) have this functionality in OpenMW, though they work otherwise (i.e., they get you there the same way a siltstrider would). GS Seyda Neen Complete (see above) includes some additional ship travel, but is not redundantly listed here.

• Imperial Airship – Working so far, though see note above about Kahleigh's Retreat.
• Canoe Travel – Installed okay. I did not keep it long enough to find the magic paddle to use the canoes. The problem is that it puts canoes just about everywhere, cluttering the whole game with them, and providing rapid travel anywhere. If you demand that, just use a teleportation cheat; much cleaner and simpler.
• Odai Boat Service – Working. If used with Balmora Expansion (see above), it must load before BE. If used with Balmora River House, it must load after BRH.

Texture Replacers

I am not listing any pure texture replacers here unless they are ones with problems; the presumption is that any such mod will work, unless the texture image files in it are corrupted, or it uses "fake bumpmaps". I'm also not listing anything that I tried and reject just because I thought they were subjectively hideous (and there were lots of those, especially Hlaalu and Vivec replacers). I will list here mesh-and-texture-at-once replacers that work and do not work.

• Better Bodies 2.4 (a.k.a. Better Bodies ZW): Working so far (as others have reported), but I'm still testing.
• Better Bodies 2.2 (the "official" one from the BB project at Psychodog Studios): Was also working; used it for a month.
• Better Clothes 1.1. Testing, but good so far. This is designed for use with Better Bodies and Better Heads. Pre-BB/BC clothing meshes in some old mods can not come out right, but that has nothing to do with OpenMW.
• Better Heads 2.0. Testing, but good so far. Only issue is that with some "head pack" mods (like World of Faces), I've had missing-neck problems, but I think that's the fault of the head packs, not of Better Heads (or Better Bodies or Better Clothes, but it's going to take a while to nail down, and I'm not running MacKom's Heads, for which this was a known problem). I'm starting a new game and will test without the head packs.
• Skies IV – Spectacular. This takes some manual work to install, as you have to select which moons you want, and also make some weather changes in morrowind.ini and either import them into openmw.cfg or make conforming manual changes. I have not yet tested its changes to snowy or ash skies. For SW Vvardenfell, it's definitely my favorite skies texture-and-mesh mod so far.
• Spewboy's Bitter Coast – Excellent. Get it. It verges (no pun intended) on a grass mod, without any of the problems associated with them. Also affects local rocks and other stuff, to good effect.
• Better Skulls 1.4b – Definitely an improvement over the cartoonish originals.
• Better Picks-n-Probes – Nothing to write home about, but makes them easier to distinguish.
• Better Looking Liquor, Drugs, and Vials 1.0 – Testing. Looks impressive, but I'm not sure what load order will be needed to resolve conflicts (in inventory) with Potion/Scroll Icons and Potion Sort, Fixed, below.
• Metallic Road Signs – Working so far. Makes it easier to tell what is down what road without hovering over signs. Purists will not like that the signs are in English. Speaking of which, I have no idea if there are any additional localizations, but I suspect not, since this is not a font mapped onto a texture, the wording is actually part of the image, so it would have to be painstakingly done for every road sign in the game. Note that this will have to load after any more general sign mod (e.g. for merchants, such as Faylynn's) if that also includes road signs and you want this mod's road signs not that one's.
• Faylynn's Signs and Banners, Refined+Darkened – Working (I did not test the brighter original version). Makes it more obvious which merchant type is which.
• Shiny Septims - Original – Technically working, but too bright, presumably due to "fake bumpmapping", with the cheat result that it makes coins in dark places glaringly obvious. There must be a better coin texture mod for OpenMW, where they look neither like gleaming beacons nor like vanilla's lumps of corroded brass.
• Lysol's Hlaalu Normal Mapped for OpenMW 1.1 – This omwaddon works and is nice work, but has the side effect of giving outdoor Hlaalu guards excessively fancy furniture (in the few cases where they have any) that looks like they stole it from someone's mansion. It's a tiny bit distracting. There's another one I used that looked almost as good, wall-wise, and did not have this furni issue, but I forget which one it was. Not Faylynn's; I did try several of hers.

Audio

I'm listing here stuff that works together. There are other sound mods I'm not trying out that will definitely conflict with some of what I do list here, probably in multiple ways. Chief among them are Atmospheric Sound Effects (ASE), and its lower-impact fork Expanded Sounds by Piratelord.

• Quieter UI Sounds – Seems to work consistently, though honestly a lot of these sounds, like for equipping/de-equipping remain unnecessarily noisy.
• Ambient Town Sounds 1.3 – Working, including with BS, below, and Cait's Critters Unleashed, above.
• Better Sounds 1.1 – Working, including with ATS and CCU, above. Note: This incorporates Bethesda's own Bitter Coast Sounds, so disable BCS before running BS. You also can't use the weather effects changes in the config files that are prescribed by both ATS and BS at the same time; just pick one set of adjustments and ignore the other.
• Swiveller's Sounds 1.1 – Did not attempt. This is a half-baked mod that requires a whole lot of manual sound-file format conversion work on the part of the player.

Misc.

• Meteors 1.2 – I had it installed for a month, and never saw a single meteor.
• Key Overhaul 1.1 – Seems to be working.
• Pearls Enhanced 3.0.0 – Working so far; have not tested the alchemy effects. I'm not sure how much of an enhancement this is. You do find some more valuable pearls, but the chance to find a normal one is reduced, with many of them flawed. While that's balanced, I don't really see the point. "Clutter-ware"?
• Chalk – Working, though a bit tedious to use, and the chalk sticks weigh a crazy 1 full pound (or kilo or whatever these units are). Use OpenMW-CS to reduce this to a sane 0.1. Given that you can add notes directly to the map (didn't know that? double-click on any spot that isn't already a little "named place" square), about the only use I've found for this is labeling containers.
• Lower First Person Sneak Mode 1.01 – Working, and useful.
• New Leveled Animated Practice Dummy 1.1 – Working so far; this is not for homes, but for dummies in guild rooms.
• Potion/Scroll Icons and Potion Sort, Fixed by Spirithawke (patches PSIaPS 1.0 by rm_rfstar, Erasmus, and Srikandi) – Working and useful, though takes a while to get used to. Gives distinct icons for various potions and scrolls (or at least types of them), and sorts vanilla ones ("Restore Health, Quality", instead of "Quality Restore Health", etc.), without making weird changes to chests or to Golden Saint summoning scrolls as earlier versions did. See also Better Looking Liquor, Drugs, and Vials in the "Texture Replacers" section. It would be better if it sorted even more logically ("Health, Restore, Quality"), but we'll leave that for another mod.
• GotY Script Tidy 2.02 – Did not work for me, even with just the minimal variant installed. It is likely that the fixes this attempts to apply to coding errors in the original Bethesda ESMs conflict with fixes already applied to the OpenMW game engine itself. However, I did have other mods going at the same time. The only way to adequately test this would be to run through the entire game with no mods but this one, and see if various well-known vanilla bugs stop occurring.
• Ingredient Weight by PeterBitt – Working as expected. Recommended, since the stock weights of several Tribunal items were wildly inconsistent with similar items in the base game.

Trivial and Amusement

• Morrowind Achievements 0.5b – Working so far, though it clutters the main journal.
• Hunter's Achievements v1.0 by Trollf – Working so far, and uses its own journal.
• Morrowind Trading Cards by Danae – Not compatible. While one can find and collect cards, and some NPCs will trade them with you, the main NPC for this will crash the game if you enter his cell, or use the console to bring him to another cell. Furthmore, several stock NPCs and locations who have been modded to have something to do with cards will crash the game when you enter those cells. The crashes are partial: One cannot move or do anything in-game in these cells or in proximity to console-summoned NPCs affected by the bug, but can still reload the game from a save, and use the console. The albums for collecting the cards (available from that main NPC) do not work, even if you console them to yourself; the cards cannot be added to them. If you give yourself the completed albums, and are running the buffs version of the mod, you will get the buffs from them (they act as skill books at least, and may also add daily powers, I'm not sure – it was broken enough I stopped testing it). There are other bugs, like one collector NPC offering you a rare Golden Saint card, taking what you offer in trade, and then giving you a junk card instead of the GS card.

Hacks, Testing Tools, Exploits, and Cheats

• Tempus Fugit Ring by abot – Functional. As in the vanilla engine, the ring will duplicate itself upon game start if you don't have it in your inventory. While annoying, this is not a big deal, as it is worth only 1 gold. This item is actually a must if you play a time-dependent mod like Necessities of Morrowind, so your character will not be half-dead of thirst if you go cook dinner in realtime in the real world and forget to pause the game, which by default runs at 30x realtime. It can also be useful for temporarily speeding up time beyond 30x if you don't want to use Wait or Rest. One might use it in the game-morning in exteriors to slow (or "un-speed") time down to 10x or less for more daylight playtime. While the Morrowind's night can be exciting (especially with a mod that makes nastier creatures come out then), it can be a hassle for trying to locate something new. A PC would be sane enough to wait for daylight if he/she/it were a real person, so this is more of a practical hack than a cheat.
• Chests of Holding 1.0 – Working so far. These are stationary, and are not portable. They're at Intervention locations, and exist so you can unload stuff and actually move if you've done a typical over-encumbered teleport. Not really a cheat, since you would just dump the stuff on the ground at the same spot anyway; the provision of a container just makes it more orderly.
• Stripping mods – As noted above somewhere, there are various mods for getting NPCs to take off their clothes. Some work, some do not. I have no "excited by cartoon nudity" rationale to test these things out in detail; you're on your own, there. I tried some because I wanted to get an NPC to drop some armor so I could examine it, during a test game, before I figured out you can just open the console, click on the NPC, and do SetHealth 0 to get them to die on the spot. As I recall, only one such strip mod gets NPCs to drop stuff on the ground, while the rest either cause them to de-equip but retain their stuff (if you have 100 disposition with them), or will do nothing at all (presumably due to an MWSE dependency or other OpenMW incompatibility). Some also seem to be intended as "in your imagination" roleplay things, like the command of this nature in Companion RPP (it also has kissing requests, etc., that don't actually do anything other than produce positive or negative text responses; this isn't exactly The Sims, and MW's NPCs have very limited animation abilities).

Unknown or Only Preliminary Results

The following mods are not producing any obvious errors, but their positive effects are indeterminate to me, since they change aspects of the game I don't know well enough to tell if they're working. See also the section above on companions.

• Uniform Script Fixes 1.0 – This purports to prevent Imperial and Ordinator troops attacking you if you are wearing their armor (and, in the case of Imperial, you are not among their forces). A) I was wearing some Imperial gear before installing this and was not attacked for it, so the vanilla game's attack effect must be for very specific items that I have not used. B) I did (after installing this) manage to steal some Ordinator gear pieces from one of their barracks, using telekinesis, and I was not attacked for wearing it, right there in the same room. But I had not done that before installing this, and thus do not know if I would have been attacked for those items, or if it's only a full suit (of a specific sort), or if it's only after killing an Ordinator, or what.
• Freed Slaves Counter Issued 1.01 – I have not started the Twin Lamps quest line since installing this, and you have to be in that quest to get the item.
• Lore Fix 1.01 – Enables various bits of Bethesda dialogue that are present in the vanilla .ESM but not actually used in the game; it gives them to various NPCs. Only someone who has played through the entire game many times, and knows all the dialogue very well, would know whether this is working.
• Various "NoLore" mods, e.g. ones that get NPCs to stop offering babble about Solstheim when they have no plausible reason to have anything to say about it. I didn't think to try one of these until after my game was well under way, and attempts to install one at level 3 keep messing up my game.
• Simple Seasons 1.0 – My current game is too new to be sure this is doing anything. Even after a lot more play, I'm not sure I would necessarily notice. Its readme did say that it does thing like trigger more rain in the Caldera through Bitter Coast region (I think) as a seasonal thing, and it has been raining a lot in my game. However due to the "changing mods in mid-game in OpenMW will badly break it" problem, I can't reasonably test by remove this mod and seeing if it's still raining. Whether it is or not could be due to the effect of the mod, or the effect of borking up the game by touching the mod load in any way.

Worked to Some Extent, but Had Issues in at Least One Test

Issues experienced with these may well be due to changing load order, or incompatibilities with other mods. They need to be tested one mod at a time. See also the section above on companions.

• Rain Splash by abot – I've seen a grand total of one rain splash. Pretty useless, though it might be a nice ambient touch if it worked with OpenMW better (or, rather, OpenMW worked with it – it is known to work with the vanilla game engine). Right around the same time I saw the rain splash, I started getting FPS lags, and one of my companion (a mod one, Jasmine, not a stock one) disappeared. However, this could be coincidental timing.
• Shut Up! – Worked great in one game, but has not been doing anything in the one I'm running currently, with additional mods. I suspect this is a mod load order issue. I'm not sure whether this should be loaded early, as something that mod-added NPCs will be affected by as they're added to and generated in the game, or should load later, as something that modifies and overrides their default behavior.
• Breton Arms, as part of Balmora Expansion (I have not tried the separate version) – It is working in my current game. In a previous one, the shop had no inventory. There is one problem with it, which might be a misfeature, not a bug: After you buy one piece of armor from this vendor (e.g. Gold Cuirass) the vendor never has it again, even if you forcibly regenerate the NPC with PlaceAtPC or whatever. So you and your companion can't have the same gear from this merchant. The stuff adapts to female or male body it seems. I don't know if this permanent (e.g. it's very girly armor on my Jasmine companion, but I have not tried wearing it myself – kind of an oversight!).

Unresolved Problems in a "Stress Test"

To push OpenMW's boundaries, I'm running near the max number of mods. It works surprisingly, almost shockingly well. The issues I've run into so far:

• Making any mod changes – even to load order, or just adding a simple .omwaddon that does nothing but fix a typo – after a game has started has a strong tendency to screw the game up in OpenMW, often in ways one will not notice for a while. Some of these may include the following (and examples are given below):
  • Rooms with missing floors so you (and any NPCs who generate as the door opens) fall into water, to your death on rocks, or endlessly in a void.
  • Rooms that lock you up (PC cannot move, and nothing else happens, though console still works) as soon as you enter them.
  • Missing meshes and/or textures (they show up as day-glow pink or green fields). Nothing will re-load them, even adding them individually in a new data=/path/here/ config file entry that just has Meshes and Textures directories with the missing things.
  • Companions may vanish, though are usually recoverable from the void with PositionCell as mentioned elsewhere herein. (Do not use PlaceAtPC; that makes a new copy of the NPC in their default starting state, so you will lose the companion's gear, stats increases, quest flags, etc.)
  • NPCs in the wrong place, e.g. standing (even drowned) in a river, stuck under a bridge, etc.
  • Crucial NPCs just missing. They can also be recovered, with PositionCell or PlaceAtPC.
  • Items missing (including entire places, if added by a mod).
  • OpenMW crashing on startup, or upon leaving the cell one is in when re-entering the game.
• Two interiors in Mournhold have lost their floors; in one you fall into water, in the other you're falling in a void. In both cases, you can swim or fall-fly (respectively) over to NPCs (who are also in the water, for void-floating with you) and find out who they are, then just load a previous savegame, and use the console to clone the NPCs, with PlaceAtPC, "NPC_name_here", 1, 1, 1 (and also toggle collision/clipping mode off temporarily with TCL and move if you and the NPC are stuck inside each other, then toggle it back off again with the same command). As far as I can tell, no objects in these rooms are essential, and only three of the NPCs matter (one gives quests, one is a hireable companion, and the other is some councilor guy who might be quest-related; all the rest are generic guards). Anyway, just avoid going into the rooms after you figure out which doors lead to them.
• The Dawn companion mod includes a unique teleportation feature, to Mournhold. If other companions (or pack animals) are in tow, they will not go along for this ride. In at least one case (the Jasmine companion) it sends that other companion into the void, though this NPC can be recovered, with no loss of gear, etc., with PositionCell, e.g.: "JAS_Jasmine"->PositionCell, 492, 457, -240, 16200, "Balmora, South Wall Cornerclub". I also find the Jasmine companion to be very "brittle" in response to stuff done by other mods (though robust otherwise) and have had to recover her this way more than once.
• A few NPCs have a tendency to wander into weird places/situations and get stuck, evidently due to faulty modified path grids in sloppy mods, or to different mods doing different things in the same area that, in combination, mess up the path grid. You can just move them to a safer location in the console, as with companions. For a generic NPC, you can leave them as-is if you want, though I find it distracting to have someone walking into a wall all day, or a pack guar stuck under a bridge.
• One NPC has flipped out. The Siltstrider operator in Ald'Ruhn goes into "flee in terror" mode seconds after you arrive. This sends any companions you have into combat mode. Since the NPC is in combat mode himself, first, you can kill him without it being a crime/bounty situation. Doing so and cloning him with PlaceAtPC just results in another travel agent with a panic attack. You don't need him anyway, since you can leave via Mages Guild travel. I've tried every in-game way that came to mind to get him to chill out, and nothing works except temporarily. If you really want him there and on duty, probably the only solution is to enchant a constant-effect Calm Humanoid item (of high enough value he'll equip it), and use the console to put it in his inventory. Another approach would possibly be to use a mod editor to track this NPC's script down and change his values to something braver, like AI Flee of perhaps 20 and AI Alarm of 0. This might not work unless that change is in a separate .omwaddon or .esp, loaded at the end, since it's evidently a mod incorrectly changing the default behavior of the NPC in the first place.
• Poseable armor mannequins (which are really just weird NPCs) will frequently trigger companions into combat mode when they enter the same room, because the way these things work is they very briefly enter combat status themselves to get into a fight pose, then are frozen in that position, and they do this each time you enter the cell. You can sometimes hear them unsheathe their weapons and utter a syllable of what would have been battle bravado banter, and combat music start for a note or two, when you enter a room which contains one or more of them. The solution is to not put them in a combat pose. This may not affect all modder "brands" of such mannequins, but the problem is happening with all of them I've tried so far in a battle pose.
• A few texture seams here and there, including at least two you can fall into and get stuck, but just use TCL to get out. Don't use FixMe; it rarely actually sends you to a useful location and can make matters worse.
• Some clothing and other gear mods are messed up, and have broken meshes and/or textures that show up as either a day-glow thing in the right shape, or a big yellow box with a huge "!". There does not seem to be an easy way to fix these. Not all of them that seem broken at first really are, however. Several provide female-only clothes, and if you put them on a male they don't work (either the clothes don't show up at all, they make part of the character invisible, or they clip badly with the body mesh. Also, some are made for the Better Bodies mod and some are not, and this can also cause texture clipping (e.g. thighs showing through greaves). This can be visually patched up to an extent by equipping pants, shirts, or whatever, that are approximately the same color. Once in a while some mod or other will mess up a vanilla texture, e.g. the Crab Meat icon not showing up. This mostly seems resolved by restarting the game app, and otherwise by toying with load order, but sometimes it may just be a faulty mod. Most often, it is due to changing the exact number and order of mods loaded. Just do not do it. If you aren't sure you want to run a mod, try it out with a test character, then start a new game after you decide which mods you'll use. This is unfortunate, but I wasted two weeks of game play by testing out some additional mods and removing some poor ones, only to find that my game got too screwed up to continue, and my mod load setup was too complicated to return to exactly. This is a good argument for putting all your game directories under version control with Subversion (svn), Git, or Bazaar (bzr).
• With all the mods I've loaded, there's an NPC house in Caldera I can't enter without mostly locking up the game (console and menus still work, but the PC cannot move or even look around). Not sure which mod is the culprit, but I just cloned the NPC outside his house.
• Same thing happens with the cell "Seyda Neen, Census and Excise Prison". Manually entering the area (e.g. with Player->PositionCell 2460, 4840, 16340, 225, Seyda Neen, Census and Excise Prison") does not work around the problem; it seems to be a partial app crash upon loading the room's details. I doubt there's anything vital in there. However, I have concerns that I will not be able to finish this game run, since it seems likely that it will happen with additional cells, some of which may be necessary. I will attempt to work around this by cloning key NPCs who are usually in such rooms to locations outside of them, if I have to.
• A handful of quests have been slightly problematic. The "Infidelities" mini-quest in Mournhold triggered the journal entry that the husband had been spotted, but not the one after following him around and spying on him and his maybe-lover; they never did anything unusual, just stood around. Using the console to set the journal entry flag (see UESP's list of them for that quest) got past the problem. Similarly, in one test game, Fargoth did not do his animated "go to my hiding place" routine, seemingly because some fencing added by Seyda Neen Complete got in his way. I used the disable console command on the fence components and all was well. In another test, this scripted Fargoth behavior worked fine. I think it is the same problem as some NPCs getting stuck against wall, under bridges, etc. (see above).
• Not all features of mods will work. E.g. Flig's Slavery mod is supposed to allow you to claim slaves you find, after doing away with their original masters and getting the keys, but I have yet to get this to work. Will try it with purchased slaves, with a particular eye to raising their disposition with kindness and seeing if (as intended) you can convert them to willing companions after you free them. Another example is the NPC Commands mod; some of the commands work, and some do not (I would guess it's an MWSE dependency, but I'm not sure).
• Some mods just cause OpenMW to crash, and others do not but are totally malfunctional. I'll annotate such problems in the lists above when I encounter them.

Additional Load-order Notes

• Any mod that adds new items to a vendor's inventory needs to be added before you visit that shop, or the items may never appear there. This can sometimes be fixed by a save-cleaning routine, but sometimes not. This also means that if you remove a mod then re-install it later, the items from that mod might not show up there again.
• Any mod that adds an inventory type to a vendor (e.g. allowing a clothing-only merchant like Milie Hastien in Balmora to buy and sell armor) must be loaded after all other mods that affect their inventory, such as new clothing items. This is perhaps the no. 1 way to get confused into thinking that a clothing-items mod is not working, and I was tricked by it myself when testing Morrowind Kilts by dg around the same time as Cali Clothing; the latter had converted Hastien into clothes+armor, so the later-added kilts did not appear there. It's also a good example of why to test mods one at a time in an all-new game if you think they don't work (if they work anyway, even with or after other mods, then "no harm, no foul" in multi-modding).
• Systemic mesh-and-texture changes that you want to be consistent game-wide (skies, all Hlaalu textures, new meshes for Imperial uniforms, etc.) should be loaded late, since various mods are apt to include misc. variants their authors created, or even just duplicate vanilla resources because they didn't clean their mod before releasing it.