User:Darklocq/Mod testing notes

This is a 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 formalized testing used, per the Mod Testing Guidelines, for the Mod Status page. Unless otherwise noted, all mods referred to here are found at either or both of NexusMods or Morrowind Modding History, part of Great House Fliggerty, which also hosts some directly that are not in the MMH archive. Note that MMH has two search features; only the one at the top of the pages works. The main GHF pages have the same issue but worse, in that the top search feature doesn't always work at all (trying searching for "Better", for example); GHF is best browsed by category.

Some mods are listed in multiple sections of the list below, because they're more than one kind of mod; player home stuff is discussed in the "Player Homes and Businesses" section, and companion stuff in the section for that, for example. Better-developed entries are reviewing for playability, lore-friendliness, usefulness, glitch workarounds, etc., not just compatibility; knowing a mod doesn't crash OpenMW isn't enough to know whether it's worth installing it. Mods are English-only unless otherwise noted; some very simple mods will work regardless of language, but most have at least some language-specific material in them, and will emit the wrong language or just not work at all, if used in the wrong version.

This page also provides generalized mod and companion advice (toward the top) for OpenMW users, which can be spun out into separate articles.

Feel free to directly edit this page with corrections, additional entries, new observations, etc. If you add your own entry, please sign it (~~~~) even if you're an anonymous IP user. Corrections and additional notes need not be signed. Questions or objections should go on the talk page.

Style notes: Mod titles have been normalized to put authors' names after them (as "by ..." credits), to remove them (unless ambiguity would result) from the front of the title if present, and to drop "Mod" (unless ambiguity would result) from the end of the title if present (we already know it's a mod). Mods with more than one known title, and authors with multiple aliases, are shown with all the names as AKAs. This page is written in UESPWiki style: Capitalize what the game capitalizes (spell, item, and creature names, etc.) to avoid ambiguity. Also gives mod titles (and abbreviations thereof, and Morrowind itself as a game rather than an in-game place) in italics, as published creative works and to help distinguish these titles from other things. Executables (OpenMW, OpenMW-CS, Morrowind Script Extender, Bethesda engine, etc.) and projects/collaborations (Morrowind Patch Project, The Dremora Team, etc.) do not get that style. Some of this material is written with first-person perspective ("I tested ..."), which should probably be rewritten, unless this is changed to a signed-reviews page where each entry has a specified author.

Need to add more version numbers, authors, links. Also, TB and BM codes to indicate Tribunal and/or Bloodmoon dependencies of certain mods.

Key

Dependencies

Download links

Tribunal and Bloodmoon dependencies are still mostly missing from the mod compatibility testing list below. Where they are included, it is in the following format: [TB] = Requires Tribunal (or the Game of the Year edition, which includes it). [BM] = Requires Bloodmoon. OpenMW, unlike the original Bethesda engine, requires Tribunal to load Bloodmoon (as of OpenMW 0.41), so this option and the next are functionally equivalent. [TB+BM] = Requires both expansions (or the GotY edition). [TB/BM] = Requires that at least one of them is installed (for OpenMW use Tribunal). [FM] = Requires Siege at Firemoth (also included in the GotY edition). (TR refers to Tamriel Rebuilt, the mod project to create the Morrowind mainland around Vvardenfell.) Note: There are some mods that ship with separate .ESP files for Morrowind alone and for various combinations of MW, TB, and/or BM. It's always a good idea to go over the mod's ReadMe file.

Few have been added yet. When they are, it will be in this format: [a] = Link to mod page at author's own site (or to direct archive download if there's no HTML page about it). [f] = Link to mod entry at Great House Fliggerty; each entry has a download link at top, and may have additional support files as separate downloads below the description (check here for updates, mod cleaning notes, etc., too). [m] = Link to mod entry at Morrowind Modding History; same setup as Great House Fliggerty. [n] = Link to mod entry at NexusMods; pick Download then Manual Download (you cannot use their Windows mod installer app to install things for OpenMW); you'll be warned of any known dependencies and may also see support or update downloads.

General advice on mods in OpenMW

• OpenMW does not like you to add, remove, or change the order of mods once a game has been underway. The longer you've been playing, the higher the risk of adverse effects, both from adding new mods and removing mods, especially if resources from them are used in the cell the player character is presently in, or are in the player's inventory. Removing unused mods, absent those conditions, is somewhat safer than adding them, but not foolproof. Mods that literally only add things are safer to add mid-game than those that change existing things.
  • If not starting from a brand-new game, do a full (not quick) save before changing your mod(s). Exit the game app, and make your changes. Restart the game app. Load the save, save again, restart the app again. Repeat for good measure, using the most recent save. This is known as a save-cleaning or clean-save routine.
    • Hardcore save-cleaning: If the above does not resolve your problem, try a more brute-force approach: Drop all gear, and go naked into a small, simple, vanilla room that does not contain any modded items (potential examples: a minor NPC's hut, or a one-cell ancestral tomb that you have cleared out), then do the save-cleaning routine, and go back for your gear afterwards. If containers in the space might contain modded items, check and remove any first and add them to your temporary gear pile.
  • The most common adverse effect of changing mods mid-game is meshes/textures not loading, so that various items, faces, surfaces, etc. show up day-glow fuscia, or with giant "!" icons instead of rendering properly. This problem usually affects just one or a few things at first, then gets worse and worse the more you play. This can sometimes be catastrophic, e.g. when it's a floor that goes missing, and you and all NPCs fall into the water table or the void, or when the only door out of a room vanishes, or when a key NPC disappears.
  • If this missing texture and mesh problem happens and a save-cleaning routine doesn't resolve it, the only potential fix – other than removing any recently added mod(s) and loading an old savegame – appears to be to restart the app, then move as needed to a cell where there are no such errors visible (including in your inventory – drop any glitched items in another cell first). Then play a bit and keep saving in cells with no errors, and reverting to those games, with a fresh app restart, any time something shows up glitched. If you do this "glitch-cleaning" routine enough times, there's a chance the game will right itself, but there is no guarantee, and even when it does, in bad cases it can take days or weeks to work.
  • The second most common negative effect of mod changes is the disappearance of NPCs, either mod-added ones like companions, or vanilla ones you have relocated with Command Humanoid. They can usually be recovered with the Console (see below).
  • Try removing old mods you don't need (e.g. add-on quests you already did, and from which you are no longer using any reward items; or a mod that gives vendors new items that you don't actually want). This is fairly likely to make companions disappear (recoverably). The "my game is turning pink and purple" mesh problem seems to relate to how many resources the game engine has to load, and conflicts between them, so reducing the load and potential for conflict seems to help when all else has failed.
• Use a nightly build if you can, since the nightlies fix various bugs as they are reported and resolved. Back up your entire game directory and config and savegame directories first; sometimes the nightly can fail to work with a pre-existing set of mods due to some regression or other, and restoring a functional game is easiest from backup rather than trying to downgrade specific files.
• Best practice: Load the mods you think you want to use, in a test game with a throw-away character (don't even bother customizing it any more than necessary for testing). Use Console cheat codes as needed so that you can go test whatever it is the mod or mods add (e.g., give your new test character money for transport to a mod shop's location and to buy items from the shop and ensure they work, or give yourself the necessary stats, level, and reputation to trigger a mod-added quest and make sure that it will activate). It is safest to back up your config files, and copy your entire current mod directory as a backup; if you need to revert, you won't have to remember what your earlier set of mods were and what order they were in. Geeky users can also use a version control system like Subversion, Bazaar, or Git.
• There is no guarantee that a mod that seems to work at first will work perfectly. If it's complicated, with lots of quest scripts and such, there's a good chance it will break at some point, and either require console commands to rectify, or will not be fixable.
• Use OpenMW-CS's Verify feature. Do it first on vanilla Morrowind and any official expansions loaded, without other mods. Use your operating system's screengrab method to screen-shot all the "stock" errors (yes, Bethesda's original files throw numerous errors in OpenMW). Then add your mod and do Verify again, and look for non-stock errors. If you're competent with the code, you can fix simple problems yourself, and save the patch as a .OMWAddon file and add it to your load order after the downloaded mods.
• Repeat this as needed until your desired mods are all loaded and seem to be working. Be prepared for some of them to still not work entirely as expected.
• Many mods rely (at least for particular features) on MCRE and/or leveled-list merging, and not all of them disclose this. The result of using these mods in OpenMW is that they'll work in part only, if at all. If MCRE is needed for something, that aspect of the mod simply won't work. If the leveled list in the mod needed to be merged, its random items may not show up, or may show up too frequently, having replaced something in the vanilla leveled lists instead of being added to the list as a possible random item.
• 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. 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.
• Systemic mesh-and-texture changes that you want to be consistent game-wide (all Hlaalu textures, new meshes for Imperial uniforms, high-resolution skin textures, 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. See notes in the Meshes and textures section.
• Not all features of all mods will work, even after work-around efforts. The culprit is usually obscure scripting syntax errors, but sometimes it's a dependency on exploiting a bug in the original Bethesda engine that has been fixed in OpenMW.
• Some mods just cause OpenMW to lock up or crash to desktop, and others do not but are totally malfunctional. The mod lists below will annotate such issues when they are known.
• If you rename or move a mod in your filesystem and update the config file to compensate, this sometimes causes the in-game resources of the mod to reset to default (e.g. a companion will no longer be your companion "yet" or have the gear you gave them).

Companion mods

Since the the Tribunal expansion's introduction of Pack Rats and the special NPC Calvus Horatius, a Mournhold mercenary whom you can hire and share inventory with, companion mods have been among the most popular mod types, getting better all the time. Companions generally all require Tribunal (or the Game of the Year edition of Morrowind, which includes it). Vanilla Morrowind followers cannot do anything but follow and fight; you cannot give them new gear or repair their existing stuff, other than with the Console.

Players without Tribunal have one known option other than giving/taking gear with the Console, and that is Companions Hippolyta and Decius 2.01 by Vorwoda a.k.a. John Segers, which has limited (specific-item) inventory sharing through dialogue; it is also (optionally) a romance mod, for either gender. I have not tested it in OpenMW.

Various "generations" of companions, and their issues

Companion mods in general have proven challenging to work into OpenMW, other than rudimentary pack animals and very basic "shut up, carry, and fight" followers. A large number NPC companions appear to be based on Grumpy's Companion Project v3.1 (let's call these "generation 1"), or often an older version ("generation 0.5", the early experimental phase). This code has been improved by Emma and others, and some later companions have integrated these improvements and sometimes inherited their new bugs ("generation 2"). Later still, with much more complexity, numerous others (and Emma, in some later work like Witchgirl Adventure), have produced extremely complex companion-and-quest mods, all working in different and inconsistent ways ("generation 3").

One would think that the gen 3 companions would be the most functional in OpenMW, through a process of refinement, but this proves not to be the case, due primarily to lack of communication and code-sharing between mod authors. In the majority of gen 3 companion mods, their big pile of quest scripting breaks at some point in the OpenMW engine, even if their general companion behavior (movement, combat, spell use, etc.) is usually exemplary. This failure-by-complexity is a factor of OpenMW's parser being much more strict about code syntax errors than Bethesda's original; the more quest scripts there are, the higher the likelihood that some one-line or even one-character error is present and causes OpenMW breakage. The problem strongly affects rich mods like Julan, Ashlander Companion, Laura Craft Romance (and its male version, Imperial Boyfriend Indiana James), and rideable animal mods like abot's Guars. A few are mostly functional, like Jasmine, a Morrowind Companion and Witchgirl Adventure, though they still have some issues. Check the forums; various people are trying hard to fix these mods to work with OpenMW (though in a few cases, a particular problem is actually OpenMW's own fault). Gen 3 companions also have a stronger tendency to simply vanish and to have to be restored with a PositionCell console command, without losing gear.

The most usable for the longest time are the simplest ones that are based on Companion Project 3.1, such as Dawn Companion, and Gatanas, Dremora (Markynaz) Companion (though that does have one harmless dialogue bug). These usually have little original dialogue, no quests at all or a few simple ones, and lack complicated features like trainability. Unlike gen 3 companions, they usually also have little if any effect on cells (i.e., do not add or radically change any game locations). They're also less immersive and involving, basically being humanoid pack animals who fight and whom you can dress up. Various actual animals, like Wolf Companion and Dog Companions, are also highly functional gen 1 companions. Gen 1 are the least likely to disappear for no apparent reason.

Generation 0.5 companions, based on older versions of Companion Project, often have glitched combat in OpenMW, and will not stop fighting once they start, will start fighting the air for no reason, or will attack you, unless forced to stop with console tricks. Some examples are Emma's Hurd and Beryl. Grumpy's own Cally and Gabran are, ironically, in this category. His .ZIP files and installation instructions are faulty (though fixable), and these two "model" companions were included in some archives of CP 3.1 but were not based on its code but 3.0 or earlier; they just do not work properly, if they appear at all.

Many gen 2 mods fail to perform as expected (or at all, beyond stationary NPCs that can hold stuff and chit-chat). This is also true of some mannequin mods (which are just paralyzed NPCs, basically, other than those that are upright corpses). Some mods in this category are usable, with issues. The hireling addons A Lord's Men and Staff Agency (one is a fork of the other, though both can be used simultaneously) are in this group. Both of them provide various mercenaries and domestic/utility staff that are fully functional, some that are mostly functional, and some that are just broken (though they do not appear to do anything bad to your game). One that is not really usable in OpenMW (yet) is the complex Constance, Thief Companion, which borders on a gen 3 mod; she exhibits the same combat problems as gen 0.5 companions. Same goes for the fighter companion and domestic staffers provided in Domehome. It just goes to show that companion mods have been built along similar principles but without programmatic sharing of code, such that companions that post-date fixes for various problem often do not integrate those fixes. Gen 2 companions also often have a tendency to inexplicably vanish (mostly after changes to the list of loaded mods, or when left alone for 72+ game hours), though they can be console-restored.

The five most frequent companion problems in OpenMW

1. The companion eventually disappears, 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 (it will happen after restarting the app or reloading a save). With some companions, it also happens if you are away from them (i.e., not in the same cell) for 72 hours in game-time. It can also happen with some if you and/or the companion are using Levitation or Slow Fall when you go through a teleport door (or otherwise trigger teleportation), though I have yet to experience this problem, and it may be fixed in OpenMW by now (some specific mods also address it in their own code). Regardless, 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 they are in the cell, but have incorrect elevation (z axis). Or they may have ended up at world map coordinates 0,0, which is the Daedric shrine Assarnatamat, though I have not witnessed this either. Sometimes the vanishing-act problem also occurs after using a transportation ring for a specific companion, e.g. Jasmine.
   • This disappearance can usually but not always be resolved with PositionCell, e.g. "JAC_Jasmine"->PositionCell,492,457,-240,0,"Balmora, South Wall Cornerclub" (that's "NPC_ID"->PositionCell,xPosition,yPosition,zPosition,facing-direction,"Cell_ID"). The easiest way to use this is first do player->GetPos,x and repeat for y and z, move back to make room, then use those coordinates, rounded up to nearest whole integer, in the PositionCell command.
   • 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 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). Gatanas is scripted to appear in the nearest tavern if you ask any major-city NPC if they've seen her. So, read the companion's documentation carefully. Some companions that supposedly have this feature, e.g. Jasmine returning to her house, do not have it working properly in OpenMW (she will go there if you tell her to, but will not by default when she goes missing for inexplicable reasons). It's advisable to test these features early on, so you know what your companion will actually do and not do before an emergency arises.
   • 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 (if any). 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 (though it is difficult to break it to the point you'd want to try this). This eventuality may necessitate that you remove the companion mod, do a save-cleaning routine, 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, so backup first.
   • 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. Restart the game, reloading that save, next time you play, and give the gear back. If the companion disappeared, the game data was already corrupted by something by the time you did that save, 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 being in the same cell (it may also help to interact with them, e.g. by toggling their follow mode or accessing their inventory). 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). Good places to "park" companions you aren't using for a while is in your player home, just outside it (if you don't always teleport in and out), in the main room at any Mages Guild if you use Guild Guide travel a lot, near a Silt Strider you use very frequently, and in the shop of a merchant you go to almost every game-day. Any place you are certain to return to within 72 game-hours is good.
     • Don't leave a disappearance-prone companion in "guard this spot" (Guard AI), "walk around" or "stay in the area" (AI wander), or "stand here" (AI wander off) mode, and then exit the game; put them in follow mode first (returning to where you "parked" the companion first, if applicable).
     • This methodology may not be foolproof. The safe bet: 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 two Emma mods (Laura Craft Romance and Imperial Boyfriend Indiana James), 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. Sometimes its a problem of a companion failing to give a teleport ring (or animal vendor a control ring), and similar issues can happen with house mods where the seller will not give you the key you bought. These are probably minor script typos, and likely differ from mod to mod.
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 of everything derived from Companion Project prior to version 3.1. It can be fixed temporarily by a) making sure all enemies are dead, b) casting a strong area-effect Calm Humanoid (use Fortify Illusion first if you need to), c) using the Console to issue StopCombat to the companion and any other combatant NPCs, like other companions (who may by this point have attacked the turned-hostile companion in your defense), d) waiting for them to sheath their weapons or stop casting, e) putting them in wait mode, then f) putting them back into follow mode. Sometimes just the Console command is enough. If these steps don't work (companion is stuck in a sheathe-unsheathe loop while Calmed and/or seems fine then attacks you again when Calm wears off), make sure there are no more enemies around, and also try exiting and re-entering the cell with the companion(s) in wait mode. If all else fails, wait 72 game hours in another cell, and come back; if companion is gone, use PositionCell to return them. A harder-core fix may be extensively patching the mod using code from Companion Project 3.1 or from generation 3 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 also affects Thief Companion Constance, but does not affect Witchgirl Adventure's Morgana, nor Tribunal's own Calvus Horatius, nor Dawn Companion, Gatanas, Wolf Companion, Dog Companions, A Lord's Men, or Staff Agency. Be aware, however, that most companions are scripted to turn and fight you if you damage them by any means three times in the same fight, and some have a lower threshold. Almost all will fight you if you hit them even a split second after the last actual enemy dies, and due to clipping issues, you can sometimes hit them without realizing it. So, you need to expect to use the Console. You cannot be of the "all use of the Console is cheating, no matter what" philosophy, and still expect to use companion mods for more than a few hours, sorry.
4. The companion's control or dialogue options disappear when another companion is added, or options that do not pertain to this character are added – The first of these (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 seems 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 a mod's own documentation will warn of this). Many mod authors have used Grumpy's scripts without doing much to adapt them to be unique to their specific mod, probably because Companion Project's own documentation is unclear in parts. The second problem, of inapplicable dialogue options appearing, happens for unknown exact reasons, but is obviously a general matter of a coding error not limiting an added dialogue option to particular NPCs correctly. This issue is annoying but harmless in most cases (in the case of abot's Guars is it not harmless, and wrecks the functionality of affected companions).
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.

Additional companion tips

These are not OpenMW-specific, unless specifically indicated.

• Habitually move to the side when engaging. Every time you approach an opponent (or one charges you), quickly move to the left or right, and turn and re-face their flank. If you do not, you will get hit – a lot – by your companion(s), who try to strike directly at the baddie in front of them as if you are not between the companion and the enemy. Also, you run increased risk of hitting the companion inadvertently; they will frequently clip through you sufficiently that you'll hit them in the arm, and trigger them to attack you instead.
  • If your companion is already attacking you in retaliation, move to put the enemy between you and the angry companion. When the enemy is dead, quickly take the steps outlined above in point #3.
• Increase their ability to keep up with you, or you will lose them frequently. I recommend SetAthletics and SetSpeed to match your own stats, and use this every few levels at least, as your stats increase, if the companion mod isn't clever enough to have their stats increase along with yours. See next section for details on how the SetStatName commands in the Console work.

Help your companion survive

Use GetStatName to examine your companion's attributes and skills, and SetStatName to change one of them. These Console commands drop spaces and hyphens in things like "Long Blade" and "Hand-to-Hand", thus GetLongBlade, SetHandToHand. Some key commands to issue to make any companion practical for the long haul:

• All companions need to have abnormally high Acrobatics. This is because NPC movement AI is remarkably stupid, and they will fall or jump off high places as if blind and drunk, and die in the process. You can sometimes get promising companions killed in minutes simply by going to a place with a high Siltstrider platform. Tribunal's Calvus Horatius is notorious for this "idiotic deaths" problem. Highlight the companion in the Console, and do SetAcrobatics,200 (this is enough to survive any fall, and helps them follow you over rough or steep terrain, without affecting the gameplay otherwise).
• SetHealth,Value where Value is something reasonable like your own Health level, or close to it (or even more than yours if you keep getting them killed, and especially if you've nerfed their combat, as described below).
• SetMagicka to a reasonable number, even if they're just a fighter. Below, we're going to give them some basic survival spells. If the companion is a mage, they may already have a higher Magicka than you, set by a script, and you can leave this as-is.
• SetStrength to something reasonable, especially for companions with inventory sharing, which is most. One who can only carry 120 units when you and other companions you have can carry over 400 is going to see you quickly "retire" that weak companion if you don't directly remedy the deficit. On the other hand, you may only be able to carry 120 at your current level and may have a companion who can carry 600 for no explicable reason, and not nerfing that is obviously a cheat, like carrying a Pack Guar in your back pocket.
• AddSpell,"Water Breathing" and AddSpell,"Levitate" (and same for Water Walking if you like), followed by SetAlteration,100 (there is no reason to set it lower, since the game's AI isn't advanced enough for companions to do Alteration-using clever things on their own initiative). There's no guarantee a companion will use these spells, but many will. If you have one that won't, and get tired of casting on-touch Water Breathing on them (companions who cannot breathe water and who are in follow mode will blissfully follow you underwater until they drown), see if you have a companion installed who does auto-Water-Breathe, look up that NPC in OpenMW-CS by ID, and find the name of their Water Breathe ability, then give it to the won't-Water-Breathe companion as a "spell". (Another route: search IDs for water, and scroll down the Spells results, looking for a 0 cost, always-succeeds, Ability version of the effect.) This will almost always work. Same goes for auto-Levitation and auto-Water-Walking ability that some companions have, to follow you automatically (you might have to cast Dispel to make it stop, though, if you give it to a companion who didn't come with it). Note that some companions that include such abilities have to be manually told to use and stop using them, while others are full-auto.
  • You can also give a companion a Constant Effect enchanted item that provides Water Breathing.
• AddSpell,"Hearth Heal", followed by SetRestoration,100. If the companion is a mage who is scripted to be capable of curing/healing you and whose stats and spells increase over time, you should skip changing their Restoration skill and let it develop as intended. Most of those carry their own (inventory-invisible) Restore Magicka potions for when they get low. For a fighter companion, though, just max their Restoration and set Magicka high enough so you don't have to worry about whether they can self-heal any more today. Be aware that some crude companions still won't heal themselves even after you do this step, and you need to heal them frequently.
• Also check that they have one armor skill (or Unarmored) appropriately high. Many come with all of them set inappropriately high, and this should be reduced, with one reasonable and the others low, both for plausibility/balance and for the practical reason that you will not be able to keep them equipped in a stable set of armor (which you may have custom enchanted). Otherwise, any time you have them carry a piece of armor loot with a higher nominal value that what they're wearing, they may equip the loot item instead, even if it's a total mismatch for the armor class you want them wearing and even if it's a net loss in protection due to not being enchanted. Note that some mage companions will not wear armor at all; at mid-to-high levels of game play, they depend upon you to provide them with Constant Effect enchanted Exquisite clothing to keep them from dying every five minutes. So, if you have not yet hunted down the one NPC who sells the Summon Golden Saint spell, or found the guy in Mournhold who restocks Grand Soul Gems, now is the time. However, this is often just an effect of them having a very high Unamored stat, and you may be able to get them to wear armor, if you demand it, by adjusting their stats, e.g. setting their Light Armor skill and lowering Unarmored so the former is at least one point higher than the latter, and the latter is 85 or lower.
• Look at all their stats and adjust as needed. Companion Personality, Speechcraft, and Mercantile are completely meaningless (except for those that also offer services like Barter, Spellmaking, Enchant, or Repair). But you'll often find nonsensical stats that actually do matter, like Agility or Luck set to 150 (a serious combat cheat), or a Marksman of 5 or 10 which means "miss almost every time and waste expensive ammo" (this stat needs to be 30 or higher at a bare minimum for any companion you give pricey missile weapons to, and 51+ is better).
• Some advanced companion mods auto-set various stats based on those of the player character or in response to direct training by various methods, so may not retain all of them you manually set with the Console. Some also change them on-the-fly in response to things like "Use your missile weapons" commands, jacking up Marksman to higher than other skills – even to 200, which is cheaty and sloppy, but there's no way around this other than by editing the mod to use more reasonable numbers. It's cheaty because not only will they never miss, they'll get maximum damage out of the range of possible damage per arrow (or bolt or whatever).
• Avoid having to manually heal them all the time by giving them Constant Effect Restore Health items that add up to 5 points per second or so; they'll be very hard to kill.
• Contrary to popular belief (even UESPWiki had this wrong for years), NPCs can definitely get both Common and Blight Diseases. Your companion inevitably will get diseases if they go out fighting with you.
  • When this happens (and it may not be obvious except with Strength), if they do not have an option to Cure and Restore themselves, they must be Cured by you, and have Restore spells cast on them (in that order) to fix damaged stats (including from Greater Bonewalkers, which damage stats directly without an intervening disease). No NPCs can use shrines, potions, scrolls, or cast-on-use items to resolve these problems for themselves. With those that have dialogue options to cast the restorative spells on themselves, check their stats before and after, because there is no guarantee that this feature works as intended in OpenMW.
  • The safest bet is to get Restore spells for every Attribute and Skill, in on-touch versions, and use them periodically on all companions, after first using a cure-all spell, like Vivec's Touch (which you get for free and which has a far lower casting cost than it should). Due to the Magicka expenditure, you may want to Fortify Magicka first and do this routine immediately before using Rest, unless you also want to drink some Restore Magicka.
  • Companions can even catch vampirism and lycanthropy (the werewolf disease in Bloodmoon). These are just Common Diseases during the first three days, but after that there is no way to cure an NPC of them in-game, only in the Console.
  • There is, fortunately, no known way for an NPC to catch Corprus disease.
• Companions will happily jump into lava pits in places like Dwemer ruins. They simply do not recognize lava as dangerous; all they see is a drop they think they can handle (and are often wrong about that, too, if you don't fix their Acrobatics – they think they can handle any jump that you can). Quickly cast an on-target Levitate on a lava-swimming companion to get them out (very quickly if you're using one of the "deadly lava" realism mods that jack up the damage).

Customize your companions as you like with similar Console adjustment to those described above. Most companions seem to come with either a) high Short Blade and/or Long Blade skill and poor skills with any other weapon type; or b) implausibly excessive skill with all weapon types; or c) no real skills, if they are some kind of trivial hireling like a farmer or maid. If you have a big stockpile of high-end maces and staves you don't use as a player character, and have a Long Blade skill of 75 yourself, try SetBluntWeapon,70 to have a mace/staff/club-wielding companion who can nearly keep up with your combat ability, and set their other weapon skills very low so they avoid equipping other weapon types you might have them temporarily carrying. Better yet, set that skill to more like 50-something and the others to 5, so you are the leader and do most of the serious fighting.

You can also use OpenMW-CS to modify the companion's starting stats, if they are of the sort that grow in power with you. Just be aware that some of their stat-changing scripts can be complicated, and some are not affected at all by the initial starting values (which may be set only so they have some stats as an NPC if you attack them upon first meeting).

Either technique is a solution for the "I really love the looks of this butler or dancer NPC, who has inventory sharing but worthless stats, and I wish they were a combat-capable companion" scenario. Just fix them. It's your game; the mod author isn't watching over your shoulder, and probably wouldn't object anyway (their own mod is taking the game in a new direction from Bethesda's, after all). Be aware that usually only combat-oriented companions come with advanced combat options, like being able to tell the companion to use ranged or melee attacks only.

Limitations of companions

There are many:

• It's important to understand that companions do not have their own AI and that their personalities are an illusion. All they have is scripts that check for a condition that a script can detect in this game engine, and do something predetermined in response, if the mod author thought to include such a test and response, and did so correctly. If the author didn't add a specific test for something (and it is not built into NPC AI), there isn't a way for the companion to "notice" or react appropriately. Some well-developed companions actually do various custom condition tests, but even these cannot prefigure every eventuality, nor can they reason, and there are conditions that cannot be tested for anyway.
• No companions appear capable of proactive use of magic that responds directly to the threat that has appeared (e.g., using a spell, scroll, or potion of Resist Fire, or purposefully choosing a Frost Damage weapon, when facing a Flame Atronach). Some individual companion mods may be scripted to cast appropriate defensive or restorative spells in response to certain attack types after already being hit by one, such as curing poison (a script can detect that), but there seems to be no scriptable way for them to "see what's coming".
• Most rely on the game engine's NPC algorithm for weapon selection, which is a bit mysterious. They sometimes pick weapons that are not the best for them, and it seems to be a mixture of factors including nominal weapon value, their skill level with the weapon type, whether it is magical, whether it still has charges, and various other bits of data.
• On the plus side, one adaptation seen in several companion mods is use of a Jinkblade to attempt to paralyze the enemy, then switching to a more favored, higher-damage weapon. But, some companions will in fact just stab and stab with a Jinkblade, doing very little damage, until its magic is depleted. They also don't seem able to detect when an opponent is resistant to the Paralyze effect.
• Companions will not use Cast When Used enchantments of any kind; all their gear must be Cast on Strike or Constant Effect. This is true of all NPCs not specifically scripted to use the Cast When Used enchantments of a particular item they already have. In theory, individual companions could be coded with this capability, but none seem to be, and it would break if you gave them different gear.
• Companions will not use fortification potions or scrolls of any kind, nor will most of them use Restore Fatigue or Restore Magicka stuff (though some are scripted with their own invisible restoration "stash" and can apply it when told to).
  • Many if not most are scripted to slowly regenerate both Magicka and Fatigue (whether you use Rest or not). Apparently, a problem with this in the Bethesda game engine does not apply to OpenMW; it could cause this regen effect to turn negative under certain circumstances and act as a drain, and is why so many companions have a dialogue option to reset Magicka regen. In OpenMW, you should never need to use it.
• Most will use a generic defensive Scroll of Xth Barrier, but a) they'll do it even when facing a trivial creature like a Nix Hound, and b) if they have more that one, they'll use them all back to back before starting to fight. So, just give them one at a time, when about to take on a tough baddie.
• They also did this use-them-all-at-once thing with Restore Health potions in the generation 1 companions, but most later ones do not have the "potion guzzling" bug. Just give yours a few and see what happens.
• Many will not take a Restore Health potion of the cheapest two varieties, and none will take a player-made one, only a standard one from a merchant or found as loot.
• Most companions will not use Restore Health potions or spells until near death (typically 30% or even 20% Health), no matter how fast they are taking damage, and none will use one automatically except during combat, so they need to be healed (or, if they have this feature, told to heal) manually by the player after combat is over, if they don't have CE Restore Health items. A few will not even take the potions during a fight, and must be healed on the fly by the player if facing tough opponents. Many will also refuse to take one even if they have a option to tell them to do so, if their health isn't below a certain amount, typically 80%, requiring you to cast a Restore Health on them if you want them back up to full.
• Unless scripted to so do, companions will not tell you they are injured or tell you what their health and other status is. The easiest way to at least check their health is to cast a very low-cost Restore Health on them; this will (in OpenMW) show the same yellow status bar you get for enemy health in combat. To check other things, you will usually need GetStatName commands in the console.
• Companions will not equip items that it might seem they "obviously" should. E.g., if you are buffed temporarily to Speed 300, and give a companion the Boots of Blinding Speed, they will not equip them in some effort to keep up; they only see them as low-quality leather boots and will ignore them unless all they have is shoes.
  • Some good companions have a script to increase their speed to keep up if the player's goes up (and some will Levitate or Water Walk when you do if they are in follow mode). Many do not, however, and you can easily outrun and lose them, as with "take me to safety" NPCs in various quests. See above for how to give abilities like Water Breathing to companions, and increase their base Speed and Athletics, with the Console.
• Many companions are bugged (or intentionally coded to be picky) with regard to bottom-rung armor, and either will not equip items like Netch Leather at all, even if they came with it, or will have it equipped but will de-equip it the moment you change their inventory in any way. Many will refuse to equip anything comparable, like Nordic Fur, and require Chitin or better (I've even encountered one that even disdains Bonemold, which was particularly bad since he's supposed to be a Hlaalu Guard!). So, some companions may not be usable at the very beginning of the game, until you've got some spare, non-terrible loot for them to wear. One solution to this is to use GetLightArmor etc., to see what their current skills are and reduce excessively high ones; they will often then equip "lesser" gear. If they're scripted to set (and reset) their stats based on the players', this trick will not work.
• Companions with a high Unarmored skill may refuse to equip armor of various sorts or at all. It is not actually consistent from armor piece to armor piece, and may not be from mod to mod. In some minimal testing, I find that some companions will refuse to equip a shield unless their Unarmored is 86 or lower, regardless what their Block skill is, but will still wear a cuirass when Unarmored is in the 90s. So, try adjusting Unarmored downward, and raising the desired Light, Medium, or Heavy Armor skill until you get them wearing what you want them to wear. It may be possible for some mage/monk companions to be hard-coded to refuse to wear armor at all.
• A similar effect may also happen with regard to weapon-equipping with companions with very high Hand-to-Hand skill. I'm not using any, so have not tested this.
• Because companions equip clothing based on its nominal value, you should always use Exquisite-level items when doing Constant Effect enchantments for them. Otherwise, they'll de-equip something they're supposed to be wearing if you give them Exquisite loot to carry.
  • An exception is that many companions will not wear two Exquisite rings at once, so one must be Extravagant if you want them to wear two rings (the first should be Exquisite). Also, glove quality does not go above Extravagant in the vanilla game.
  • You can ensure a companion always wears a particular item of apparel by using a very expensive one from a clothing mod, that exceeds the value of any loot item of the same class that might be encountered.
• A companion who favors missile weapons will waste ammo trying to shoot Slaughterfish and Dreughs underwater which seems to be impossible in OpenMW (and may in Bethesda's engine too?). If you are near water, put the companion in melee mode if there's an option to do so; if not, take away the missile weapon. If it's too late, kill the water critters yourself as fast as possible to conserve companion ammo. Similarly, spellcaster companions may try to use on-target spells underwater and they do not work (in OpenMW, anyway).
• While most spell-focused character classes will use Destruction and/or Conjuration magic in combat, some fail to do so. If you have one that won't, they probably either lack the necessary spells, do not have the Magicka to cast them, or do not have high enough Destruction or Conjuration skill, all of which are adjustable in seconds with the Console, as detailed above.
• If you have one who summons dangerous things like Storm Atronachs, or casts area-effect Destruction spells like Greater Shockball, and thereby keeps killing you or other companions, use RemoveSpell to take the spell away from them and give them a somewhat nerfed replacement, like Summon Dremora or Daedric Bite.
• You cannot give custom (Spellmaker-sold) spells to companions, only stock ones, by ID. You may wish to upgrade these over time, as spells that seemed badass when you were level 5 are a joke when you're level 20. This is not necessary with advanced, "learning" mage companions if their ReadMe file says they pick up new spells on their own.
• Depleted magic items will not regenerate their charge while equipped by or in the inventory of companions (or any other NPCs, unless game scripting individually charges up items for certain of them, as I think it does with some essential NPCs). They only charge back up over time when in the possession of the player character. It is thus vital that you either rotate weapons between you and companions, so they always have one with charges, or you periodically take rest breaks, taking all their items from them that need to be charged, and doing Rest with them in your possession or manually (and expensively) recharging them with filled soul gems – even if you are over-encumbered while doing so – then give them back after they're charged up. This is best done indoors, since in the wilderness you can be attacked by random creatures while Resting, you may be encumbered, and your companion may be unarmed. If using the soul gem approach, you do not have to leave the inventory-sharing window to charge the items; just put them in your inventory, drag soul gems onto your paperdoll, charge the desired item, and give it back. You can save time by putting the soul gems in the companion inventory so they stack, then dragging them back to yourself so you can use the stack instead of one gem at a time. Using Fortify Enchant will get better results and waste fewer gems.
  • For this can't-charge reason, combat companions should always have multiple magic weapons (even as many as four or five, if you plan to be at it all day without stopping). Most if not all of them will switch to a new, charged weapon after they deplete their current one; this may be part of the game's general NPC AI.
• Similarly, NPCs cannot repair their own gear, even if they are Smiths and offer Repair as a service. You have to take damaged gear from companions and fix it yourself (or have them do so via their menu if they offer the Repair service), then give the items back. You do not have to leave the companion inventory window to do repairs, just put the items in your inventory, do the fix-it work, then give them back to the companion. Using Fortify Armorer will do more repair per hammer use.
• If you have a "pseudo-companion" – a follower NPC with whom you cannot share inventory – like the Forgeir, the Fighters Guild mercenary you can hire in stage three of the Hlaalu Stronghold quests, their gear will eventually wear out, making them useless and helpless. This can be fixed by: a) saving your game, b) Console-killing them with SetHealth,0 temporarily, c) taking all their repairable items and dropping each on the ground, d) using the Console to click on each and get its ID, e) reloading your savegame, f) doing RemoveItem,"Item_ID",1 followed by AddItem,"Item_ID",1 for each item. This will give them fresh, 100%-fixed replacements for all their damaged gear items. This even works on custom enchanted items, which have IDs like "$dynamic12345"; with those, like IDs containing spaces, the double quotes around the ID in the commands are mandatory. If you're a stickler, you can deduct the approximate cost the repairs would have run, from your own gold, with something like player->RemoveItem,"Gold_001",150. You can use a similar technique to replace any crap gear they have with better gear you've earned or bought but don't need, then use Disable on your gear item you dropped to get its ID, thus deleting the original item (you only gave them a copy, not that actual item, which remains in the game world otherwise).
• When companions use Levitate (by any means), they often clip into the ground if your elevation is higher than theirs and they have not risen to yours yet. This can cause them to get stuck or fall through the floor if the effect ends while they are still clipping. If you see one clipping like this, move to where this isn't happening as soon as you can.
• Some companions (all those based on Companion Project) have a "warping" capability, such that when they are in follow mode, and are not in combat, if they get too far away from the player character they'll teleport to the PC's location. While this can look funny – they may chase off after a critter in the distance then reappear in front of you and do it again – it is very practical for not leaving them behind accidentally. Older companions do not have this feature, and it is missing from some later ones that were independently developed. Not all companions who have this feature have it implemented correctly enough to work in OpenMW, though that particular failure is rare (only affects Witchgirl Adventure in my tests so far).
• Most companions do not have any kind of "move out of the way, you are blocking the player character" capability, and consequently will very frequently block the PC into corners and otherwise become an obstacle. You just learn to work around it, by anticipating tight spaces (e.g. Imperial towers' spiral stairs) and having the companion wait; by moving in ways that "lure" the companion into a new position that hopefully gives you enough room to get by; and by using the Console's ToggleCollision (TCL) command for a moment to get unstuck. Even companions who do have a "Move" feature often don't have one that works reliably.
  • In Bethesda's engine, that Console trick often got companions and wandering NPCs stuck in walls and floors because the no-collision clipping applied to them, too, for the duration. This bug/misfeature is almost entirely fixed in OpenMW; about the only way it will happen is if you use this trick to move far enough away from the companion that it triggers them to warp to you, and they do so in a way that causes them to clip with a wall or something, and you turn collision back on. To fix it, just move far enough away again to cause them to warp again, or cast Levitation if they auto-Levitate with you (which puts them into no-collision mode temporarily), or cast an on-touch or on-target Levitation on them for the same effect, then lead them to somewhere they are not overlapping anything.
  • Do not follow the oft-given vanilla gameplay advice to use the Console command ResetActors (RA) to fix this or any other problem. It often does not work, and doing it will send all NPCs back to their original locations (or at least all of those in the same cell – this needs further testing). This was poor advice even for vanilla gameplay, since it will also undo your hard Command Humanoid work to move some vanilla NPCs around.
• Teleportation and companions:
  • Except a few specifically scripted to do so (and some of those fail in OpenMW), companions cannot follow you through Recall or Intervention. The only forms of teleportation they can follow you through are: Guild Guide, siltstrider, and ship fast travel; and teleport doors (doors that load a new area rather than swing open – they go from one cell to another, indoor or outdoor, and may be an activator that does not look like a door). Some mod-provided teleport items will work with companions, but only when they go to either a) an outdoor cell, or b) a specific, pre-determined indoor location.
  • The one known mod solution for Recall/Intervention and companions, that works in Bethesda's engine without MWSE, should work in OpenMW but does not, at least not in my test game (see Companion Teleportation entry in the Companion and NPC utilities and misc. section).
  • Mods that add new teleportation means (airships, etc.) that use the same underlying method as fast travel or teleport doors will work with companions (usually), and many mods do this with additional Guild Guides. Those that are based on Recall or Intervention (as are most house-mod teleportation rings) will not work with companions.
  • Taking companions to/from Mournhold: The teleportation NPCs provided by Tribunal are player-character only. Some companions have "Let's go to Mournhold" or "Meet me in Mournhold" options, but most do not. The work-around is to install the Balmora Council Club mod (even if you have no interest in that home/business), since it adds companion-compatible Mournhold Guild Guides; see the mod's entry in the Fast travel section for details.
  • Some companions will not follow you through a teleport door or fast travel until you move and then stop again. If you go in a door and then another door (perhaps to its left or right on a perpendicular wall) without walking, or use one Guild Guide then another without taking a step after the first, the companion may be left behind. A few also will not follow if they are still in motion when you trigger the teleport. And some companions are bugged in that they require a moment after a teleport to get back in follow mode. So, the best practice to avoid all these problems is to teleport when everyone is standing still, wait a second or so after the teleport, take a step, wait a second or so, then do the second teleport. This becomes second nature quickly, and will keep multiple companions following you no matter who wrote them with what glitches.
  • If you have two or more companions following you, you have to ensure they're all in range (approximately 25 feet) or the further-away one(s) will not follow you through fast travel or a teleport door. The maximum practical number is three followers, and even this is often frustrating. Two rarely pose a left-behind problem, though they still increase your likelihood of being boxed into a tight space by them, and are also apt to damage each other frequently in combat, and to thus require Restore Health attention. If you note that they always follow in a particular order, you can compensate by giving the frontmost one better armor, the back one weaker weapons, etc.
  • Think thrice before you give a companion the more powerful stuff available in the official Area Affect Arrows add-on. Be careful using them yourself; you'll rarely get to shoot two in a row, because your companion will rush to meet the enemy as soon as the first hits, and thus will get in range of the area of effect of a second shot in most cases.
• Like other NPCs, companions will respond to being hit with Soul Trap as a hostile action, so be careful with area-effect versions of the spell.
• As covered in previous sections in more detail:
  • All companions need to have abnormally high Acrobatics, or will frequently die from falling off things like Siltstrider platforms for no apparent reason, or simply from following you when you jump around. However, many come with this stat set as low as 5 or 10, and must be fixed to be usable for very long. (See next section for a cheaty consequence of this Acrobatics boost with a companion who offers Trainer service.)
  • Companions don't recognize lava as dangerous and may need to be Levitated out of it.
  • Companions most certainly can and will get diseases and have their stats harmed by them and by Greater Bonewalkers. Even if they have an option to cast Cure and Restore on themselves, they depend on you to make that happen.
  • Some aspects of companions (even them being present where you left them) can reset after 72 hours away from the player character, so don't leave them alone for long stretches. Some companions do not seem to be affected by this (especially the simplest ones), but others can get their stats messed up, or will disappear.
  • Various companions (especially fighter mercenaries) come with Guard AI as part of their scripting. The author thought it would be cool if they auto-attacked hostile creatures in settled areas. Unfortunately, they'll arrest you if you attack a humanoid who hasn't initiated combat first, even in the wilderness, and may also arrest you for theft if they are not in follow mode. They can be edited in OpenMW-CS to not be Guards. Some cleverer mod authors kept the Guard AI, but included scripts that prevent them from treating you as a criminal. A few companions do not have Guard AI, but have a high Alarm level and will report you for crimes rather than arrest you, or react negatively to you if you have a Bounty; these can be fixed with a SetAlarm,0 on them in the Console.

Cheat potential and balance problems of companions

• Companions make almost all combat situations much easier for the player character (as long as you stay out of the companion's line of fire). This can totally unbalance the game, especially with multiple companions.
  • The first compensating method is to turn up the Difficulty slider.
  • Another obvious way is to leave companions outside in wait mode when you enter a new area or at least a "boss" fight area. Feel free to reload a savegame and do a fight over if it was disppointingly anticlimactic with a companion's help. A few companions have a "stay out of the fight but keep following" sort of option, but most do not, and have to be put into wait or wander mode. (For vanilla follower NPCs, who are usually a liability not a help except at the earliest levels, your best bet is to outrun them to a new cell by Fortify Speed or some other approach, and come back for them later – within 72 game hours.)
  • If the game is still too easy for you, you may have to adjust in other ways, e.g. by using the console to reduce a companion's stats or even your own (especially for companions whose stats change with yours). See the Additional balancing section for a detailed "make the companion harmless" approach.
  • You may need to stop using an over-powered companion and pick a different one after a while, whose stats are not so excessive (and stay non-excessive).
  • You can also try installing difficulty mods. There are many, ranging from enhancements of specific foes, or increased numbers of random creatures or hostile NPCs, to economy overhauls that make gold harder to earn, or all-new combat systems. Some are MWSE-dependent, and others make such systemic changes they frequently conflict with other mods; look for a simple one to start with.
• Companions increase your effective carrying capacity, sometimes by more than your own Encumbrance stat. This can help you get richer, quicker. It's also a major real-time saver; you make fewer trips back and forth between loot piles and merchants. Anything that reduces player real-time spent on "bureaucracy" and tedium is a convenience not a cheat in the minds of many players.
• Most companions will still follow you, haltingly and at a distance, if they have a "warp to player position" script, even when they are overencumbered, and they can still fight in this condition. So, you can load them with 5,000 units of loot and drag them around like they're a Pack Elephant. (One mod's Pack Rats follow in this manner while dead, if they died in follow mode.) Exploiting this is officially lame. If your companion isn't following properly, and always lagging behind, standing stock still, overencumbrance is surely why. (If they shouldn't be overencumbered – e.g., they weren't a few minutes ago, with the same loot – this is an indication that a Greater Bonewalker, disease, or other problem has affected their Strength or Endurance and reduced their Encumbrance capacity; see tip about fixing this in the Help your companion survive section. If their stats frequently update based on yours, it might even mean it's you that's diseased or cursed.)
• Services: Various companions offer services. Many players will consider it cheaty, especially if they offer more than one service.
  • Trainers: Anyone will find this option cheaty if they consider the efforts to find better trainers over time central to the game. This will be especially the case with companions whose own stats adjust with yours; what they offer to train will vary over time, making them a "mega-Trainer". Also, the necessary fix to raise all companions' Acrobatics high (see above) will make any Trainer companions into Master Trainers of that skill, unless you temporarily lower it while using their Trainer service.
  • Merchant: Kind of a senseless option, and basically a lame "slow but sure infinite money" cheat, if the NPC has any significant daily-resetting funds: you can sell them an item, then take it back via Companion Share, and have the item and the money, and keep doing it until the money runs out, and do it again every day. Another thing some may object to is Merchant companions with any restocking goods like silver arrows or Restoration potions, though this is primary a time-saving convenience that doesn't really make the game easier, just less repetitive of returning to shops or making your own potions.
  • Spells: May be cheaty if the companion offers a lot of spells, rare ones, ones that cost less than they should in gold or in Magicka expenditure, or spells that should not be possible (e.g. with doubled, tripled, etc. application of the same magic effect, or doing something not normally available, like Restore Magicka). A particularly obvious cheat is a companion selling you any Fortify Skill spell; these are normally only available from a total of three NPCs (two in Tribunal and one in Bloodmoon, and are not available to just-starting characters.
  • Spellmaker and Enchanter: Not very cheaty, since NPCs who offer these services are fairly common and often not faction-specific. The potentially cheaty element is that you can get a replacement spell or a new item enchanted right in the middle of a dungeon crawl without having to return to civilization; for many this will be a real-time saver, not a cheat.
  • Armorer: Gets you repairs without having to buy hammers, and at very low cost once your companion's Disposition is maxed (and with many simple companions it starts that way).
  • You can use OpenMW-CS to create a re-mod of the companion mod that removes any or all services from them; they are just checkboxes in the NPC's entry.
• When you get to a level where you are regularly producing your own enchanted items, companions can be used as "storage" for ones you don't need in combat but only situationally (e.g. a belt of high-speed Levitation, on use), without you having to carry all of them.

Additional balancing

• If you love the virtual camaraderie of companions but want them to have minimal real effect on combat, yet not die all the time, you can use the following technique to make the companion harmless (unless their stats auto adjust to track with your own):
  1. Set their defensive skills (armor of whatever sort, Agility, Block, Restoration, Illusion, Alteration) very high – over 100 – and/or give them cheat-powerful armor if some mod provided some, and/or make sure they have great defensive spells and abnormally high Magicka
  2. Set Luck in the middle (around half of yours)
  3. Reduce offensive combat skills (weapons, Marksman – always with low-end ammo you got free as loot – plus Destruction and Conjuration, and replace powerful spells with weaker ones). Set them low enough to usually fail and to do minimal damage when they succeed (but keep the favored weapon higher than others, e.g. set it to 15 and others to 5).
  4. If you want an "arm candy" companion just in fancy clothes and no armor, you can give them Unarmored 200 and they'll be pretty much invincible, especially with CE Restore Health on some items.
• Contrarily, if you've beaten all the game's quests and enemies, and a bunch of mods for high-level characters, and are running out of challenges, you can try intentionally using companions who are weak and death-prone (Calvus Horatius is a good choice, without any modification necessary, especially if you are over level 25 – leveled monsters are apt to kill him). Your new mission is to keep the companion(s) alive through hair-raising adventures – which can be more difficult than it sounds.
  • A good taste of this and the serious challenges it can pose is doing the official Siege at Firemoth add-on quest at level 40 or so, with no goal in mind (given the low-end loot) other than the survival of all three, eventually four, game-provided followers. The only way to do it is to switch gears and be nothing but a support mage healing your compatriots while they do most of the fighting, and to Calm the spellcasting one again and again to minimize the damage he does to his friends; you will need a large number of Fortify and Restore Magicka potions. At the final Lich fight, switch back into baddass mode, and take that boss out before he kills them all in one to two strikes. (See the UESPWiki article on the quest for details.)

Roleplay

• Most companions charge no money for their services. If you find this too implausible, you can regularly pay them a fair salary or loot share manually, by giving them gold in inventory or, less visibly, by just docking yourself the amount with something like player->RemoveItem,"Gold_001",1000.
• Give them great gear; you really do not need 1 million septims, or a collection of a dozen Glass Curiasses in a chest, so don't be stingy. They're risking their virtual lives every time they go somewhere with you, and take a lot of damage.
• If you have a big house mod or have already built your Great House stronghold, you can enhance the sense of having a buddy (or lover, or bodyguard, or whatever) by using a furniture mod to give them their own stuff (bed, closet, etc.), removing useless stock furniture if necessary. If you have lots of houses, you can give some to specific companions as their own homes (though remember to visit within 72 game hours if you don't want aspects of some companions to reset to defaults).
• See also the Companion and NPC utilities and misc. section for roleplay interaction and realism mods.

Specific companion mods

Humanoids

• Jasmine, a Morrowind Companion 2.7 by Gulfwulf a.k.a. GHF a.k.a. Jac – Mostly functional (aside from occasional disappearing – see above), until player character reaches Reputation 3, then her scripting causes her to have issues: She tries to give you a telepathy ring, and fails, and gets stuck in an annoying dialogue loop. Giving yourself the ring via console does not fix this. Using the ring makes her disappear and become unrecoverable even with PositionCell. The workaround is to just always thank her for [not really] giving you the ring, every time you dialogue with her in follow mode. This is annoying, but workable. She's a solid companion mods to date for lower levels of game play, but even then is highly sensitive to changes in the list of mods being loaded, and (rarely) 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 go to Caius Cosades to 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 not over-powered (at first), though may make things rather easy for a level 1-3 character (less so than Wolf Companion, below). The house she comes with in Seyda Neen is very modest. A minor bug is that she will not use the crappy armor she comes with (a problem with many companion mods), and she won't equip anything comparable (leather stuff, mostly, but sometimes other low-end items added by mods). You must give her Chitin or better or she will not armor up; but you would do that anyway. As her stats and level increase with yours, she eventually becomes rather over-powered; this can be mediated by giving her weak weapons so she can't kill everything before you get to fight it. A great thing about Jasmine (like most other gen 2 and later companions) is she does not suffer from the potion-guzzling bug (see general companion notes above).

  Getting her to trigger properly as a companion, rather than just some NPC you rescued, 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 (hopefully to the shop for some armor she'll actually wear).

  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. It is difficult to find most of them; go with her to the Eight Plates tavern in Balmora and talk to the NPC Deandre for a long series of them (frankly repetitive, but the rewards are mostly skill books, so maybe worth it). There are some that are only findable by walking around with her (especially in the mainland part of the Ascadian Isles region) until she hits a trigger location, and some of them may be triggered by weather changes. You may find her parents' home ("Jims's House") in this area, but there is no reason to take her there until her quests direct you to do so. While the dialogue loop bug mentioned above does not prevent her quest-specific dialogue from triggering (when there is some that is of the prompt-the-player-character, interruptive variety), it may be suppressing some dialogue menu options; she has quests and responses I have not been able to trigger, after months of play, but which I know exist from having looked at the mod's details in OpenMW-CS. This includes the romance option, beyond the point where you get an impulsive hug, and a show-down with an enemy from her past.

  Her ability to stay out of your way is very good; she has the smartest movement AI I've seen in a companion mod so far in that regard, and usually responds to a nudge, and also has command options to move (to enter AIWander mode briefly then return to follow mode). However, she has an annoying movement bug: after any teleport (including fast travel, and teleport doors between cells) she gets confused and stays standing where she is, unless you remain standing close to her for about one second, or nudge her, then continue forward. She has a dialogue option to teleport with you if you use Recall or Intervention, but it does not work in OpenMW.

  She uses the game's default Redguard female voice acting, and it is not too-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, when you're diseased, and when giving "wrong" answers to her own quest prompts). She has abnormally high (200) Acrobatics, like many companions, to avoid ridiculous falling deaths. She auto-Levitates (including cessation of the effect) and auto-Water-Breathes, and can (when prompted) cure herself of diseases as well as restore her own stats if they get damaged. Sometimes her stats bug out a little; I've seen her strength shoot up inexplicably, and it goes back to where it should be with this restore option, or after you use Rest. If her stats are not keeping pace with your own increases (which they should after you level up), there's a "practice your skills" dialogue option that will fix it. She's a straight-up fighter, and will use any weapon type. She does not cast offensive or defensive spells, though I think she might start casting Restore Health on herself after a certain level (I'm not sure because I give her Constant Effect gear and potions that provide the effect). She's also easy on the eyes – her appearance is modeled on a particular Playboy Playmate, and she's a Better Bodies companion, so looks pretty realistic, not like the awkward, cartoonish NPCs of the vanilla Bethesda game.

  Despite its problems, I recommend this mod for Jasmin's, well, companionability. She has much to say if you look for dialogue options appearing after journal entries in the Main Quest and some major side quests. Sometimes she gives advice or expresses doubts (e.g. about a Fighters Guild quest that looks like an outright assassination). Just be prepared to mostly run with another companion later after her dialogue loop problem triggers.

• Dawn Companion 1.3 by Korana (based on Joseph Michael Linsner's comic book character of the same name): Fully functional, though simple. Her disposition does not vary, she has no quests, is not a spellcaster, doesn't have very unique dialog, never triggers audio. Her scripting is very robust, and her navigation and combat AI is as smart as it gets, other than – like most companions – she'll happily injure you if you don't get out of her way. She was my go-to companion for a long time. Technically not lore-friendly, except you don't have to interpret her as Linsner's character, just as some random human with some tats. Some aspects of the readme actually pertain to an earlier mod this one is based on, Grumpy's Companion Project 3.1 (e.g., you can ignore the instructions to console her in, since she's actually already in-game, in Suran, Desele's House of Earthly Delights, with a "luggage" chest). Korana's Lady Death Companion (based on Brian Pulido's comics character) probably is equivalent, with mostly the same scripts, but is much harder to rationalize, lore-wise, since she's ghostly white, with white hair, and glowing eyes. 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. Another philosophy on this is that mega-strong armor for a companion isn't really a cheat if you don't use it on the player character; all it does is keep the companion alive, which you would likely do by reloading a savegame if she was killed anyway. 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 if you don't give her the super-armor she comes with, 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. She also cannot cure herself of diseases or their effects (including damaged Strength from Great Bonewalkers), so use Vivec's Touch (or equivalent) after fights with diseased enemies, and periodically cast Restore spells on her for all stats (do so for any other companions who lack self-restoration). Dawn offers Repair service. She's also her own unique race, for whatever reason – pale and flame-haired, and of Breton stature. Dawn's unique teleportation feature, to Mournhold or to Balmora Mages Guild, will bring you along, but if other companions (or pack animals) are in tow, they will not go along for this ride. The author says Dawn "should" work as a vampire companion, if you get her to contract that condition. You can play as this character (the race has Imperial stats, with a different daily Power) with this head and permanent underwear, by using the Dawn Prefabricated Character (formerly Playable Dawn) mod; not tested in OpenMW yet.

• Beryl and Hurd by Emma: Severely malfunctional; they go into "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 Addamasartus 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 are aware of you and still alive, or B & H will go into combat freakout mode the instant they walk out of Arrille's where you find them, and b) if you have both installed, you probably need to lead each of them to Addamasartus 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!). The combat-fixing steps in point #4 of the general companion advice above will work. Still, since this would have to be done again and again and again, they are not practical companion mods in OpenMW.

• Laura Craft Romance (originally Girlfriend Breton) 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). Update: Actually, engaging her dialogue section about hurrying up or sleeping a little longer will put her into an endless wake-sleep-wake-sleep loop. If you avoid that part of her menus, she 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. It can definitely be used to teleport her to a public square in Vivec (one of her "meet me there" places). She has various abilities, like armorer, that I have not tested personally yet. The non-hostile baby Clannfear in Laura's basement will follow, but seems to serve no purpose but amusement. I can see in the code that it relates to a quest in some way. One issue with this mod is that 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, and every permanent corpse in the game is infinite storage, so it's not really a cheat. Some may find Laura's lovey-dovey dialogue a bit over the top, 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. Update: As of 2017-04, using a nightly build of OpenMW, and fixing one script name to have a _ character instead of a . is apparently sufficient to restore most of Laura's functionality. See the forum for details, especially this post of 2017-04-05.

• Imperial Boyfriend Indiana James (originally Boyfriend Imperial) 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). The fix mentioned for Laura probably also works for Indy.

• Domehome by Grumpy and Emma (see Player homes section for notes on this as a house mod): Comes with domestic staff. The fighter, Ingred, has the same the same broken combat AI as Beryl and Hurd, with the same after-fight fix (see above). This fix needs to be applied quickly if she's using a missile weapon, otherwise she may fire all ammo at an imaginary enemy in the ground. 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 the easily killed Mudcrab Merchant). 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, but they do not go into kill-thy-neighbor mode when individually led outdoors to the same exterior cell (i.e., through a teleport door), so it may be just a problem with the ring's special teleportation. I would ensure that they are kept out of any place you plan to teleport into with any other companion in tow, if you've found a solution for using Mark with companions (none is known for OpenMW as of this writing; the Companion Teleportation mod is incompatible). 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 PositionCell in the Console.

• Cally and Grabran by Grumpy – These "generation 0.5" 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 Bethesda's engine; I tried them one at a time.) These seem to be early beta versions of Grumpy's Companion Project, and some downloads of CP 3.1 include them even though they are not using the 3.1 code. Many other companions based on the final 3.1 code (before Grumpy's cancer got the better of him), including Dawn Companion and Gatanas as well as Emma's Wolf and Dog Companions mods, work quite well.

• Witchgirl Adventure – Mostly functional so far, with minor problems. One (also occurring in vanilla Morrowind) is that your instructions to her to not 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; she 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, to trap the enemy and any of her summoned minions that die, 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 a 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 (I think he's aimed more at level 30+ people) 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  Ss  G    P (Morgana, her summons between her and Gaenor, and player 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). I ended up using the console to take away her Storm Atronach spell and give her Summon Dremora instead; less collateral damage, less noise, and the Dremora actually does less – he wastes time casting his Fire Shield – so you do more of the fighting.

  Her movement AI is bugged, in OpenMW, in multiple ways. I have looked briefly at the code, and there's all kinds of stuff in there for fine-tuning it, but none of it actually works, so there must be some syntax error in there that is "fatal" to all these efforts in OpenMW's strict parsing engine. Morgana has among the worst companion movement and navigability I've encountered, to the point that she is easily trapped behind small rocks she should step over, cannot follow you up steep slopes (even if you do SetAcrobatics,200 on her), is very slow and gets left behind (even if you use the Console to boost her Athletics and Speed), has great difficulty navigating ladders (often goes under them and gets stuck), and does not have an actually functional "warp to the player's position" script despite the ReadMe saying she does, so she's easily left behind when exploring. If you use her, you constantly have to check behind you to make sure she's still there, and wait for her to catch up or go back and get her unstuck, exactly like with a vanilla "rescue me and lead me to safety" follower NPC.

  To trigger her quest scripts, you have to return with her to her house (more than once; I think you have to leave Ald'ruhn, then return to it on a different day). You're on the right track when she tells you about her chatty grandfather's ghost downstairs (do not attack it). Unfortunately, the first of her quests is broken, as the special skull you eventually have to find does not appear in the cell it belongs in. You have to give it to yourself via console with player->Additem,"AA_skullRastaff",1 (or a PlaceAtPC command). This is as far as I've tested her quests. If you find her missing brother early, nothing happens; you have to trigger the right quest stuff for her to even recognize him. She has a "personal trainer" NPC in Ald'ruhn (in the Rat in the Pot, if I recall correctly) who can raise her skills. This raises a whole bunch of them in groups (combat, magic, stealth) for a steep cost, instead of being able to raise specific ones, or just having them auto-raise as the player progresses.

  She does not auto-Levitate or auto-Water-Breathe, and has to be manually told to start either effect, and told to stop with a hard-to-find Dispel option (under "extra magical tricks"). Her dialogue menu is a mess, with commonly needed options buried among trivia. Morgana comes with her own scripted, enchanted Ebony Stormsword (priced at 1 gold), but will not use it unless you specifically tell her to go melee. You can give her a more powerful Short Blade (the only weapon she's any good at), with the same caveat. As with summoning, she won't "remember" that you told her to use melee, between sessions with her. Any time you put her in wait mode, her combat options reset to her summoning overkill defaults. Despite these issues, she can be a fun diversion, if you're tough enough that being zapped by Storm Atronachs all the time isn't a big deal. She has a fondness for Moon Sugar, and a sharp tongue.

• Thief Companion Constance – Installable, and I was able to pick up the companion, get her to follow, take inventory, fight, and engage in some unique dialogue options and behaviors (like going off to Balmora on her own and stealing stuff). 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, but was written later. Update: I have re-installed cleanly, and the combat problem still happens. I did not test any of this mod's quest scripting, due to this general usability issue.

• Julan, Ashlander Companion – Functional until you take him to Ghostgate when he says he's ready, whereupon you cannot progress, and the inability to advance his quest also breaks the game's Main Quest, until Julan dies. See the OpenMW forums for a thread about progress toward fixing this hall-of-fame mod – probably the highest-priority mod to get working, given how many players love it. Its many connections to the Ashlander side of the Main Quest really do enrich the game. Last I looked, there was a general belief that a .omwaddon patch, used with a recent build of OpenMW, had resolved the problems, but no one had tested it all the way through yet. In my own testing, I found that this patch was not effective with a pre-existing game at all (even after removing the Julan mod, doing a clean-save routine, and reinstalling it). If the patch does work, it will only work if a new player character is generated after it's installed.

Many-companion Mods

Various mods provide companion, guard/mercenary, and service and domestic staff systems, with numerous available NPCS, who are sometimes coded to work together in special ways.

• A Lord's Men and Staff Agency – Two mercenary/hireling mods with all sorts of options, including: generic guards, combat companions, functional service staff (spellmakers, smiths, etc.), and trivial, amusing hirelings. Full reviews forthcoming, but the short version is: they mostly work, but several of the hires have bugs that make them not very useful, while others work just fine. Overall, they are a net positive. One is a fork of the other, but both can be used at once. It'll take me a while to tease apart which NPCs are added by which mod and what their bugs are. The most severe one is that both provide at least some fighters with unmodified Guard AI, which results in your own companion arresting you if a) you attack any humanoid, even in the wilderness, before they attack you first, or b) steal in front of the companion when the companion is not in follow mode. I still did all of Bloodmoon with one of these (appropriately, a Nord), got arrested four times, and just got my stuff back out of the Evidence Chest in Fort Frostmoth, so it's not a huge problem. (If you're wondering, most companion mods use modified Guard AI: there's a test that prevents them from arresting you, while retaining the Guard function of attacking hostile creatures that go into settled jurisdictions, whether the companion is in follow mode or not.)

  Some more review preview: Both mods provide some unique hirelings, and some of the options include: a gardener who'll periodically give you a potted alchemical plant; a sailor who'll give you some key map locations if you don't already have them; a herdsman who'll eventually produce a dog-sized but strong pack guar; a miner who'll produce raw ores, including occasional rare ones like Adamantium and Stalhrim (it shouldn't do the latter, since it is not really an ore); male and female courtesans with the option you'd expect from such a character (it's a fade-to-black, not an animation, so don't get excited/offended), multiple dancers with new dances including some kind of like ballet and folk or interpretive dance; fighters and battlemages, of course; service mages that provide additional teleport destinations, enchanting, and spellmaking; a librarian who'll give you a random book each day. One of the mods has staff that are more useful, for the most part, than the other's (which has a lot of trivial staff, without inventory sharing, who don't actually do anything and are just roleplay decoration), but its combat companions may be better. One works by you buying coupons and trading them in for staffers, the other requires that you get some (usually but not always common) item and pay some cash. One is a one-time hiring cost, the other a monthly salary but affordable for anyone over about level 5. One has a feature whereby you can hire a "Champion" companion, and have any other of that mod's companions follow the Champion instead of directly following you, which is convenient (you can tell the Champion to wait, and the others will auto-wait). One with more companions with inventory sharing actually has pretty good combat stats on them regardless what their job is, so you can use them as regular companions even if they're nominally domestic staff, especially if you tweak them with the Console. Serious bug with one of them, the one that has a pack of NPCs in the Vivec Foreign Quarter plaza: If you get in a fight in the plaza, any of them within alarm range will rush over to offer you their services on the spot, during the fight; but the dialog is bugged and cannot be dismissed by any means. The only solution is to reload a previous savegame, or to use SetHealth,0 on each of them in the Console, then Resurrect after the fight is over.

• CM Partners and its forks:
  • Friends and Partners a.k.a. FnR 0.7 [TB] by enkephalin (a.k.a. Dok Enkephalin) and Cutthroat Mods ^M  – In testing; working so far. This variant has a complex adventuring party system, loads of NPC interaction, training, bandaging, all sorts of stuff. Converts Ahnassi and Emusette Bracques/Barnand Erelie into potential companions. It adds the same companion NPCs as CM Partners, but heavily modified, plus some new ones. It's unclear what version of CMP this was forked from (in 2004), but the original 1.0 seems likely. Bloodmoon options are added in a separate .ESP. This archive also include a patch for the popular Havish mod [not included in this mod list yet.] Like various other mods, it adds Jiub (your prison ship pal at the start of the game) back into the world, this time as a potential companion (and probably the easiest one to get). Picking up others takes some work, to raise the disposition enough. The mod's NPCs are romanceable, but not automatically (there's a random element to sexual preference, etc.).
    • There's also a previously released [TB+BM] archive, with the same 0.7 version number, but with Bloodmoon stuff integrated, so just one .ESP, and without the Havish patch.
      • Single esp: http://mw.modhistory.com/download-80-951
      • Split esp: http://mw.modhistory.com/download-80-9802
  • CM Partners 2.8 [TB] by Cutthroat Mods – Broken. The NPCs show up and will dialogue, but none of them will become companions. Various creatures will follow (e.g. an oafish Ogrim, and a sentient and non-hostile Cliffracer – not visually distinguishable, so easy to kill by accident). Bandits show up and try to hold you up for money. But the main purpose of this is humanoid companions, and they're not working.
  • CM Partners Roleplayers Edition 2.9 [TB] by Cutthroat Mods – Broken. Same core issue as 2.8. Adds the character alignment system (lawful good, chaotic evil, etc.) of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in Morrowind, for the purpose of determining whether the mod's potential companions will pair up with you and remain loyal. This feature conflicts in a minor way with Seyda Neen Complete (see the Major overhauls of vanilla places section): the "alignment choice barrel" spawns inside a wall. I'll document a fix, in case the main problem with the mod (or a later version, below) is also fixed: Look on the ground near the Census and Excise Office wall in Seyda Neen for two books and a random alignment barrel (which you don't want to use unless you want no choice over the matter), then type cm_alignment_choice->Move,y,3000 in the Console and the choice barrel should appear (you pick the desired alignment paper out of it).
  • CM Partners Roleplayers Edition 3.0 [TB] by Cutthroat Mods – Broken. Same problems as 2.9.
  • Baron's Partners 3.0 1.1 [TB] by Baron Of Hell (the "3.0" is part of the title) – Broken. Same problems as CM Partners 3.0, though using an alignment is supposedly optional in Baron's. This version has some topless female NPCs (unless running a full-underwear version of Better Bodies) who don't seem like they're supposed to be. At least one of the added vendors sells stuff a merchant should not, like the Skeleton Key that is supposed to be unique to the guildmaster of the Thieves Guild, and a powerful cloak you're supposed to get from a quest, plus some new and excessively cheaty items; they even restock in his inventory, so you either have to pretend they're not there, or remove the NPC with Disable in the Console. Some or all of these additional problems may exist in some CM Partners versions; they were not thoroughly tested after figuring out that the main companion feature was broken.
  • Partners Unsexed 2 – Not tested yet.
  • Partners Unlimited 1.0 – Not tested yet.
  • Ex-Slaves and Partners 1.5 by Nevena – Not tested yet.
  • Club and Courtiers by Nevena – Not tested yet (and may be something else, like an add-on for Ex-Slaves and Partners.

Creatures-turned-NPC

• Gatanas, Dremora (Markynaz) Companion 1.3 [TB+BM] (formerly Gatanas Markynaz Dremora Companion) by Princess Stomper and Westly ^M  – Mostly working, and fully functional as a companion – an outcast, formerly high-ranking Dremora (NPC, not creature, and uses the Dremora (Markynaz) Race 1.3 mod for resources; the .esp for the race must load before the companion). I installed the female version, from the race + companion combined archive. The female has 10 points more Speed, the male 10 points more Endurance; they have different but equivalent gear. The only real issue so far is that after completing the "retrieve my stolen special armor" quest (the only quest included, which works fine, and is a tough multi-Dremora fight), the companion's greeting will revert to the "we have much to discuss" one that starts this quest, but there is no dialogue option pertaining to it any longer, so it just stays that way most of the time, and seems to interfere with the romance options. This has no other effect on the mod as a companion. Gatanas is not over-powered if picked up by a new player character, and dies about as easy as you do. The quest will still activate (with high enough disposition) even if you are far too weak to do it yet. The romance features can be worked manually by digging up the Journal entries in OpenMW-CS, but the mod is simple enough that it doesn't really do anything (doesn't have lovey-dovey stuff to do with or say to you after you accept the scripted advances; a bit like the vanilla Khajiit girlfriend for male PCs, Ahnassi, but without all the running out to fetch stuff).

  Gatanas is a capable fighter, has excellent movement AI, auto-Levitates (and Dispels it when done), and can carry a lot. Comes stock as an Axe specialist (with a Daedric one, but no other non-clothing gear), though has some other weapon skills; you can use the console to tweak some stats. Not much of a spellcaster (maybe not one at all, depending on your own stats). Has services to offer – perhaps too many, including Spellmaking, Enchanting, Training (of what may vary – the NPC's stats adjust over time in response to yours), and Repair. Also has some unique fast travel options, to four Daedric shrines, two in the far north and two in the far south. One might prefer the destinations be better distributed, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth; it's still very real-time-saving when trying to deal with intentionally far-flung quests in this game. If you go over all the dialogue options, you'll discover there's summonable pet Scamp (it is too weak to drag around with you except at maybe level 1–7 or so). If you don't bother, Gatanas will eventually summon it anyway as one of the "We have much to discuss" things. It should be kept alive at least until the second of the mod's quest-related discussions about where Gatanas's stolen stuff is. The Scamp can be re-summoned, including to indoor locations.

  Gatamas lacks clever but potentially annoying scripted interruptions. Other NPCs react to the Dremora with trepidation (if you ask them, and it doesn't affect their Disposition; the novelty wears off, and it's unfortunate that this is always a dialogue option). Guards have no particular reaction to Gatanas, unlike the Dremora companion Belial (below). The graphical work is impressive on both Gatanas and the included gear (after you do the quest there are extra skirts for the female version that you can use on someone else or yourself). The female Gatanas's armor (also gained by quest) is rather sexy-femme, aside from over-large pauldrons; it's good armor, but not excessive. Gatanas has lore-informative things to say when inside various Daedric shrines, and some haughty and stranger-to-your-mortal-plane random dialogue. You can feed Gatanas Fire Petals and Wickwheat, and get her/him drunk on Mazte; these raise Disposition a little at a time. If he/she gets lost, ask any NPC in a major city (Balmora, Ald'ruhn, Vivec, at least, but not Caldera) and you'll re-find Gatanas in a local tavern.

  Issues: Curiously, she/he will not auto-Water-Breathe even if given that spell via the Console; you have to cast it as on-touch. Since it makes no sense that a demonic power who makes spells and enchantments can't cast a beginner-level Alteration spell, a workaround is to give the companion the automatic ability with the console, from another installed companion that has it, if you look it up in OpenMW-CS. The mod similarly lacks any option to self-cure and -restore, as with Dawn (above), so needs to be periodically tended to. The option to dance often just makes Gatanas repeatedly strike a pose. Another trivial bug is an "at home" dialogue option that doesn't work right (thinks we're home when we're not), but it seems to serve no purpose but chat, so no big deal. Aside from bug fixes, and more quests and dialogue, the only improvement that a modder could easily make is replacing the already nice appearance with some of the stunning work collected in the Ranked Dremora creatures mod.

• Belial, a Dismal Daedric Companion 1.0.3 [TB+BM] by HangHimHigher ^N  – Working, aside from a non-fatal movement glitch. A very different and more elaborate take on an outcast Dremora companion. His/her appearance (you can install one gender or the other) is hard to distinguish from that of a Dunmer. One can use a graphics editor's color balance sliders on these textures to give Belial a different appearance, e.g. an otherworldly violet hue or whatever. Other textures in there seem to indicate the Dremora will eventually turn red. This mod is recommended for higher-level characters, and is best for a Telvanni player. Savegame when Belial is located; it's easy to give wrong answers, with a determination that you are not interesting enough. The mod includes quests, advanced combat options (including Summon and Destruction control, whether or not to use inventory weapons versus Bound weapons, etc.), the opportunity to get an Altmer clan mad at you and plotting revenge, and more. You can play this as a straightforward "recover an item" quest with Belial as an opponent rather than potential companion (if you do so, you might let Belial "wind up" the fight a bit and at least get a summon and a first strike in, as the Dremora is not otherwise much of a fight, unless you are low-level).

  As a companion (whereupon Belial gets better stats, calculated from yours), you first have to deal with the quest that led to your mutual encounter, and there are multiple options. Potential spoilers: If you want the sword that is the object of the starting quest, which is better than the reward item, a staff, you have to ask Belial for it, then refuse to hand it over to the questgiver. If Belial is allowed to keep that sword in the first-meet dialogue, it will disappear after the conversion to a companion; so get it immediately and give it back later, or use it. Or turn it over to the questgiver, if you are a goody-goody (so, um, why do you want a Dremora companion?). You'll talk to Belial three times in two visits to get agreement to be a companion.

  Do not talk to most Guards when you have Belial in tow. Imperial ones will give you one warning (period – not one from each such NPC) and only if you have enough Reputation; otherwise, you get a big Bounty for consorting with demonic forces and they will attack, with backup from any other nearby Imperial troops. Ordinators and regular High Ordinators will attack as soon as you talk to them, as will Royal Guards other than maybe Helseth's own bodyguards. Almalexia's personal circle of Her Hands High Ordinators do nothing, nor does she; presumably the man-god Vivec won't care, either. If you are Redoran or Hlaalu, your own House's Guards will do nothing, at least if your House status is high; Guards of the opposing house will give no warning. Telvanni Guards don't care; they're around summoned Daedra all the time. Mercenaries with Guard AI (non-uniformed Guards in stuff like Nordic armor, e.g. Thalestris in the merchant shop in Dagon Fel) don't care. Most other NPCs don't care, but a few do (e.g. Caius Cosades has a negative reaction, while some, like Therana, have special "Belial" dialogue options). The hostility is prevented by simply putting Belial into wait mode.

  Belial's stats verge on over-powered; this is probably best as a post-Nerevarine companion used for intensely challenging quest and combat mods for higher-level characters (or for taking on Bloodmoon at below the minimum recommended level). Like some other companions, this one comes with a fatally low Acrobatics stat, which must be raised, or you may well fall and die while just being led out of the shrine he/she was found in (spoiler: Ashalmawia, near Ald Velothi and Khuul; Belial is deep inside and high up), or later while climbing and jumping around. At least 120 is recommend, and 200 will survive any fall. This mod has the same movement bug as Jasmine; you have to wait a second after teleporting by any means, including doors, or the companion "sticks" and doesn't follow. Personality-wise, the Dremora is a depressed nihilist, which will either be hilarious or annoying, depending on your own personality and mood.

Guard and companion animals

• Wolf Companion 3.1 by Emma and Grumpy – Fully functional, and my favorite animal 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 leveled 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, probably around level 5. 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 (or spell-healed) manually; this companion cannot carry anything. Has a highly desirable "follow me, but wait outside interior cells" feature that I wish all companions had, especially creature ones. Does not Levitate with you (he stops following and stays put if you do), but does auto-Water-Breathe. After about level 20, Spot becomes less useful and very likely to get killed; he does not appear to level with the character, and his once-excessive prowess becomes insufficient against powerful, leveled enemies. He's still good for pest control (Rats, Nix Hounds, Alits, etc.) while exploring wilderness areas, but will get injured more often and worse. Just heal him frequently, and be sure you are well armed to quickly kill things like random Daedra. Spot comes in three colors (all the ones from Bloodmoon). I prefer the natural reddish one, though in BM that's a diseased Plague Wolf. You can only have one wolf, though, not all three. His teleport ring (to bring him to you if lost or just away) is something all companion mods should come with, given how frequently they glitch and vanish.
• Dog Companions by Emma and Grumpy – Works great, and you can have more than one. 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 are bugged and do not appear; they cannot even 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 happens when they run around and run into a wall or object and keep running at it until the next anim. cycle phase. (This problem also affects regular companions when they get stymied in trying to follow you and run like mad for a moment against an obstruction; this seems to be a game engine problem not a mod problem). It helps to put each kitten in a different interior cell, if you have a player home with some rooms that are not all in the same cell (i.e., they have teleport doors). They are very cute, and you can feed them rat-meat as a treat. Despite their size, they can walk up anything a humanoid can, so if you put progressively taller objects against each other in various places, effectively providing stairs, you can get very naturalistic results, like the kittens on windowsills or naughtily getting on the dinner table, as they wander around randomly. If you like a silly game, you can give them powerful stats in the Console or OpenMW-CS, and use them as fighting companions.
• Panther Buddy 1.0 by DonnerGott – Working, but may not for you, depending on other mods. She is a much more balanced guard-pet for lower-level characters than Wolf Companion (and Dog Companions – same code). 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. The panther's level is actually higher, and I think it has more health, so it might be viable as a companion for more levels than the wolf/dogs in the long run. However, her movement, control options, and other scripting is much simpler; a good project for fans of cats over dogs would be to compare the dog and wolf mods above to see how the adaptation was done, then apply it to some big cats using the this panther model (or a better one), with various cat skins (jaguar, tiger, etc.), and maybe some mild scaling and stats distinction between cat types. Caveat: In one test with a lot of mods, she would not follow or dialogue, and was just a panther-shaped container (the Control Pearl did not work). It is unknown at present which other mod(s) PB conflicted with.
• Your Dragon Companion 1.0 by Kagz a.k.a. Kagrenac a.k.a. Raven – Not tested in OpenMW yet, but uses the scripting from Dog Companions, so is highly likely to work.

Pack animals

• Pack Rats added by Bethesda's official Tribunal mod in Mournhold are fully functional.
• Guars 1.19 by abot – Not compatible with OpenMW. After you get on one of these rideable guars, its navigation seems to be broken. Clicking makes it zoom into super-speed mode, plow through the landscape, and fall with you into the watertable 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, and kill the guar). Other broken things, even just using it as a regular Pack Guar, are that it warps to the player's position 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 fast-travel with you as advertised, so it can only be used if you're going to walk the entire trip. 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, I just got messages that it was doing so).
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB], with BE Fixes (see entry in Major overhauls of vanilla places section) – Adds some Pack Rats and Guars that are fully functional.
• Pack Animal Merchant 1.1 by Baratheon79 – The Pack Rats and Guars it adds just outside Pelagiad were not usable by me in the present test; the NPC who has them accepted my money but I don't get 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 "stationary" animated NPCs and creatures their position migrates a bit over time.)
• Pack Guars (maybe also Rats?) added further from but still nearby Pelagiad by another mod – I think it was Grumpy's version – were not usable by me in the present test; the NPC who had them didn't respond with any purchase options.
• 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 (you don't get the control ring, and the donkey thus will not follow), but I'm pretty sure the donkey did follow in a previous test with a different list of mods loaded. Another forum user confirms it is working, as of 2017-04-08, but it is not for me in my current test. I suspect a conflict with abot's Guars (which has serious, cascading issues in OpenMW), or some other mod. May just be a load order problem. Warning: Pack Donkey 2.x by Emma is not a TES3: Morrowind mod at all, but is a .ESM for TES4: Oblivion, so do not install it.
• 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. I ended up removing it for prophylactic reasons, given the severe problems with abot's rideable Pack Guar, above. This is something that should be "clean tested" first, with just the vanilla game plus that one mod.
• Side note: The prices of the Pack Rats in various mods are inconsistent, but the carrying capacity and behavior appears to be the same. Both the pricing and carrying capacity of Pack Guars is wildly inconsistent between mods, and at least abot's Guars obviously has very distinct behavior.

Dwemer constructs

• Yagrum Advanced 2.0 – Yagrum Bagarn will build you two companions, a Dwemer Sphere and Steam Centurion. To make them Mournhold-capable, there's a trivial side quest (look for the additional dialogue options "Mournhold" and "power source" from Bagarn). For airship, see entry in Fast travel section, below.
• Private Mobile Base 4.2 [TB+BM] by henkbein a.k.a. HB – Ignore stuff the vendor NPC tells you about "Dwemer Cyborg Prototypes"; you can eventually find them in Solstheim (why?!), and they are a less functional, alpha-test version of those added by the later Dwemer Cyborgs mod by henkbein [have not tested it yet], but also have infinite health, so they are super-cheaty as companions. Plus, they don't look Dwemer. Just pretend they're not there; you can't even use them as mannequins; three will disappear from the game (even if you leave them at their original location), and the one that remains will disappear (or possibly return to its original spawning point) if you leave it alone for more than 72 game hours. (About the only use for it is as a short-term bodyguard if you are exploring Solstheim at a much-too-low level; the cyborg is indestructible, though slow, so it can fight things for you if you keep a distance.) If you want a proper steampunk Dwemer companion, play as Telvanni, or get Yagrum Advanced, above.
• Dwemer Cyborgs by henkbein – Not tested yet; the prototype versions in Private Mobile Base are not really usable.

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. Mostly before seems better, since if a companion has a conflicting dialogue option, you probably want the companion's to work with that NPC, not the generic NPC mod's one, or a companion's quests or other special features might not work.

• 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. Another is to ask about health, including disease. 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. Using those features makes equipping and de-equipping sounds, but doesn't appear to have any other effect.
• Universal Companion Share 2.0 by Fliggerty – Incompatible, as it requires MSWE to do anything. When OpenMW finally starts natively supporting scripting beyond the original game engine, this is arguably the no. 1 thing to implement: ability to inventory-share with any NPC in follow mode.
• Move or Take My Place 1.0 by abot – Despite the fact that the readme says "MWSE required", this actually seems to work to some extent, 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 your best faction buddies, unless you use Fortify Speechcraft to force their disposition to 100 with repeated Admire and low-cost Bribe, or a strong Charm or really-really strong Fortify Personality to temporarily raise Dispo to 100. 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. Anyway, the Move request seems to work more often than Take My Place. Update: This mod is not necessary if you have NPC Commands, which implements these features and many more.
• NPC Commands 8b [TB+BM] by Horny Buddha – 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 (100), 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). If you do have enough Command Humanoid to do something like bring an Enchanter home with you, you can save time doing it with this mod (don't have to keep casting the spell over and over again). 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). 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.
• Improved Teleportation 2.0 by Charles Cooley a.k.a. cdcooley a.k.a. CDC – Incompatible; requires MSWE. See next entry for variant that does not.
• Companion Teleportation 1.1 [TB+BM] by Charles Cooley a.k.a. cdcooley a.k.a. CDC ^M  – Incompatible but fixable (see below). May or may not work. Presently totally non-functional in OpenMW. This is a damned shame, because the inability of the majority of companions to follow you through any form of teleportation other than Guide Guide, siltstrider and ship travel, and teleport doors (doors from one cell to another) is a serious pain in the butt. This mod is a non-MWSE version of Improved Teleporation There is also a compatibility patch for CT included in Multiple Teleport Marking. Update: This forum thread indicates why it is not working: the author did not include all the near-identical scripts, but compiled bytecode versions of them; this code only works in Bethesda's engine (technically a VM). He did, however, include the source of the original script, so someone who knows what they're doing can fix this mod by replacing the bytecode versions with source versions; his readme even has (geeky) instructions for how to do it.
• Mournhold Mercenary Upgrade [TB] – Partially functional; works but with a serious flaw that can be worked around. Adds a few modern companion features to the otherwise almost useless Tribunal companion Calvus Horatius, and gets rid of his weird "profit" calculator. The bug is that this mod disappears his follow/stay dialogue option; this can be resolved by using NPC Commands with it, since that mod gives you these commands for any NPC with a Disposition toward you of 100. He (like many poorly-thought-out companions) still has to have his Acrobatics manually jacked up in the Console to at least 120 (200 is better) to avoid absurd falling deaths because of the game's poor NPC movement AI. See the Help your companion survive section, above, for details.
• Firemoth Improved Companions [FM] – Working, but to little effect. Adds better gear to the half-assed companions you are assigned in the official Siege at Firemoth add-on. They will die anyway, unless you are high level and take various strenuous measures to keep them alive, as detailed in the UESPWiki article on this quest. (Doing so is probably the only fun challenge about that expansion, honestly, which is almost nothing but skeleton after skeleton and rat after rat.)
• At-a-Glance Companion Status Bars 1.1b by skaeps – Incompatible, as it depends on MGE. Version 2.4 likely does also, and it's reported at Morrowind Modding History that it "currently has some major problems" anyway.
• Healing 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Makes NPCs with Healer class actually offer healing (Restore Health) as a service. Of limited utility, since they will not actually provide the service to you unless you are pretty notably injured (not sure what the exact cutoff is, maybe 80%). There are some other mods that purport to do this.
• Hide the Skooma 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Mostly working (to the extent is has issues, they are probably also in the Bethesda engine). Temporarily removes Skooma and Moon Sugar from your inventory when dealing with merchants who object to it. Issues: This temporarily affects your Encumbrance; if you don't pay attention, you can over-buy stuff then not be able to walk when your contraband is added back to your inventory after you are done with the merchant. Does not prevent a drop in Disposition from those merchants coded to have one when encountering contraband; likely, the script cannot detect such merchants until they've already reacted to the contraband. A few ingredient merchants are not fooled by the trick and will still refuse to deal with you until you manually drop the Moon Sugar (this bug does not affect Skooma, or other merchant types).
• It's Me, You Idiot 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Eliminates the annoying "Who's there?" NPC greeting. This could be re-modded further to eliminate some other pointless NPC chatter that usually makes no sense in context (e.g. "Dirt, dirt, dirt", references to "that elf" being in trouble, etc.) This would be especially welcome with companion mods that use the default voice responses of their race/gender, and to eliminate male NPC's "Ma'am" and "Well hello there!" responses to male player characters wearing skirts.
• Barb Fix 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Tweaks stats of the Barbarian NPC class so they actually wear (duh!) the fur/leather armor they have in their inventory.
• NPC Functionality 1.3 (formerly The Request Mod a.k.a. The Dialogue Request Mod) by Casey Tucker ^M  – Working. Compliance varies by many factors: Disposition (you generally need it very high), Speechcraft, NPC class, relative level, faction, quality of the gear you are wearing, Reputation, plus a random element. Options: follow, stay, or guard this spot; move out of the way; lend money (and pay back, with interest); tell in-game date/time, NPC's best skills, faction (unless secret); fight melee/ranged/magic/no-magic/NPC's-choice, stay out of fight (but may heal from a distance if they're able), use stealth when PC does. You can go out of your way to be nice to raise Dispo a little. Faction members you outrank will comply with any request. Has a morale feature – asking some level-1 commoner to fight for you will just scare them, some weak NPCs who follow will run away from fights, etc. Best-friend spellcasters may heal you if you're injured, without you asking. Can be used to build clumsy armies, e.g. to assault cities and strongholds. Has custom text responses, including Khajiit dialect. The primary utility of this mod aside from roleplay realism enhancement: "assign 'team archers,' 'team warriors' and the 'team healer,' so that the entire group works effectively as a team"; this can compensate for simple companion mods that don't have combat-control functions. A potential issue: increases the frequency with which NPCs trigger voice clips (some of us want a mod that sharply reduces them!). Also unnecessarily takes up two Topic menu lines for its main menu when one would suffice, and does not put all of its features in that menu. The only ReadMe is on the download page.
• Give Your Orders 1.3 [TB] by TheLys ^M  – Functional but of low utility. You generally cannot get anyone to do or tell you anything without both Personality and Disposition near 100 (Speechcraft seems to have no effect); there's still a random element to it (they may refuse to tell you their class and level, then tell you, then refuse to tell you in the same dialogue session); many requests, if you do not have these maxed stats, result in a lowered Disposition whether complied with or not (including from your full-on companions); and you can sometimes end up with the situation that a following NPC will refuse to stop following. However, it can be seen as a realism mod, and someone focused on roleplay and the challenge of managing people's Dispositions may love it. The lowered-Disposition problem can be directly worked around with Companion Role Play Plus, which provides the ability to raise it. GYO provides follow/stay/wander movement requests, and options to tell class and level, and give a full stats run-down. It has more/less likelihood of compliance based on things like relative rank in a faction. A nice feature is that those in follow mode get Speed, Swift Swim, Jump, Slowfall, and regeneration (Magicka? Health? Fatigue? all?) boosts, and there is also an option to add Levitate and Water Walk spells to them. Most companion mods come with all of that built in, and can be adjusted with the Console if they don't (see the Help your companion survive section), so these features are mostly useful for NPCs who aren't true companions.
• Roleplay junkies can run most of these (working) mods simultaneously, to get numerous (though often redundant) interaction options.
• Mods to get NPCs to unequip items or strip entirely – See notes in the Hacks, testing tools, exploits, and cheats section.

NPC additions and changes

Numerous mods incidentally include new NPCs (e.g. item mods that add a merchant, quest mods that add a quest giver); those are not listed here. This section is for mods primarily focused on NPCs.

For NPCs only re-skinned, see the Meshes and textures section. For changes to the frequency or locations of guards and other NPCs, see the Spawning section. For changes to NPC combat behavior or stats, see the Combat and damage section.

General

• The Regulars: Sitting NPCs 2.5 by GhanBuriGhan – 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. Note: Some seated NPCs in Kat's Kastle (in its hard-to-find fashion show rooms) are working properly, so whatever is different about them can be studied and used to fix The Regulars and mods that use its resources.

Dancers ("exotic" or otherwise)

• Dancers 0.8 by Nicholiathan – Working, including in other mods that use the vanilla strip-club resources of Desele's House of Earthly Delights to add dancers elsewhere. It diversifies the (human) races of the dancers (who remain regular NPCs, not companions), and changes their behavior options (e.g., must pay them to strip). If you use a nude version of Better Bodies they will eventually go full-nude.
• Balmora Academy of Stripology 1.5 – Provides male dancers as well as female, but is bugged in OpenMW (dancers cannot be hired as intended). You can still enjoy it as a gender-neutral exotic dancer club, though. For hirable dancers, see A Lord's Men and Staff Agency. Note: This mod uses the same location as Little House on the Rocks, and so cannot be used at the same time. If you use a nude version of Better Bodies they will all be full-nude.
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB], with BE Fixes (see entry in Major overhauls of vanilla places section) adds another Desele venue in that city, with dancers, female wrestling (not actually animated), and a non-working prostitution function.
• See also the Increased modesty section for mods that add more clothing to the House of Earthly Delights dancers.
• No known dancer mods provide any beast-race dancers; the animation hasn't been done for their unusual legs.
• There are also mods that add non-"exotic" dancers (just animated patrons having a good time) to pubs. The Balmora Council Club mod does so (during nighttime hours), for example.

Slaves and slavery

• Slave Mod by Fligg – Did not do anything it purported to. I would surmise that an error early in its scripting stops it from compiling, but have not investigated. It sounded like a great mod, since you could use it to buy more slaves than those at a single Main-Quest-related vendor, free them, and possibly have them stick around as companions if you raised their disposition enough.
• Seyda Neen Complete (see entry in Major overhauls of vanilla places section) adds a working slave market, but the slaves-as-companions feature of this is broken. You can do nothing useful with the slaves; they'll follow (unarmed and in nothing but clothes), you can free them, and that's it. No inventory sharing, no disposition increase over time, etc.

Notes on NPCs

• Skirts and male player characters: Some male NPCs, including companions like Tribunal's Calvus Horatius, will dialogue with and comment about a male player character as if female when 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's High Ordinators (Hands of Almalexia), and Redoran Guards. I suspect this is a problem in the vanilla game, not OpenMW, nor any particular clothing mod, but I don't play vanilla (I'm not on Windows), so I can't verify this easily. It really doesn't make sense that any NPCs would trigger off a clothing item instead of just checking the PC's actual gender, but who knows?
• Lying-down NPCs added by various mods (e.g. sleeping guests in tavern bedrooms, drunks in pubs) have a tendency to not stay that way, to migrate around on the floor through walls, etc. Dagoth Ur's Sleepers (the basis for NPCs laying down in mods) also have this problem. I experimented with using the console to put some of them in beds, 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 weapon 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 y axis. 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. A similar approach, with visible ropes, has been used in some mods to keep dancers on their stages.

Mannequins and dummies

Mannequins, which are usually NPCs coded to stand in a position (effectively paralyzed) come in two varieties: armor-and-clothing, which can be given anything but only display those items (and may be posable in various ways, or even dance); and posable weapon mannequins, which can wield a weapon, too. They may look like wood, or like regular NPCs, or like something fanciful; this is just a matter of mesh and texture work. Some mannequins are actually coded as upright corpses and have limited functionality, but most are "live" NPCs.

The weapon-wielding kind hold a weapon by briefly entering fight mode to unsheathe, then freezing. This can have negative effects, including a) hitting and possibly killing you when you first tell them to do this, and b) triggering any companions in follow mode to attack the mannequin (which can happen repeatedly, since they drop from at-rest state into combat state every 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, and just have them be clothing-and-armor mannequins. This may not affect all modder "brands" of such mannequins, but the problem happens with many. Don't lead companions into a vendor who displays them in such a pose if you don't want to see your buddies attack the vendor's inventory, which seems to happen about one time out of every five to ten when entering such cells.

A rare side effect of mannequins that are not corpses, and which do not have scripting that checks that they are standing still, is that some of them can be given commands like "follow me" in mods like NPC Commands, which may convert them into low-capability companions who cannot be put back into stock-still mannequin mode (nor dancing mode, if they're dancing mannequins) – except by picking them up, which will zero out their inventory (so empty it first), then putting them back down as newly spawned mannequins. This "not a mannequin anymore" effect can also happen if you use Command Humanoid on them. It most often affects dancing mannequins, since they have no code that makes them stand like statues.

Attacking any non-corpse mannequin may trigger other NPCs (even other mannequins!) to "report your crime" as a violent assault, though a few mods may work around this. Some poorly coded mannequins that still have an active Alarm function, and will also report you for theft (and possibly even go into combat mode against you but usually without an ability to strike you) if you take an owned item. So, it is safest to do SetAlarm,0 and SetFight,0 on them before using them in a place you have taken over as a player home where the containers are owned by the original occupant, or if you are daringly using a space that spawns combatant humans, like the Old Mournhold manors used by the Dark Brotherhood. You need to repeat those commands if you pick up and move the mannequins, since doing so respawns a stock copy. Some posable mannequins are glitched and may become unusable after you pose them, leave, and come back; if this happens, you have to kill them, plunder their corpse, and replace them; the killing is best done with SetHealth,0 in the console, to avoid being reported for a crime.

Mod practice dummies are expected, of course, to be attackable, and are coded as creatures, not NPCs, whose health restores rapidly and who do not fight back, so you can hit them again and again to work on a combat skill. They do not always work in OpenMW.

A similar concept is security-training containers, which have locks and/or traps that reset themselves so you can try again and again to unlock or disarm them.

• New Leveled Animated Practice Dummy 1.1 – Not working. This is not for homes, but for the stock dummies in Fighters Guild training rooms, which seem to do nothing with this installed. Some home and furniture mods provide working ones you can hit and train with (don't know about the leveled part).
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB], with BE Fixes (covered in the Major overhauls of vanilla places section) has a furniture store with two vendors that provide armor-and-clothing (not weapon-display) mannequins. Those from the upstairs vendor are broken, but the downstairs vendor's are fully functional.

Creatures

This section is for added and functionally modified creatures. As the paucity of this section indicates, not many creature mods have been tested.

For creatures only re-skinned, see the Meshes and textures section. For changes to the frequency or locations of creatures, see the Spawning section. For changes to creature combat behavior or stats, see the Combat and damage section.

• Dremora
  • Ranked Dremora 3.1 by Neoptolemus – Fully functional, and a stunning improvement. Highly recommended. These are some of the best looking people in the game, incredibly detailed, and Better Bodies-based. (I almost feel bad fighting them, and "invited" a bunch of them to populate a player home I don't use, by spawning them in there with PlaceAtPC, then StopCombat and SetFight,0, just so I can admire the work that went into them.) This does way more than appearance improvement: It adds males and females of the seven ranks of Dremora in TES lore – from Churl to Valkynaz – in place of randomly encountered Dremora (level 9) and Dremora Lords (level 10), though you'll still encounter the vanilla ones as summoned and special creatures. The ranked Dremora range in level from 6 to 40, providing much more of a challenge; four of the seven are more powerful than the vanilla Dremora Lord. Their weapon loot has also been nerfed; they no longer have Daedric, but Dremora weapons, identical in weight and appearance, with slightly less power, and about 1/10 the value. This addresses the "all I have to do is loot Daedric shrines for a few days and I'll never care about gold again" problem (especially if you are using the buy-and-sell-back exploit to raise the amount of money available from Creeper and Mudcrab Merchant). It's still great loot, though. Another plus is that they're distinct in other ways - they have different armor/clothing (no, you don't get it as loot), and they have different attacks, as some are bow users and some spellcasters. Superb variety. This approach should be taken with other monsters of various sorts, like undead. Because it replaces the random Dremora entirely, it is not compatible with (or, rather, just undoes) mods that affect those. The only improvement I would make to them is a bit more contrast; they have very elaborate skins, but the details are hard to make out (other than the glowing bits).
  • Unique Dremora a.k.a. Dremora Replacer 1.0 by Psymoniser (a.k.a. Psymon a.k.a. Psy), et al. – Installed, and seem to remember it working, but most of what it does is obviated by Ranked Dremora. It replaces the vanilla Dremora with ones using Reavance's Better Daedric Armor textures as well as bodies from one of the player Dremora races, PC Dremora by The Dremora Team & Militades. Includes patches to instead use armor textures from GhostNull's mod or Darknut's. Another thing it does is give the several special, unique Dremora in the game their own individual appearance. This aspect of the mod may still be functional with Ranked Dremora installed.
    • Update: 2.0 is available, under the Dremora Replacer name, from MW.ModHistory.com.

• Wildlife and farm animals:
  • Cait's Critters Unleashed by Hoghead the Horrible and Cait (Sith) – Working so far, including audio and their limited AI. They are non-hostile unless you attack them first. 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. Some also respawn, and can be attacked without bounty or other consequence, and thus can be used as Marksmanship, Destruction, etc., practice, if you're mean-spirited. But many do not respawn. Note: If you want to try Wilderness (latest version seems to be Wilderness (Lite) Fixed 2.0, by The Puma Man and proletarian871), it incorporates Cait's Critters Unleashed and Water Nymphs and Other Creatures by TheLys, so these should not be run with it.
  • Wolf Pack 1.0 [BM] by hollaajith – Largely malfunctional. The purpose was to "make [each] wolf pack in Solstheim behave as a true pack", with an alpha wolf, and to also have a 20% chance of a Snow Wolf spawning in the pack. That last bit did not appear to work at all. The behavioral change was negative: the wolf pack would attack as a group, and stop attacking if you killed the alpha. The problem (beyond that in itself) is that the wolf pack would never, ever attack again, or do anything. They just sit there in the snow forever. The premise is faulty, anyway; the "alpha dog" model of wolf behavior has been demonstrated to be pseudo-scientific nonsense.
  • I have not tried the various general wildlife mods. Several have known issues with OpenMW; see the Mod status page.

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.

• Seyda Neen Complete 2.5 by GS a.k.a. Gianluca, et al. – A merged compilation of mods to the locality, it seems to be almost fully 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 new assortment of ship transport 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, not very-slow-travel through landscape they've already explored in previous play-throughs. 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 in this mod. By itself, this mod works fine. The slaves available in the new slave market here, which are supposed to be usable as companions, cannot be used this way; their inventory sharing does not work, even with Universal Companion Share installed. 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, no longer desperately selling silverware, one of the houses has a small "secret" cave full of semi-tough baddies for that level range. 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. There's more merchants, more NPCs and their homes, and a swamp-sinking house that has a quest, with a potent reward if you can handle some Daedra opponents. (The quest has you give that item up, but you can do it very late in your game when you no longer want it. Some might consider it over-powered and give it up earlier.) Bug: New ropes added around a small swamp pool interfere with Fargoth's movement in the Fargoth's Hiding Place quest (I can't believe they didn't test that). These ropes should be removed with the console's Disable command early in the game. Mid-to-high-level players will appreciate the additional merchants added to the town.
  • Seyda Neen BB Market 1.3 by GS a.k.a. Gianluca, et al. – This add-on for the above appears fully functional, though trivial (just some clothing vendors, and not all of them 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 Chainmail Dress by Shan (which did work stand-alone). There are four such vendors in one spot combined into one add-on 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. But, their enchantability is poor. It is possible this mod will work without SNC itself, since all it does is add some vendors outside.
    • Chainmail Dress by Shan – Compatible as a stand-alone if you don't want Seyda Neen BB Market which includes it.
• 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 Seyda Neen Complete, above.
• Seyda Neen Expanded, Remix by JamesW (a.k.a. JW) and Rochndil – Not tested yet. In my next game, I'm going to try replacing Seyda Neen Complete with this one; it looks much more evocative and less "cram it all in there". S'Neen is supposed to be a port town, so it should have actual ships and more people and services in it, but converting it into a nascent city was a bit much.
• Bitter Coast Compilation 1.0 by Samurai – Not tested (yet?) – Same idea as SNC, above, but combined elements of over 130 mods all over (mostly) the Bitter Coast and Seyda Neen region. Will obviously not be compatible with most other mods of this area. It is vast and ambitious, and the 1.0 version number gives me pause; it isn't plausible that this had zero bugs. There may also be MSWE other such dependencies, though I would expect most of it to work.
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB] by Gorg, Canadian Ice, and Jeremy, with BE Fixes (a.k.a. Texture Fix - Balmora Expansion) by Slarti a.k.a Sartibartfast – Another big, merged compilation of locality mods, this one makes more sense than Seyda Neen Complete, since Balmora is supposed to be one of Vvardenfell's major cities. Almost everything is 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, which corrects numerous problems, and also upgrades several of the incorporated vendor mods to later, better versions. I also did not try some third party's Balmora Expansion Overhaul 1.5, because it fixes fewer problems than Slarti's patch did. As with other such mega-mods, some of what BE adds is basically trivial though arguably adds realism (bathhouse, hospital, brothel, museum, brewery, restaurant) and some of it may be over-powered for newbies (not free, just available in shops), but overall it makes Morrowind seem more like a real place with people doing stuff and with a vibrant economy. Slarti has also released Balmora Expansion Lite 1.0, a scaled-back version, but I have not tested 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 (integrated into BE) but forgot to normalize the volume, and Slarti's patch didn't fix it. I almost broke my headphones ripping them off my head, then immediately went looking for a patch like this. 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 more common 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 Odai Plateau raises 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. The general pattern seems to be that mods that add stuff to Balmora should mostly be loaded before BE, since several of them are over-inclusive of landscape resources which will overwrite the hillside changes of BE.
  • BE includes the magnum opus Carnithus's Armamentarium integrated with Dark Club and some similar mods, into an underground, monster-laden, gothy vampire gush (which can only be entered at night, at least through the obvious entrance), with a high-end outfit/armor shop, and nightclub you can frequent, plus a tough quest that can earn you a small player home down there. This is hardly TES lore, but if you're already playing goth and vamp 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, and fight like hell to get to it every time you go. Its quest is good preparatory training for the Goblin quest under Mournhold in the Tribunal expansion. For details about CA, see its entry in the Merchants and items section.
  • BE provides some other weapons and armor vendors (originally from other mods) with high-end gear, and they are very expensive. I objected to either the damage-to-weight ratio or too-high enchantability of some items and just sold them off without using them.
  • BE also includes an easily earnable, non-excessive home mod already (talk to the Balmora Overseer for the quest, and you may have to have a high enough Reputation to get it), 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. Valuable loot relating to it appears randomly in loot containers, though fortunately rarely.
  • See also The Regulars, above, for an issue that affects many mods and is clearly an OpenMW bug.
  • I've read that BE has one alleged cheat in it, the availability of a Corprus cure spell or item somewhere (it is not the only mod to provide one; Kat's Kastle does, too). This will just have to be ignored if you object; 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. This Corprus thing is of no consequence; the scripted disease you catch, and its quest-scripted cure, is a required part of the Main Quest. There is only one possible other way to get Corprus (searching a particular corpse repeatedly), and that version is not curable and breaks the Main Quest, so having the BE option available to deal with that is actually a plus.
  • Mods incorporated into BE that should not be individually added to your game, or conflicts will result: Balmora Manor, Balmora Zoo, Balmora Bathouse, Balmora Museum, Morrowind Abodes: Your Balmora Residence, Dave's Furniture Store, Lysandrus, Quivers and Fletching Kit, Wyr's Jewelers, Carry Your Bedrolls, DEJ's Pocket Watch, Magic Backpacks, Nyagetan, Healers, WeaponPack2, ThievesGarb (Black Clothing), Dark Club, Ranger Robe, Heremod's Balmora Waterfall, and Sheikizza's Aedric Armour Collection & Daedric Armour Collection. I've found that some other mods that make use of Sheikizza armor resources seem to work fine; you just end up with different sets of Aedric or whatever with different IDs and stats.
  • Mods incorporated only in part into BE, which can also be added to your game in their original form: Dongle's Musical Instruments; LadyE's Display Cases, Spider Webs, and Jewelers Sign; Gorg's Flowing Capes; Forgotten Longbow Pack; Silgrad Tower; House of Mannequins; Tenience's Rare Items; Particle Weapon Merchant; Pack Animal Merchant; Lovemod; Heavenly Pleasures; Legolas Gear; The Regulars (but it does not work properly in OpenMW), Carnithus' Armamentarium and its add-ons (though there would be no point – would create a duplicate shop and NPCs in Mournhold or Molag Amur); LichLair; Darkstone Manor; Britney's Secret.
  • House mod compatibility: Each of the mods below has an entry in the Player homes and businesses section if I tested it beyond BE compatibility; the info here is just about how it behaves with BE.
    • Domehome by Grumpy and Emma (see both above, for its companions, and below, as a house mod) – Only partially workable with BE; 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 – requires the BE-compatible variant, and should load before BE. It must load after Domehome if using both, and after the optional Balmora Marketplace, but before Odai Boat Service if that one is also used.
    • Clean the Apartment by Grumpy – This apartment above Caius Cosades's house introduces issues. 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. The BE problem might be fixable by loading CtA before BE. CtA will also conflict with various other house mods that affect Cosades's home, of course (e.g. Caius Cosades Better). 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. Plus, every single permanent corpse in the game is also infinite storage, so who cares?
    • Caius Cosades Better 2.0 by Spirited Treasure – I can tell just by looking at it that will will conflict with BE, because it adds an apartment to the east of Cosades's house, and this will collide with the slope that supports BE's hillside shops. It is vaguely possible that this could be make to work, with some visual defects, by toying with load order, but I'm not going to try it until maybe next game.
    • Concept Exterior Abode – Conflicts with BE, and seems to be alpha-ware.
    • Balmora Balcony House – Did load and appeared to work, but I did not test it extensively due to conflict with Domehome.
    • Castle Nerevar v2.0 by Chick & Arielle – Conflicts with BE massively. Not lore-friendly anyway (Nerevar was a Dunmer hero, so would not have built an Imperial-architecture castle). Mod not tested by itself with OpenMW yet.
  • Merchant mod compatibility: Each of the mods below has an entry in the Merchants and items section if I tested it beyond BE compatibility; the info here is just about how it behaves with BE.
    • The useful and practical Adul's Arsenal and more silly Adul's Arcane Armature (using the same door) are compatible, though the shack entrance looks out-of-place in a Hlaalu-architecture milieu.
    • 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.
    • Balmora Marketplace a.k.a. Marketplace Balmora 1.0 by Spirithawke – Compatible if loaded before BE. Must also load before some other mods in this area including Balmora River House, or will result in landscape fractures (it over-includes resources that are not very close to the market itself and should be cleaned of them by a modder with the right tools to do that).
    • Balmora Trader Market 1.7 by NinjaOcean is compatible (including with Balmora Marketplace).
    • Balmora Market 1.22 by ivegotabettername a.k.a cameronvsdwayne – Incompatible, as it puts vendor stalls exactly where BE merchant shops are.
    • Balmora Grocery – Not compatible with BE in tests so far. If you're a Necessities of Morrowind user, 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. However, I suspect it is overlapping buildings.
    • Heaven's Lookout Updated – Will have its access ring go missing if BE is installed, since the tower in which it would be found is changed. The shop can still be accessed by using Console to get to its cell, or to give yourself the teleport ring (player->AddItem,"Andyguy_Ring",1).
  • Bug: The potted plant seller added by the furniture mod incorporated into BE has no inventory, though his counterpart in Hla Oad does.
  • Feature: The furniture shop provided by an optional add-on is about the best available. See entry in Furniture section for details.

Major quest mods

Some ambitious mods provide expansive quests, sometimes with new types of creatures, their own cutscenes, etc. Some work, some do not. I have not tested many of them (though more than I've done write-ups about yet).

• Grandmaster of Hlaalu 1.3 by Lady Galadriel – Not tested yet. Ambitious overhaul of the entire House Hlaalu experience, including: vastly expanded Rethan Manor stronghold, more NPCs, new quests, your own entry in the Yellow Book, position on the House Council, mining opportunities, a new colony, improved vanilla companion Fjorgeir, new bow artifact, and much more. This clearly needs to be installed from the start of a game, or at least before joining House Hlaalu. There is a Necessities of Morrowind patch for it. It will conflict with most other Rethan Manor mods, obviously, but adds so much to it you probably wouldn't want them.
• 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. Try this mod alone, since the problem I had could be caused by conflict with another mod.
• 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. To try it (and debug it if necessary), use a Windows machine (or VM) to run a cleaning tool on this and see if it will load. I'm skeptical it is compatible with Balmora Expansion, though it will be great it if is, because it looks genuinely interesting.
• Fishing Academy 2.54 – At least partial failure. This adds an island to the west where you can do all kinds of fishing quests and earn your own ship. I found the NPC who takes you to the island, and he says he only takes people to the island, and then refuses to take you to the island and just stands there. So, I uninstalled it, as broken. I did not test whether swimming or Water Walking out there would allow one to do this stuff, as I wasn't terribly interested in fishing, and was already testing Private Mobile Base, so didn't need the ship.

New places and minor quest mods

• 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. Some of the buildings overlap a big tent structure added by the same mod. Has a very alpha-test feel to it, though I would guess that these problems did not show up in the vanilla game engine or it would not have been released. The concept is reasonable, it just needs work, both to be functional and to be integrated into the milieu (e.g., some quests involving the politics of the Altmer establishing a colony on Vvardenfell that is neither an Imperial nor Great House endeavor). Some of these issues might actually be the fault of the "Extras" add-on included with 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. It has lots of Scottish-inspired stuff that I want to try out (more kilts!). While it includes a house mod, it seems to be more than tha'.
• Morrowind Public Library – Works fine, including its "most wanted books" quests, and its little café with drinks that are actually useful potions. Many will find the sheer number of Skill Books in here to be a huge cheat. My solution: pretend they're not there.
• Balmora Waterfall by Heremod Productions. Working and fun for somewhat low-level characters. Expect to have to retreat and come back if you are not armed with a large stockpile of Restore Health potions (and to come back multiple times to mine all the Raw Ebony, which is heavy). Took me all day to beat this the first time I played it; the enemies are not varied, but numerous and attack you in a large group when you're deep in here. (Tip: If you keep healing, and periodically leave to repair, or bring extra armor for when yours breaks, you can rapidly train up an armor skill, even all of them one after another, including Block, by standing there and not fighting back – the sheer number of hungry critters results in you being hit again and again in rapid succession.) If you are high-level, expect to be bored and to kill all enemies and be done with the whole thing in half an hour or less. Note: This mod is integrated into several others, including Balmora Expansion (see above) and Sgaillach Estate; do not install it separately with them. This will also, obviously, conflict with any of the several 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 Heremod waterfall. This is probably the only way to get the amount of Raw Ebony required to have the Crafters Hall armorer in Mournhold make some Ebony armor pieces for you, while you are still low enough level to a) bother with this much desperate ore-hauling labor, and b) actually need to have Ebony armor made, at high prices, instead of taking it for free off your victims. (You should also plunder the Vassir-Didanat Cave of its ebony before reporting its location to Dram Bero for a Daedric weapon reward. Maybe there's another Ebony mine sitting around without guards and I haven't found it yet?) Be able to levitate before going into the place behind the waterfall, or there's a well you can get trapped in here. It's also convenient in the final area after the big fight. As just a waterfall, it's a nice visual facelift for the area. It also provides some extra instances of Charles the Plant and its Meteor Slime ingredient (a variant of Scrib Jelly that can be stacked with it in potion-making).
• The Old Unused Well of Pelagiad – Works fine. Another fun little dungeon crawl for lower-level characters, and voted into the Hall of Fame at one of the mod sites. Provides some reasonable loot for significant work by the character, and is fairly evocative for a cave. I didn't get to this until I was around Level 20, and it was then way too easy; the average smuggler/bandit cave is harder at this level range. I would say do this as soon as you can handle all the caves and tombs around Seyda Neen.
• The Ebony Blade 1.02 by Astion – Mostly working properly. Tremendous fun for high-level characters (the monsters are seriously beefed-up versions of stock creatures). Has a Dwemer door lock puzzle I never could figure out, and used a console cheat to bypass; I'm not sure if the quest is broken, or I'm just stupid. Another puzzle (a rockslide-blocked entrance) is more obvious when you find a certain scroll, that only works at that location. The titular weapon is a booby prize: while it looks nice and does some serious base damage, it has almost no enchantability. Do this quest just for the fun and the challenge, after you've done the Main Quest and Tribunal, but probably before Bloodmoon (which has even tougher baddies in Hircine's Hunt). You need to have a reputation of at least 25 or so, or the quest-giver NPC in the tavern in Caldera will not tell you were to go. You might find it anyway, if you explore northern islands a lot. Has a minor bug I've seen happen elsewhere a few times in OpenMW: when you "pick" Raw Ebony in here, its container rock doubles in size, and can even trap you with clipping. Fix it by clicking on the affected rock in the console and doing SetScale,1.0 or SetScale,0.5. PS: You get to fight a manifestation of Boethiah!
• Of Justice and Innocence 1.31 by Darkelfguy – Working. Adds a good medium-level side quest to Dagon Fel, to rescue a woman's brother taken by smugglers. This is a well-written, bittersweet story, and you have the option to end it like a Shakespearean tragedy. It's a nice break from all the cheerfulness-and-light rescue quests provided by the vanilla game. If you find you can't get into the final room, this is not a bug; it means there's dialogue you've not had with the right woman in Dagon Fel yet.

New major landmasses

• Tamriel Rebuilt 16.12 [TB+BM] by the Tamriel Rebuilt Team ^A F N  - Testing. In general, it appears functional so far, but most quests have not been tested yet. TR is the largest landmass mod of all for Morrowind. Starting east of the vanilla Telvanni territory, this massive project has been adding the continental lands of Morrowind, around the island of Vvardenfell, complete with cities, NPCs, guilds, quests, and the whole lot. Note that various mods come with (or have separately available) compatibility patches for TR. Many mods that add landmasses (usually islands) directly conflict with TR; MS Windows users can use a tool to move these landmasses elsewhere on the map. If you've done this successfully, please see if you can produce a .esp or .omwaddon patch others can use for the mod in question. Note: The current release version is a combination of the three previous separately available ones (referred to by various names like "Map 1" through "Map 3", or more specifically "Telvannis", "Antediluvian Secrets", and "Sacred East"). If you have an old version of those installed, you have to remove them and replace them with the new files; this will likely require staring a new game. TR now uses a new pair of resource .BSA files, shared with the Project: Tamriel team.
  • Installation: The installation instructions in the ReadMe are for the original Bethesda engine. For OpenMW:
    1. Install Tamriel Data 3.0 ^A N , e.g. to a directory called Tamriel_Data in your mods folder. Use the high-resolution not vanilla-resolution version; the OpenMW patch is only for the former.
    2. Download the OpenMW patch ^N ; click "Download (Manual)" at NexusMods for a list of available files, including the patch. Extract its TD-Compat folder to Tamriel_Data (it is just meshes and textures, without a .esp file).
    3. Next, unpack Tamriel Rebuilt itself. You should now have two mod directories, for TD and TR, plus a patch directory inside the one for TD. It is important that the patch files load after the original TD files.
    4. Add these three directories' paths with data="..." lines in openmw.cfg, right after the line for your Morrowind/Data Files directory, one per line, and in this order: data="/your/path/Tamriel_Data", data="/your/path/Tamriel_Data/TD-Compat", data="/your/path/TamrielRebuilt_16-12".
    5. Near the top of openmw.cfg, add lines for the TD .BSA files: fallback-archive=PT_Data.bsa and fallback-archive=TR_Data.bsa on separate lines; these come immediately after the similar entires for Morrowind.bsa, Tribunal.bsa, and Bloodmoon.bsa.
    6. Download and unpack the bug-fix patch for TR 16.12 ^A ; see below for details. This is a TR_Mainland_1612Patch.ESP file that goes in your TamrielRebuilt_16-12 directory.
    7. You can manually add entries near the bottom for content=Tamriel_Data.esm, content=TR_Mainland.esm, and (if you are using them) content=TR_Preview.esp, content=TR_Travels.esp (both included), and content=TR_Mainland_1612Patch.ESP (downloaded separately). Alternatively, you can enable them in the OpenMW Data Files menu, then drag-and-drop them into this load order, after the base Bethesda game files.
    8. Add any other mods after these, especially if they include TR patches.
  • TR_Preview.esp – Not recommended. This is an included preview of lands (mostly to the south and southwest of Vvardenfell) that are still in alpha and beta development. Mostly it is wilderness punctuated by towns and buildings with a lot of stuff in them, but few or no NPCs, thus no quests. Parts of it are severely broken, e.g. landscape fractures, etc. Due to the amount of unowned, unguarded stuff, TR_Preview.esp is basically also the biggest cheat mod ever; there's probably at least 1 mil septims worth of goods laying around free for the taking. Not cool. This is surely because the NPCs haven't been added yet, but the obvious solution would have been to include a dummy NPC, and make all unassigned town/city goods owned by that pseudo-person by default until set to someone more specific, and to spawn generic guards to prevent looting the entire region. If you want to explore this, you may want to add this mod later, or just avoid the unfinished areas (i.e., any place that should be populated but is empty) until you are high enough level and rich enough that stealing piles of soul gems and silver weapons and such is of no interest to you.
  • TR_Travels.esp – Included add-on that provides various fast travel options between Vvardenfell and the mainland, including guild guides and ships. This more or less requires TR_Preview.esp; locations within it are included, and if it is not loaded, fast travel will take you to some non-existent places and just dump you in an expanse of water or a void. At best, you will have to learn and remember which locations are broken without TR_Preview.esp. May conflict with mods of Seyda Neen if they change its dock (the mod puts a fast travel NPC on it). Glitch: Caused an issue with the Seyda Neen prison ship (the one you arrive on and which later is removed); its deck crates remained, floating in the air near the dock, after the ship was removed. Removing the mod did not fix the problem, though starting a new game without, then adding the mod after character generation, prevented the problem. Another solution would be to use Disable in the console to remove the offending "hover containers".
  • TR_Mainland_1612Patch.ESP ^A – A separate download, this is a between-releases bug-fixing patch. Only needed until 16.13 (or 17.0, or whatever the next release is). This must load after both TR_Mainland.esm and (if present) TR_Preview.esp, and possibly after TR_Travels.esp. Loading it before TR_Preview.esp will cause a landscape fracture hundreds of game miles long, an entire town with no ground, and other problems. To test if yours is working right, go to Seyda Neen and, with TR_Travels.esp installed, take a ship from there to Teyn (or swim it if you don't have that add-on). If Teyn looks sane, all should be well. If Teyn is a bunch of floating buildings with no ground, and if your world map shows what looks like fractured and overlapping coastlines between Vvardenfell and continental Morrowind, your installation is hosed and you have to start over.
  • Tamriel Rebuilt Census and Excise Travel Links 1.0 by The Crustacean – Not compatible. This is a for an old version of TR, and has a dependency on a .esm file that no longer exists. Conflicts anyway with the official Siege at Firemoth expansion (the Tamriel travel ship overlaps and mostly engulfs the Firemoth ship).
  • Tamriel Rebuilt Travel 1.3 by Ozrabl98 – Not compatible. This is a for an old version of TR, and has a dependency on a .esm file that no longer exists.
• Project: Tamriel a.k.a. P:T – This not a mod release, but a community modding project similar to (and directly cooperating with) the Tamriel Rebuilt Team. Its mods are listed separately below.
• Skyrim: Home of the Nords a.k.a. SHotN ^N  by Project: Tamriel – Testing; generally functional so far. Requires and must load after Tamriel Data (see Tamriel Rebuilt, above, for TD instructions). Adds 200+ exterior cells, 150+ interiors, a large city, new NPCs and quests. Skyrim is due west of Vvardenfell, beyond a thin strip of continental Morrowind added by Tramriel Rebuilt. Get there via guide teleport in the Skyrim Mission in Ebonheart. Minor glitches: a few missing meshes and textures (a helm that makes your head disappear, some hookahs with blank textures). Probably too much stuff is unowned, but it's mostly clutter and low-end ingredients. Major glitch: if you follow pointers and try to join the local Thieves Guild, you're asked if you're serious, then nothing happens. Landscape looks great, quite different from but arguably better than Solstheim, with some of the same wildlife, and some mod-exclusives. New armor and weapons, clothing, books, misc. items. Able to start at least one quest in testing so far.
  • Sky_main_Grass.esp – Do not use in OpenMW; it is known to be malfunctional with this engine, though SHotN otherwise works better in OpenMW than in Bethesda's engine.
• Province: Cyrodiil a.k.a. P:C ^N  by Project: Tamriel – Testing. Working so far, but no quests tested yet. Requires and must load after Tamriel Data (see Tamriel Rebuilt, above, for TD instructions). Despite its name, this focuses on Stirk, an island port between Cyrodiil, Hammerfell, Valenwood and Summerset, though there does appear to be a mainland segment presumably for Cyrodiil. Adds 80+ exterior cells, 60+ interiors, dozens of NPCs, 4 major quests. This is very far southwest of Morrowind (far side of the continent).
  • PC_Stirk_Grass.ESP – Do not use in OpenMW; it is known to be malfunctional with this engine, though P:C otherwise works better in OpenMW than in Bethesda's engine.
  • Stirk Boat Ferry for Province Cyrodiil (a.k.a. Stirk Ferry or Stirk Boat) 1.0 ^N  by Glisp – Incompatible. This is for an old version of P:C, and has dependencies on old .ESM files that no longer exist. Trying to run OpenMW with this Seyda Neen to Stirk fast travel mod installed will cause the app to crash while trying to load the game. P:C provides fast travel already, from and back to the Ebonheart docks.

Player homes and businesses

Some of these also include service NPCs, quests, etc.; if it's primarily a house or business mod, it goes in this section. It can also have an entry in another section if other things it provides are significant.

Note that any "new house" mod will conflict with another mod that puts something in the same spot; you'll have to pick which one to use. A mod may also conflict with other mods in the general area if one or both of them affects landscape in the area.

Added homes

This subsection is for mod-added player domiciles that are new or replacement buildings, caves, treehouses, floating homes, whatever. If it affects an outdoor cell, it goes here, unless if fits a subcategory below better.

• Balmora River House by Cali a.k.a Calislahn – Fully functional, including the alchemy sorter (official ingredients only). This is a very practical and compact user home base for a player who is not a hoarder. Its location makes it convenient for all new to mid-level players; after Cosades is out of the picture, and especially if you are Redoran or Telvanni, you may wish to relocate. Compatible with Balmora Expansion if the correct variant ESP is loaded and in the right order (see details in the BE compatibility notes in the Major overhauls of vanilla places section, above). The only issue with it is that its interior is unreasonably bright, which you can fix by reducing the Ambient stat in its cell by about 1/3, in OpenMW-CS, and saving that change into a .OMWAddon mini-mod you load after the house mod. This house is all one cell. If you use the Odai Boat Service travel mod, it must load after this house mod, or a landscape fracture will result. If you also use Canoe Travel, then BRH will mostly bury the closest canoe, but it actually remains accessible.
• 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 later 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, though most of it is Velothi and is reasonable to be in this location. It's conceptually interesting, but someone needs to re-do it, and in a different place on the map, outside of town. It takes too long to get from the front door to the usable interior, for one thing. Its 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. Domehome cannot be used with Balmora Balcony House.
• Kahleigh's Retreat 2.0 by kwshipman – 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 using and affects the same general ground area around Caldera (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 (I used stone blocks from a house mod to build steps making it easier to use the ramp, especially for companions; pillows would also work, though unrealistically). This multi-cell home is very nice and conveniently located, but is full of too much free stuff for new characters (after about level 5, it won't matter, since you're not desperate to sell your own plates). 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 (animated display cases take up most of the front room, etc.), then use a furniture mod to set it up as you prefer, paying as you go for plausible roleplay. Definitely invest in lighting, as half of the rooms are too dim (if you give a companion a torch, they'll actually equip it in here, except in the front room). You can also fix this by turning up the Ambient stat in each of its cells with OpenMW-CS, and saving these changes into a .OMWAddon mini-mod you load after the house mod. Adding armor mannequins helps a lot. Its alchemy sorter is good but imperfect. It recognizes some mod-added ingredients and adds them to an "Other" jar, but fails to recognize a few (e.g. the pearl variants added by Pearls Enhanced), and fails to sort some official ingredients, like Amethyst, Opal, and Sapphire. My main gripe with this mod is inefficient use of space, but if I do my own house mod it will be an variant of this one, I like it that much.
• 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 Expansion or anything similar are very low.
• Bob's Armory (I) a.k.a. Bob the Visigoth's Armory by Mr. Dave (Bob's Armory II is a shop; see below for it and for the original BA as clothing/armor mod) – Works fine as a basic house mod (whether you want the included clothes/armor or not). Two third-party add-ons for it as a home, Alchemy Lab for Bobs Armory and Shelves for Bob's Armory, did not work. I used the version of BA uploaded to Nexus Mods in 2016 with additional textures and such by a third party. Perhaps the house mod add-ons work in OpenMW with Mr. Dave's original (which is no longer downloadable from anywhere, so I have no way to test that). It's obviously a cheat to just dig into these free wares. The idea is to use them as visual replacements for equivalent items you have already earned in-game. As a player home, you'll need a furniture mod, because the place is bare. Location-wise, it's very close to Seyda Neen, so it's convenient-ish if you like that area, and unlikely to conflict with any direct mods of that town. The gear provided is all rather high-end as protection, so it's too much for new characters. Yet it all has very low enchantability, making it of no use to high-level ones. Someone badly needs to re-do this. There is a mod with a hard-to-find "magical" shop that sells these items instead, and has modeling mannequins, but it did not adjust any item stats. Honestly, later clothing and armor work by other modders is superior in most respects, whether you are after practical and menacing (see Carnithus' Armamentarium, for example) or want something that looks like Victoria's Secret and Playboy are throwing a Morrowind party (see Kat's Kastle for more than you can handle).
• Buy a House Overhauled by Giggityninja and LegoManIAm94 – Not working. You can attempt to buy a house, but do not get the key. I did not try forcing open the lock.
• The Tall House of Balmora a.k.a. The Tower 1.0 – Serious FAIL; half of it was upside-down! Disappointing, since it had useful service staff, and was in a convenient place.
• Sgailleach Estate 2.01 + update – Conflicted with Balmora Expansion so I stopped testing it. I was tempted to keep its staff and move them, by leading them out then disabling the entire structure with the console, but it's screwed up badly enough I don't trust having it installed at all. Its readme also says you have to load it before alchemy-related mods for some reason.
• Balmora Balcony House – Seemed to work, but may conflict with Balmora Expansion. I didn't use it beyond a quick test. It also blocks the door to Domehome.
• Concept Exterior Abode – Conflicted badly with Balmora Expansion, so I gave up on it. Seems to be alpha-ware, but may actually be usable in a game that doesn't have BE. The idea was to build a player home using only external cells.
• Callenwald – Seemed to conflict with Balmora Expansion, so I gave up on it. Might work fine in a game without BE.
• Balmora Underground 2.0 – Lots of dirty references, and seems a bit cheaty. But the quests might be fun. I didn't run with this one, just tested that it would load.
• Clean the Apartment by Grumpy – Functional apartment above Caius Cosades's house, but conflicts trivially with Balmora Expansion (does weird stuff to a neighboring house and guard tower). Also includes an infinite closet, is quite small, and unusually dark (get a lot of candles or other lights). Still, useful for brand-new characters just starting the Main Quest. Will, obviously, conflict with most other Cosades house mods. The closet is not a big deal; every permanent corpse in the game is infinite storage, including that of Ralen Hlaalo in the vanilla player home Hlaalo Manor, just across the river.
• Jakey Keep 0.9 – It works, but requires a large stack of .ESP files and is more hassle than it's worth.
• Little House on the Rocks 1.0 by darkelf. Appears to be fully functional, including with Balmora Expansion. I did not test this with various other mods; the BE load order is very particular with Balmora River House and the Odai Boat Service travel mod that is close to the Little House, so I suspect there could be issues to resolve. Is not compatible with Balmora Academy of Stripology (same location).
• Mori Mountain Estate 2.01 – Got it to load, but it may have conflicts with other house mods in the area and possibly with Balmora Expansion in general. The sorting librarian feature in this is worth porting to other mods. I don't recall having a use for this mod otherwise. I think this is the one that has an excessive number of armor mannequins so you can collect every armor set in the game (every variant of Bonemold, etc.), but I would have to look again to be sure.
• Morrowind Abodes – Appear to work, but I did not visit all of them, and removed it, since I either already have or don't need home bases in the affected areas, and the ones I did check out were not that interesting. The one in Vivec was very pretty but not terribly useful, since there are already multiple free places to live in Vivec. Each location is a separate .ESP file, and the Your Balmora Residence one is already integrated into Balmora Expansion so should not be added at the same time.

Movable or portable homes

This subsection is for non-stationary airships, boats, submarines, "pocket homes", and other mobile domiciles.

• Private Mobile Base 4.2 [TB+BM] by henkbein a.k.a. HB – Functional, and there are mods that improve it. The PMB is basically an adaptation of Redoran architecture to Dwemer airship technology, to create a floating, movable mansion. This mod is pretty much a total work of art. Purists will object to the fast travel it provides, but for repeat players who don't need an "explore slowly in wonder" phase again, it's a great boon to saving realtime gaming time. The main quibble I have is its sprawling lack of navigability; it's a bit of a maze, and I would fix that with more teleport doors between sections, or a total redesign with a central hub room, like the Redoran Council Chambers. If your player home requires as much walking as a city the size of Suran, something needs to change. Aside from that, and the pointlessness of the micro-room between its bottom door and its control room, I love it. However, I'm having severe problems with missing floors and walls in Mournhold, and guess what begins the game anchored right next to one of the affected buildings? This mod is presently the prime suspect. If you use companion mods, you will need the first add-on mentioned below.
  • PMB Addon Transport 1.1 by Nemo – Essential if you want to use the PMB with companions. This add-on uses standard teleportation (with many more locations), and replaces the original mod's limited teleport room with a new one, with a teleport wall that is really just a teleport door. The original mod's method was an instant-teleportation thing that was compatible with very few companions. This mod also upgrades the PMB teleport ring to allow you (alone) to teleport into more of the PMB's rooms, and also to act as a remote control to move the PMB (which must be done from an interior cell, including the PMB itself). If you only want the upgraded room or the upgraded ring, these also exist as separate mods in an earlier version, but I cannot vouch for them.
  • Additional tip about companions: Be warned that the docking bay "airlock" you enter through at the bottom is very small; only try to take one companion through at a time or you may have problems (and may still find it difficult with just one – try jumping before activating the ladder to get to the control room, and failing that, try turning on TCL momentarily in the Console and moving up). It is also one-way for many if not most companions, which means that the PMB Addon Transport mod (above) is more important than it sounds: it's easy to get a companion into this home, but hard to get them out without it. The hatch on the top of the PMB has this problem, too.
  • Other add-on mods by Nemo (which usually come in a single archive) are of less benefit. PMB Inscription Station (scroll-making) is fiddly and may or may not work. PMB Addon AlchemySorter does not work in OpenMW; the lack of any working alchemy sorter for this mod is probably a fatal flaw for anyone who uses alchemy a lot. PMB Addon Supply, for duplicating alchemy ingredients, is patently a cheat. PMB Remote Storage (for remotely accessing chests onboard the PMB) is also fiddly and also cheaty.
  • PMB Docking Bay a.k.a. PMB Bigger Docking Bay by an anonymous author – Works but does not do what its name suggests, which is unfortunate, for reasons already explained above. Rather than making the docking bay (a vertical tube with only room for one without clipping) any larger, it adds a storage chamber off it (turn around and look a little upward).
  • Various add-ons to make the PMB free or cheap are totally unnecessary. The expensiveness of the PMB is mitigated by the fact that its vendor (found in the pub in Caldera, though he moves to the city street later, and eventually disappears after you buy the last relevant item from him) will buy stuff from you, so you can get your money back (on the same day) by selling him spare high-end loot. If you don't have unneeded mega-loot, summon some Golden Saints (you need their souls to power the PMB, anyway) or go to some Daedric shrines and get some gear from Dremora. If you die when you try, you are not yet worthy of the PMB.
  • Cheat mitigation, roleplay sanity: Always go to a new location the usual way. Don't move the PMB itself to anywhere other than a major city, Imperial fort, or your own Great House stronghold. If you hovered this over Skaal Village or an Ashlander camp they would (given better AI) flip out and run for the hills. If you're Redoran and hovered this over a Telvanni or Hlaalu Stronghold, it should be taken as a menacing act of House War. Don't use the PMB's on-board Propylon Chamber for any ancient Dunmer Stronghold for which you don't have the original Propylon Index and which you have not explored and beaten. Between its teleport-out room and teleport-in ring, there is rarely any need to move the PMB at all. Don't move it to Solstheim, since much of the point of Bloodmoon is isolation in a difficult wilderness with few civilized comforts, and only one way in or out to resupply. It also doesn't make sense parked in Mournhold, because Almalexia forbids Levitation – a huge flying building is clearly illegal there. (See general companion notes up top for how to get companions in and out of Mournhold with new Guild Guides provided in another mod.)

Enhancements to vanilla player homes and strongholds

General feature add-ons

• Better Bookshelves in Strongholds – Not sure. I have it loaded, but have not tested it yet. It is for your Great House (Hlaalu, Redoran, Telvanni) stronghold only, and presumably only affects the bookshelves included in the vanilla portion of the manor, though perhaps these can be Console-cloned for the libraries added by other stronghold mods (or for other player homes; the archive also includes modders' resources for adding them to new mods).

Rethan Manor (Hlaalu stronghold, Odai Plateau)

Most of these will not be compatible with Grandmaster of Hlaalu by Lady Galadriel, a massive overhaul of House Hlaalu that adds quests, NPCs, mining, and radically re-done Rethan Manor, with four stages. See entry in Major quest mods section.

• Enhanced Rethan Manor (includes the earlier Rethan Manor Underground and Hlaalu Manor Enhancement) – Works fine.
• Rethan Manor Add-ons by Arjan – Works fine, including with the above, though with a TARDIS effect and some redundancy: the libraries added by each mod would overlap if they were real. The one with tables is better as a banquet hall, and a place to park NPCs, like companions you don't use, "guests" acquired via Command Humanoid, and the stronghold's own staff, if they get in your way.
• Rethan Manor Bunker by Iamthey – Works fine, including with both the above. However, it involves way too much walking down multiple very long corridors to be any practical use. This could be re-modded to eliminate that problem. It also includes Ordinators as guards, which is lore-incorrect (and might even get you attacked, depending on your relationship with Ordinators by that point in the game); they should be Hlaalu Guards. If you want this mod, you can fix this by using the console to Disable these Ordinators and PlaceAtPC some generic Hlaalu replacements.

Indarys Manor (Redoran stronghold, Bal Isra)

[None tested yet.]

Tel Uvirith (Telvanni stronghold, Uvirith's Grave)

[None tested yet.]

Hlaalo Manor, Balmora

• Buyable Hlaalo Manor – Works fine, at least as a House Hlaalu player. This is to buy the Hlaalo Manor, the owner of which was murdered, after his murder is solved. Has nothing to do with the Hlaalu Stronghold at Odai Plateau. As the murder mystery quest is a House Hlaalu one, you may not be able to buy this without being in that Great House, or perhaps the lack of any such quest for non-Hlaalu players means there is no barrier to purchase; not tested yet in that regard.

Velas Manor, Mournhold

• Velas Manor Complete by Veg – Not sure. I have it loaded, but don't know what it added. Due to the Velas Manor bug (you can break in there and interact with the senior Velas without triggering him to fight you, despite the death of his brother), I've been in there and mostly looted it, and didn't notice anything special about the place then, or after I did the fight and earned the house. But I don't recall what it was like without this mod. As I understand it, the mod is a combination of several previous mods to add stuff to this home and make it more useful. The place still seems small and basic to me for a player home, and doesn't have anything obviously added by a mod, like an alchemy sorter.

Player rooms added to vanilla buildings

If it just affects a vanilla indoor cell, it goes in this subsection.

• Balmora Mages Guild Abode – Appears to work properly, including with Balmora Expansion; adds a room for you in the guild.
• Fighters Guild Home – Appears to mostly work properly, including with Balmora Expansion; adds a room for you in the guild. The only problem I encountered is that if you open the door to it and the door to the vanilla barracks room at the same time, the doors overlap, fuse, and become unusable. This has no real consequences, though. If the doors, sticking out into the hall, get in your way too much, simply Disable one or both in the Console.

Player businesses

• Balmora Council Club 1.0 by Princess Stomper – Functional as a dwelling. The scripting (borrowed from Thirsk Meadhall in Bloodmoon) to make it work as a money-generating business is broken in OpenMW (ordered supplies never arrive, so you can never collect profits). Also broken is most of its quest scripting (which you can work around by looking up the Journal and NPC IDs in OpenMW-CS – there's some fun stuff like dealing with an imposter noble trying to assassinate you, and working out weird magical mysteries in the building). The primary value of this mod is companion-friendly travel to/from Mournhold, for which you never need to do anything with the Council Club at all; see entry in Fast travel section, below, for details. Note that once you complete the vanilla "Bloodbath" quest or the Main Quest (either of which trigger this mod into doing what it does with the pub venue), the entire Balmora Council Club is actually replaced by an expanded version, so do not leave stuff in the original pub. Has a few other glitches, like missing textures on some chairs, and unopenable display cases (I've seen these same models in other mods, also unopenable, so it's a fault in the display case resources). Has an interesting feature of windows that you can look out of onto Balmora (this is a fetching illusion; you're actually looking at a large interior cell that's an uninhabited façade of some of the town – clever trick, and more mods should use it). The glitched furni can be disabled with the console and replaced with chairs and cases/shelves from a furni mod.
  • Balmora Council Club Shelves by SwordForTheLord – Working, and adds more shelves and storage chests to Princess Stomper's mod, at the cost of some décor, like tapestries. If you won't use this as a player home, you don't need this add-on.

Merchants and items

See also Balmora Expansion and Seyda Neen Complete, in the Major overhauls of vanilla locations section above; they add lots of shops and gear, among other things. I have so many mods installed it's sometimes hard to be sure which items are added by what mod to what merchant, so I'm having to go back over all the ReadMes to be sure.

Note that any "new shop" mod will conflict with another mod that puts something in the same spot; you'll have to pick which one to use. A mod may also conflict with other mods in the general area if one or both of them affect landscape in the area. Even mods that only add an NPC vendor can sometimes conflict, e.g. by spawning the NPC inside another mod's wall.

General merchants

This subsection is for added merchants who carry vanilla items (and perhaps some mod-added ones).

• Balmora Market 1.22 by ivegotabettername a.k.a 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, on the east hill overlooking the city. These seem to be rather trivial anyway.
• Balmora Marketplace 1.0 by Spirithawke – Working. Adds several outdoor vendors (and stand-around customer NPCs) to the northeast of Balmora, near the river. It makes sense that the low-rent part of town would have poorer merchants. While these do mostly have low-end items, they have more daily money available than they probably should for that scenario, though none of them are cheat-level rich. Some may object to the availability of Dwemer Boots of Flying here, but they are farcically heavy, and the vanilla game provides better Levitation items (including a free amulet from a Telvanni in exchange for nothing but going and asking some Ashlanders about trade goods), so it does not seem to be a big deal. This mod will even work with Balmora Expansion if you get the load order right (covered above). There are several house mods that use the same spot this mod chooses for its fairly large merchant stalls, so of course it won't be compatible with those. If you have framerate problems in Balmora, try using Disable in the Console on the customer NPCs (or Taunt/Frenzy and fight them), since they serve no purpose but local color.
• Balmora Trader Market 1.7 by NinjaOcean – Working (including with Balmora Expansion and seemingly without load-order particularities). Adds some outdoor waterfront vendors in the northeast of town. Does not conflict with Balmora Marketplace, but is right next to it. BTM's merchants are even poorer than those of B. Marketplace. With the two combined, you get a "Balmora Flea Market" effect. Higher-level players will have no interest, but it may be helpful for lower-level ones looking to speed up their ability to sell off low-end loot (especially if you are not availing yourself of Creeper). You can even use these mods early in the game and probably remove them later if you need to free up mod slots, or just don't want the framerate hit in the area any longer. BTM will be compatible with more house mods in this end of town, as its vendors are right at the edge of the water and take very little space compared to those of B. Marketplace.
• Balmora Candle Shop IV by Nathaniel "Wolfzen" Schrader – Seemed to work, except in at least one test, the vendor didn't sell anything, though the shop had stuff in it. If used with Adul's Arsenal or its Arcane addon, their doorways partly conflict, but both remain functional. I ended up removing this, because all these light sources can be found throughout the game already, and frequently, so the shop is kind of pointless. Various furniture mods provide more lighting options like chandeliers and hanging lanterns.

Artifacts

This subsection is for unique, powerful enchanted items (of whatever sort) that are comparable to the artifacts provided by the vanilla game.

For changes to the stats, enchantments, or other properties of vanilla items, see the Combat and damage section. For purely visual changes to the appearance of items, see the Meshes and textures section.

• Loot Well Urned: Ancestral Tomb Loot Enhancement 1.1 by pseunomix ^F  – Has not been directly tested because it's extremely cheaty: it adds a special urn containing a powerful artifact to each of over 120 ancestral tombs. Also adds a random chance of vanilla urns containing more than Grave Dust; see Grave Goods in the Spawning section for a mod that does only that.

Armor and weapons

May also include clothes and misc. items sometimes, and may have quests, but focused on armaments.

Armor mesh conflicts: See "Clothing conflicts" notes in the Clothing section, which also apply to armor, though less frequently.

Stat and enchant values: The most common problems with armor and weapon mods are a) excessive damage-to-weight ratio for weapons, b) excessive protection-to-weight ratio for armor, c) stats that vastly exceed anything provided in the vanilla game at all, and d) excessively high enchantment value. To determine if a mod is cheaty, look up the stats of the closest corresponding base weapon or base armor at UESPwiki. Clothing mods often err in the other direction, giving enchant values that are too low for the price of the item, rendering it mostly useless.

For risqué stuff, see the Racy section (and for the opposite, see Increased modesty). For changes to the stats, enchantments, or other properties of vanilla items, see the Combat and damage section. For purely visual changes to the appearance of items, see the Meshes and textures section.

• Carnithus' Armamentarium – I have not tried the stand-alone version. The version included in Balmora Expansion mostly works, other than it has a non-functional door to a secret bottom room in that shop, below the room you get to via a hatch; nothing interesting is actually going on in the secret room; probably an unfinished bit that was abandoned. The caveats about Bob's Armory II apply here; this is high-end stuff with unbalancing potential if you use it early, much of it is stealable with the same tricks (about half a mil worth), and the custom guards might beat you. There's a Goblin-killing quest (for a modest underground home), but there's a minor bug; Carnithus is said to be who to talk to about engaging in this quest and its reward, but he just responds with the same "Carnithus has offered a bounty" dialogue as the others. The trick is to bring him back the skull of the Goblin leader in the sewers. There are definitely a lot of Goblins in the area, and this is good training for Mournhold. There are also respawning Skeleton Champions, Bonelords, Vampires, Durzogs, etc. One of the vendors sells blood potions that are probably too cheap for the amount of Restore Health and Fortify Strength that they perform. Another potion available in the area gives powerful Telekinesis (if you overcome its Drain Endurance knocking you down), and can be used for looting Carnithus' own shop. A nightclub down here is full of nekkid people (or barely dressed, depending on which Better Bodies you have), has someone who'll make you a Vampire of your chosen clan, and features a cameo appearance by a key NPC. These feature were from the Dark Club mod, and are not part of the stand-alone Carnithus' mod.

  If you want visually distinct alternatives to the stock Daedric gear, and have already earned a bunch of stock stuff, Carnithus' is definitely the shop you want. You can't even get to it unless fairly high-level, since the two entrances in town [both in the merchants part of town added by BE in this version – I have no idea where the entrances are in the stand-alone version of CA] and the secret one out of town are well-guarded inside by the critters that respawn. Lore-friendly? Kinda not. It has a very goth, industrial, and black metal subculture feel to it. Some will object to the shop providing purchasable Daedric and equivalent gear, but as long as your Corprus is already cured, you can get a full set for free in the vanilla game just for beating one Telvanni wizard who isn't very tough.

  If you are not running Balmora Expansion, then you can use either the original CA mod, which is located in Mournhold and requires Tribunal, or the rereleased version (with some additional gear) which is relocated to Vvardenfell.

• Bob's Armory (I) a.k.a. Bob the Visigoth's Armory by Dr. Dave (for this as a house mod, see Player homes and businesses section above) – This legendary mod, which inspired all the other mods like it, is a substantial collection of cost-free, all-female, Better Bodies wearables, mostly lingerie-style though there are some more practical items that combine well with other gear. It's one collection of stuff re-implemented as light, medium, heavy, and non-armor, in four separate high-capacity closets. The clothing-only version was added later (accessible via a magic ladle "key" by the fireplace). Good thing, too, because you can build some really great outfits by layering practical clothing under exposure-oriented armor. One thing I like about BA is that some of the items are kind of "butch", like armored pants (poleyns/quisses); it's not all dresses and chainmail bikinis. Some of the stockings included are about the best you'll find in any mod and end up being something you'll use over and over for different outfits (hint: clone them with player->AddItem,"Item_ID",1 in the console, for companions, since the mod only comes with one of each item). Some of the items, like the attempts at fishnet tops, are visually poor. A Pack Guar mod is useful for moving all the items to another player home, and even with one it will take several trips. Some of the boots included come in both plausible and tiny foot sizes, depending on what you like. None of them are oversized "anime feet"; for that, see Heaven's Lookout (and some vanilla boots, especially High Soft Boots and Orcish).
  • Bob's Armory Icons by Bryss Phoenix – You will definitely want this patch, since the base mod comes with no item icons. These icons are not all that accurate, but they're close enough to help.
• Bob's Armory II – Seems to work fine. Includes lots of historical arms and armor. They are mostly very high-end, designed as alternatives to use after earning Daedric stuff and various artifacts. If you are a noob and use moneymaking tricks to be able to afford this gear early in the game, it will unbalance your play. Also includes some decorative stuff like [non-functional] mortars and trebuchets for your keep. Some just-clothes items are also included, in the same "mostly lingerie" vein as the original Bob's Armory. A potentially fun aspect of BA II is it is populated by almost every guard type in the game, plus some custom guards, and some of them are serious badasses. You can test your mettle without Bounty consequences by using Taunt or a strong Frenzy Humanoid on each in turn and see whether you can beat them. Also, this place is very lootable, by using Telekinesis and Chameleon. I got about half the gear for free this way (and just put it in chests until I got comparable vanilla items). Some of the textures in this are simplistic, and look a bit cartoonish, especially on the helms.
• Armored Robes 1.3 – Working fine. These equip as cuirasses and just look robe-ish. They are nice but low-end visual alternatives to stock gear for Battlemage/Spellsword types, early in the game. (Maybe there are also badass Daedric versions and the like somewhere, but I've not encountered any yet, just robe-looking equivalents of things like Bonemold and Imperial Chain.) The items are uncommon, and you have to look around in many shops to find them, including an outdoor seller in Mournhold, an Imperial armorer in one of the forts, and armorers in Great House centers.
• Open-face Iron Helm – Working. Helpful for telling your companions apart early in the game, but I uninstalled it because, well, it's Iron, and who wants to use that beyond level 1, if at all? Other mods add open-faced versions of more helms.
• Bug Shield 1.0 – Working, and useful/plausible for lower-level characters to get a light shield that isn't a waste of time. You can now actually use those decorative insect-carapace shields you see everywhere in Ashlander camps (though those pre-placed vanilla items are not converted; you have to buy these mod shields).
• Wooden Shields 1.0 – Same as for Bug Shield, but slightly higher armor value, and Medium class. The colorful ones go good with various outfits. They're appropriate for medium-low to medium level characters.
• Armored Dresses 0.2 by Chascoda – Totally malfunctional: the NPC vendor shows up nude, the items are broken, and her shack, with a mis-coded door, cannot be exited, even with Intervention. Damned shame, since several of them looked really cool. I wish that Seyda Neen BB Market had fixed and included these. They didn't even work right when I got them via the Console.
• Drow Priestess Armor 1.1 – Working. This is low-end "bikini armor" for new-ish characters, and easily obtained (hint: second skeleton added to the pool in the location the readme mentions; took me a while). Not the most impressive mesh and texture work, so I don't think I'll use it again.
• 6th House Gondolier Helms Plus – Mostly functional. Adds a vendor outside in Vivec with gondolier/samurai helms in various styles. The mesh/texture set of one or two of them are broken in OpenMW, including the most desirable one (Ebony). At any rate, the range and price seem balanced; some are low-end and cheap, for new characters, with more expensive ones being better helms. I like these for companions as they are open-faced, colorful, and have a fun Asian flair (Europeans historically used "cymbal" helms like this, too, in various armies, though most people don't know that). As the title suggests, there's a black-and-red one, and it also includes Morag Tong (has a weird goggle thing), two Dwemer ones (based on centurion parts), purple, etc., plus the original that the Vivec boaters use.
• Laura Craft Leopard Outfit a.k.a. LC Leopard Outfit 1.1 by Emma – Working. Just adds her bright gold and leopard-spots Domina outfit (as armor and as clothing, with additional pieces not in the original Laura Craft Romance mod) to a crate you can take from. It's low-end gear, so no big deal. It's also based on the pre-Better Bodies meshes of the official LeFemm Armor add-on; some pieces don't work well on BB characters.
• Dagoth, Black Netch, and Red Dragon Armors by Silver Sorrow – Fully functional so far, despite all it does. Adds several dark-at-heart armors and weapons (not buyable) to the game, and inserts fairly tough NPC mercenaries with them into various Main Quest locations, mostly guarding high-ranking Ash Vampires (Dagoths), plus notes and various other items, new NPC responses, etc. The mercs make taking out some "boss monsters" harder. You have the option of installing a version where the mercs don't attack you on sight, and you can chat with them for their backstories and world-weary responses to routine questions, and fight them for their gear after the fact, but it's more fun to just make them hostile so the dungeons are more challenging (if you want the dialogue, too, cast Calm Humanoid and talk to them, then resume the fight; be sporting and wait for the spell to wear off). Some of the armor pieces are findable in misc. locations, which can also be fun. The goal of completing one set sent me exploring all of Vivec's sewer system in one marathon run, for example. An included readme has walkthroughs/spoilers. I would recommend perusing it if you are the type to get to level 15 before doing any serious Main Quest stuff; get the lower-end items while they're still of use to you. But ignore that documentation otherwise, since the main quest will put you in the harm's way of these characters in due course. The gear is nice-looking, and slightly better than the stock gear it's based on. You have to work for it, so I considered it a balanced mod. The notes and dialogue are funny, the clues take some work to figure out, and considerable effort was made to give these characters backstories that make sense in the context. Why are they working for Dagoth Ur? How do they relate to each other? Etc. The only problem so far is very minor; the cave domicile of one merc pair is overly bright for the milieu. OpenMW seems to frequently have lighting problems, with areas either much lighter or much darker than intended.
• Full Glass Armor by Hellwolve – Works perfectly. Adds some Glass Gauntlets as an alternative to the Bracers, and a Glass Full Helm as an alternative to the Helmet. Buyable from the smith at Ghostgate.
• New Imperial Helms 1.0 by grVulture – Works. Adds 3 helm variants for Imperial forces (buyable if you look around). I don't care for the mesh and texture work (looks cartoonish), so I probably will not use this again.
• Armor Hunters 1.5 – I found one of the NPCs, in Seyda Neen, but he just said he's an Armor Hunter, whatever that means, and did not sell anything, so I uninstalled it. I may have missed the point or something, and may try it again later. Readme suggests going to Dagon Fel, which I did not before removing the mod.
• Arsenal and the sillier Arcane Armature by Adul – Functional, including with Balmora Expansion. The main one provides various historical weapons, shields, etc., with reasonable stats. The Arcane addon (new room, same building) has weirder stuff, like a weather-changing rod (gives you spells to change weather, and they take about two minutes to do so), a giant and ridiculous gargoyle helm, strange weapons, etc. The shop is a shack and looks very out-of-place in Balmora. Its doorway partly clashes with that of Balmora Candle Shop, but both remain functional. One cool thing about Arsenal is some special gear for Khajiit, including leggings (boots without feet; dunno if they work on Argonians), and a Morag Tong-ish goggle helmet (Khajiit-only). The Arsenal has two customizable weapons (a fairly high-end sword you can convert from two- to one-handed, for a reduction in stats, and an Masai-style shield to which can be attached spears. Has some ninja-ish and Wolverine-ish stuff, too, plus elegant "combat hand-fans".
• The Hidden Pathway 2.0 by Star Boi – Working, aside from a few texture glitches. Adds three multi-level shops outside Sadrith Mora with interesting items that often have particle animation effects. Unfortunately, many are extremely cheaty, having very high enchant values and often super-extended ranges (e.g. staves that can be used as ranged attacks). There are also wearable items, jewelry (again with truly excessive enchant values), decorative trinkets, and off-hand weapons a.k.a. defensive weapons (looks like a weapon, equips as a shield).
• Magical Goods 1.0 by Star Boi – Same idea as The Hidden Pathway, just different stuff and a vendor in Vivec, Foreign Quarter, Upper Waistworks. I did not try this one directly; since THP above works, this probably does too, with similarly unbalancing items.
• Magical Goods Addon: Epic Encounters a.k.a. MG Epic Addon 1.0 – More of the same kind of stuff as THP and MG above; levitating shop is outside Vivec, Telvanni canton. I did not try this one directly; since THP above works, this probably does too, with similarly unbalancing items.
• Chainmail Dress by Shan – Working. Also included in Seyda Neen BB Market (see under Seyda Neen Complete in Major overhauls of vanilla places section. Adds an NPC vendor with an armored dress for sale. The item is rather gothic and doesn't use a very realistic texture, but it goes well with a more vanilla-textured (i.e., kind of cartoony) game. This is fairly low-end gear, so enjoy it early.
• Suran Archery Tradehouse 2.0 by WizBang – Broken. Shop appears, but numerous meshes and textures of the shop and of the items (bows, arrows, and quivers) are broken and just show up day-glow pink or as big "!" markers. Might be worth testing this mod by itself and then adding more later to see if this is some kind of mod conflict. Also conflicts slightly with Ashlander Transports (not to be confused with Ashlanders Transport); the shop overlaps where the transport guy and his guars are. Most of them move, but one may get stuck in a wall, one may end up downhill, etc. This can be fixed in the console with move.

Clothing

Might also include some armor and misc. items, and may have quests, but focused on non-armor clothing.

For risqué stuff, see the Racy section (and for the opposite, see Increased modesty). For purely visual changes to the appearance of items, see the Meshes and textures section.

Enchant values: The most common problem with clothing mods is a utility one; they typically have very expensive clothing (in the thousands of gold per item) but almost no enchantability because the modder forgot to do that part and left it at the default of 10 for most Common clothing items. Mods with this problem verge on useless, because newbie characters cannot afford the items, and non-newbies who can will not want to rely on them since they'll already being doing enchantments. Top-quality shirts (and anything equipping as them, e.g. dresses, corsets), skirts, and pants should enchant to 60 points; robes, belts and shoes (and non-armor boots) to 40; gloves to 20 each; rings to 60 each; and amulets to 120. Weapon and armor modders often err in the other direction, giving enchant values that exceed what the weight class is supposed to be capable of.

Clothing conflicts: To paraphrase an explanation by Westly in a readme, mod clothing (especially for Better Bodies) may use unconventional body-part slots (like a shirt that technically equips on the ankle, or a necklace or wings the game thinks is a left pauldron), in order to apply alpha-channel (transparency or translucency) effects and whatnot to the "real" area the item pertains to (e.g. the torso). A side effect of this is that another item (usually a vanilla one) that occupies the same slot "for real" may visually go missing, cause the body part to go missing, interfere with the mod item (maybe make it go missing), or otherwise conflict. The upshot is that not all clothing items are compatible with other clothing items, and you may have to mix and match a lot to get an outfit that works. Sometimes a combination will work or not work depending on the order in which the items are equipped. A "wardrobe malfunction" effect can also result, e.g. suddenly becoming topless after putting on a different pair of boots (or even in combat, becoming part-naked when fighting, only to have clothes reappear after combat). Items that only have a male or female mesh may disappear partially or entirely when used on the wrong gender, or even cause a substantial part of the body to disappear. Other types of conflict can be caused by two overlapping items with an alpha channel in the same place (typically causes flickering), and by clothing items of different sorts having colliding meshes (flickering again, or one thing clipping with another and showing through it, or one making the other invisible). All these caveats can also apply to armor items, not just non-armor clothing. Finally, remember that robes are intended to cover everything; anything coded as a robe, even if it looks like a fur loincloth, may completely hide armor and clothing underneath it. (This is often intentional, as with Hurdy Gurdy's female robe series which look like thin, tight dresses, and are so you can have a witchy-looking mage who is armored, for the game mechanics of it, but still appears visually as someone in a sorceress dress. You can even roleplay-rationalize this as a form of Illusion magic, if you like; after all, this is a magical game world.

• 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 (I think this is a clash between Better Bodies and clothes that pre-date it). The armorer guy in the basement has a dialogue loop that locks up the game (if you don't know and remember the Console command Goodbye, the only escape is to quit the game application).
• Dresses for Better Bodies v2 (a.k.a. Silver's Dresses) 0.1 by Silver – Not compatible with OpenMW as a stand-alone mod (the NPC vendor never appears). A functional variant is integrated into Seyda Neen BB Market (see above). If you have the stand-alone mod, you can Console yourself the dresses (they are IDs 0dress01 through 0dress04).
• Morrowind Kilts 1.0 by dg a.k.a. Horatio – Working. Only Milie Hastien in Balmora carries these kilts, and this mod must load before any mod that alters her significantly (especially one that allows her to sell armor as well as clothes). Buy them all immediately; in my latest play-through, and after adding some other clothing mods, the kilts disappeared from her shop on a second visit, but remained on me and in my closet. The Cashmere versions are Exquisite-quality and highly enchantable, the others are Common-quality. The textures are very bright and saturated. This mod is especially sensitive to changes in your mod load, for some reason, with the symptom that the kilt texture may not load, being replaced by the hot-pink "no texture file" color. If this happens, go through a save-cleaning routine as detailed in the General advice on mods in OpenMW section (and in particular leave the glitched item in another cell).
• Ultimate Kilts 1.0 by Silaria – Seems to be working, but the items don't live up to the name, as they have low enchanting capability. These are less garish than the dg/Horatio ones, come in more variety, and are found at more vendors. 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.
• Kilts note: If you want more complete kilt outfits with shoulder plaids, ghillie brogue shoes, socks with tartan flashes, and kilts with kilt pins (but missing the sporrans, which no real Scot would leave out), you can nab three off of NPCs in Kat's Kastle (see below); these are the closest to complete Highland attire I've encountered in any mod, though they have poor enchanting value.
• Heaven's Lookout Updated – Seems functional, aside from a minor issue with Balmora Expansion (covered above in compatibility notes about BE; short version: you have to use the Console to teleport to its location or give yourself its teleport ring). Some nice stuff, for males and females, in an anime (large-feet boots, anyone?), goth, and ninja vein. Both plain clothing and armor-clothing. Weapons with optional wearable scabbards (pauldrons), which some people like. There's some kind of frozen critter here, unimaginatively named Kronos, who relates to a quest in a beta add-on (not tested yet). Some may not like this mod's addition of a splash screen advertising it and its NPCs. Enchantability of the gear not tested yet. You'll need long-lasting Levitate/Slowfall or a Recall to get home from the shop, since it is very high in the sky.
• Gothic Attire Complete 1.1 by Qarl and Cenobite – This tour de force of a clothing mod combines the female items from Qarl's Gothic Attire, Gothic Attire 2, The Underground, and The Underground 2 into a very elaborate shop by Cenobite. Most of it is lingerie-ish, though some is practical as outerwear (corsets/bodices that go well with vanilla skirts, etc., and some boots). Most is highly enchantable. If you want the male items, you need TU and TU2; installing them should not cause problems with this also installed (different locations) but this has not been tested (and one would load GAC last, since it likely has improvements for a few female items). GA and GA2 also included some trivial armor items not included here, like "a beer mug set up as a shield". GAC is very useful for a few items, especially bras and panties that equip as Exquisite-level shirts and pants, and thus can be used invisibly with most minimal-size but high-end "armor" (bellydancer outfits with an armor rating, etc.) Much of the outright gothic stuff looks very out-of-place in Morrowind, but women who want to dress their PC the way they dress when they go out to clubs will be thrilled; some of this looks exactly like classic Hot Topic gothwear. For "dark" stuff that is mostly non-sexy, death-metal-inspired armor, see Carnithus' Armamentarium in the Weapons and armor section.
• Kat's Kastle 1.2 [TB+BM] by Kathryn, Lidi, Tommy Khajiit, NeoLiv, et al. – Works as a clothing mod, but its other features have issues. It's effectively a female clothing mall, and provides over 1,300 outfits, from elegant to erotic, historical-looking to sci-fi, subtle to crazy raver-hippie, and mostly based on NioLiv's meshes. Almost all are dresses or are like swimsuits (and both equip as shirts), plus various boots. Almost all are just clothing, not armor (including the boots), but one or two vendors supply some armor. There are only a handful of pants, skirts, robes, or gloves. Some of the work is beautiful (while some is silly and garish), but it's almost all of a low enchantability (typically 10 points), which is very disappointing, especially given the prices. The exception is boots, which are often 60 points (they should max at 40, like Exquisite Shoes). The mod also adds trivial and out-of-place things (like Robbie the Robot) and dialogue (from an absurdist British comedy), but only within the confines of the "mall" castle, which is far west of Solstheim. The place is accessed by a small two-way teleporter; once you get your goodies, you never need see the place again (though the maze of a castle, another modder's reproduction of the real-world Castle Vianden, is impressive). A teleport ring is also included, but does not work in OpenMW (it takes you to 0,0 in the world map, which is a Daedric shrine, mua-ha-ha).

  The mod includes local, lore-unrelated quests to give you access to secret rooms, but most are broken in OpenMW, so any time you detect a space on the map that you can't access, just Console into it with TCL. Many rooms suffer pretty extreme frame-rate lag, and are difficult to use (this is a common problem with clothing shop mods, for some reason). Using Disable in the Console to remove animated elements like rotating model stands, and mirrors (which don't actually work as mirrors, in OpenMW anyway) sometimes helps. Temporarily using lower-quality graphics settings might help, too, but I think this is really due to some scripting doing something multiple times per second. The easy solution is to make a bee-line for the vendor, buy everything they have, then get out of the glitched room as quickly as possible and examine the wares elsewhere. Drop and disable the ones you don't want and Console back the estimated money for them. You don't have to go home to do so; the place is full of unowned storage. (Since you can teleport to and fro, and none of these NPCs matter to the main game, you could actually use the castle as a player home, with some work, though an empty version intended for this, near Sadrith Mora, is available in the original Castle Vianden mod.) Most of the wares are very expensive; it will probably take around 700,000 gold to get them all (with Mercantile 100, Fortify Mercantile +100, and 100% Disposition; without, it will be probably between 1.5 and 3 million!). Most of the items have no icons other than of a gift box, so you have to try stuff on to know what it is later (the shops have modeling mannequins, but looking them over is impractical in the rooms that lag out). Most vendor rooms include one free sample (not owned), but some are bugged (either cannot actually be taken, or equip as the wrong item type, e.g. boots as a shirt), so you're better off with bought items. Some furniture is stealable and unowned (two nice desks, etc.), as are various booze potions, and an absurd amount of silverware; some items that should be pick-upable are not. There are various empty platforms that were clearly meant to have something on them, and some walls show up without a texture (day-glow pink). The Labyrinth in here is bugged; you will need to use TCL to get into and out of it.

  There are some nice male outfits on NPCs, but they are not for sale. If you try to do the quests (by looking up Journal entry IDs for parts that fail), some of these guys should not be Taunted/Frenzied and killed. The simple way to get those clothes is to save the game, temporarily Console-kill each NPC with SetHealth,0, get item IDs by looting the corpses and dropping the gear for a Console examination, reload the savegame from before this meta-violence, and give yourself the stuff with player->AddItem,"Item_ID",1, and subtract the value from your gold if you like. Some of the items on males are also female-wearable (pants and boots, but not shirts or jackets). Also, a few items are not available from vendors and only found on model'quins and other NPCs. If you insist on getting them all, you'll need to use the same Console-killing trick just mentioned. Getting all the goodies out of a fashion show can take several tries, and you may get ear-wormed by its Steve Winwood music in the process (hope you like "Valerie", a lot). You cannot Console-clone the fashion show dancers outside of the show. No mannequins in the mod are player-useable. A handful of models are regular NPCs (Merchant-class with no goods or money) and can be led away with Charm Humanoid. (Does your stronghold need an accountant? It's surely a better job for her.) Some of these have Asian heads, which is rare for Morrowind (though common in later TES installments). Some also have freakish appearances due to terrible makeup/tattoo texturing, or heads that mismatch bodies.

  • Tamriel Rebuilt note: This mod appears almost guaranteed to conflict with TR_Preview.esp, which wraps around Vvardenfell to the west and south. If it does overlap, this could be resolved by moving the clothing mod's islands (there are actually two, the other being a small unfinished one used in one of the mod's quests) to the far north, using Windows-based modding tools for resolving landmass conflicts, and this would also require updating its teleportation sphere (maybe also fix the broken teleport ring while you're at it). If you only run the release version of TR without the beta preview landmass add-on, the locations will probably not conflict, since that stuff is east and southeast of Vvardenfell.
• Battle Suit a.k.a. Battle Suits 2a by Ceno and Kagz – Bugged and very out-of-place. These are bodysuits that look like something out of the film Tron, and they disappear if you put footwear on.
• Lady Grey Boutique by Pozzo a.k.a. P0zz0 – Problematic. This mod provides expensive, mostly Dunmer-female-specific clothes, including Hurdy Gurdy-based robes, some hooded (Sheikizza) ones, bodices/corsets (arguably the best work in the mod), skirts, and accessories. The shop in Maar Gan will not sell you anything until you do a little quest to go find a missing VIP customer on a shipwreck. But it's bugged and won't acknowledge that you've done so, so the vendor never works. Most of the items are out in the open in the store and can simply be stolen with high Sneak and Chameleon; the inventory is small, so the non-stealable items' IDs can be tracked down in the mod with OpenMW-CS and added to your inventory with AddItem in the Console. This is pre-Better Bodies, and some items ("brassiere", actually a bodice, in both clothing and armor variants, and some gloves) clip horribly if you are using BB. The rest are okay with BB. The clothes have a trivial 10-point enchantment value, even when labeled "Exquisite". Overall, this seems like a beta test not a finished mod. Some of the clothes are nice (some are pretty wild-colored, though many fit the milieu well), the wigs (equip as helms, all with Dunmer ears) are compatible with various head-replacer mods, and the purple cuirass is great (a nicely retextured LeFemme one, which like all of those has a "tight corset" look when used with BB). Most of the few armor items have enchantment values too high, in excess of Daedric. A modder could probably fix this mod up pretty easily. One unusual thing it includes are some "Jade" Ordinator armor pieces with the left side green, to wear with regular gold-ish right-side pieces – in imitation of the two-tone appearance of Vivec himself, I think. It looks hokey to me, but someone might love it. The principal utility this mod will have is for someone who wants to dress up Dunmer lady companions and who can tolerate the very low enchant values these items have, or is just using the clothes for stay-at-home NPCs. An amusing bit is the inclusion of debutante customers in the shop, like yet another lab-grown Fyr, and a Hlaalu noble's niece, being tacky.
• Black Clothing and Armour a.k.a. DarkItems 0.1, by Cer a.k.a. Cerebrecl – Broken. Mod adds three clothing items and one set of armor, all "blackened" versions of vanilla pieces. No vendor, just a crate in the Caldera Mages Guild to get them for free – but the crate does not actually appear in OpenMW. The only way to get the items would be to add them via the Console (not tested yet).
• The Crimson Wire 1.0 by Mandamus – Broken. Puts all of Mandamus's male and female clothes in a new two-vendor shop in Sadrith Mora. Shop appears, but numerous meshes and textures of items are broken and just show up day-glow pink or as big "!" markers. Might be worth testing this mod by itself and then adding more later to see if this is some kind of mod conflict.
• House Dagoth Outfits a.k.a House Dagoth Outfit 1.0 by Alvirdimus – Adds a funny shop on top of the stronghold portion of Kogoruhn, with a set of "evil" clothes. They look pretty good, are practical not lingerie-ish, adapt to female and male bodies, and are enchantable as Exquisite items. There's a limited supply of them, so after you get them all (or as many as you want), you can fight the Ash Ghoul vendor and non-sleeping Sleeper model.
• Hooded Robe Collection 1.1 by jdooby – FAIL. Many of the items show up as giant "!" markers, and also have messed up icons.

Furniture

• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB], with BE Fixes (see Major overhauls of vanilla places section, for non-furniture aspects of that mega-mod) – Generally working, and provides a fairly comprehensive furniture shop, one of the best available, including lots of lighting options. Also adds a smaller shop in Hla Oad, and allegedly one in Vivec somewhere. Also provides exterior and non-household items, such as wells, signage posts, altars, and forges, for jazzing up strongholds. The altars are not functional as healing/blessing ones, though. It takes a while to figure out the furniture placement ring (and the options it offers are not the same for all item types, but an in-game manual is available). It's easier than manually positioning stuff with the Console, though, unless you're already good at that. The only serious flaw is that all the containers sold have a too-low capacity to be very useful. Non-cheat workaround: buy one there, disable it with the Console, then clone a similar container with better capacity from a house mod you know has better containers (or just clone the good one and dock yourself some gold for it), then place it manually with Move in the Console. Maybe low-capacity containers are "realistic", but they're a hassle. Who wants their player home full of chests from floor to ceiling? Minor bug: the mannequins sold by the upstairs guy fall to the ground as corpses, so are useless unless you want dead-people mannequins. The ones sold by a vendor downstairs are working correctly. Another minor bug (or perhaps a mod conflict) is that some portable, non-hanging paper lanterns disappeared out of these shops after a while and were not offered since, though all other items seem to still be available, and already-purchased lanterns did not disappear.
• Pelagiad Drapers – Working. New shop in the grassy part of town sells positionable curtains. They do not go well with all architectures, but are fully functional.

Plants

• Noddle's Travelling Garden – Kinda works (including with Balmora Expansion) but has a texture issue. Provides a market stall with houseplants in Balmora. However, the plants' flowers are day-glow due to "fake bumpmapping". They also have a mouse-over popup that makes them look like alchemy ingredient "container" plants when they are not. The texture issue isn't unbearably distracting, just looks like excessively colorful flowers.
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB], with BE Fixes (see Major overhauls of vanilla places section) – The plant shop included in town does not work (merchant has no inventory). The one added in Hla Oad does, selling both potted alchemical plants and plantable trees from various regions.

Books

• Correspondence of Morrowind 1.01 by Cliffworms ^F N  [archive has a typographical error name, Correspondances of Morrowind; that's a completely different word] – Working fine. Adds leaflets and handbills, love letters, communiques between bandits, and other paper clutter, plus a few useful alchemical recipes and such. Most of these are takable (not owned by NPCs or factions), but there are exceptions. If you already know the formulas, or just look them up at UESPWiki, or don't use alchemy, the recipes will serve no practical purpose, though you may find some of the other stuff amusing or interesting. Some of them are potentially game-enriching while persnickety players may consider them "lore-unfriendly", e.g. a note in Addamasartus that incriminates a Seyda Neen NPC as a smuggling and murder accomplice, and so on. New players may actually find the handbills informative, since they tell you of local businesses you may not have found yet.

Portable storage

None seem to work in OpenMW so far.

• Backpacks 1.0 by Dereko – This is pretty much just decorative in OpenMW. It adds backpacks that are a form of low-end armor and look nifty, but which most players would quickly replace with better armor. Also adds a portable campfire that is fun but is not for Necessities of Morrowind and doesn't do anything practical (probably cheat potential as an infinite, albeit inconvenient, light source, though). The scripting for this the backpack as a portable container is probably worth study by modders to see if it can be fixed to work in OpenMW. What I want most of all in this game is a portable container that doesn't cheat on weight, to use for alchemical ingredients, keys I don't need right now, and other clutter, to bring with me but keep out of my main inventory window. I presently use pack rats for this, but they are a pain, always getting in the way, stuck on rocks, or killed.
• Portable Hole – Item is findable and takable, but is just a black spot in OpenMW and has no functionality; probably an undisclosed MWSE dependency.
• Alchemy Storage Helper a.k.a. ASH 2.0 by Scruggs – Incompatible; relies on MWSE.
  • Same goes for ASH 2.0 Ort Edit 1.1 by Ortorin; it's just a weight patch of the above.
• Potion Storage Helper 1.1 by latendresse76 – Incompatible; relies on MWSE. This is just a fork of ASH.

Misc. items

This subsection is for mod-added items (and vendors thereof) that don't fit into the above subcategories.

• Map Tapestry – Working. It's a blurry enough image that it has no cheat potential, and is just wall décor for player homes.
• Pillows Plus 2.0 – Working, including with Balmora Expansion. Converts the crazy pillow lady in Balmora into an actual decorative pillows vendor for player homes. It lacks display, though. My solution was to buy one of everything and lay them out in her place, give myself back the money with the Console, then buy the pillows I actually wanted. You may have to complete her Fighters Guild "cave rats are after my pillows upstairs" quest before she turns into a vendor. The easter egg mini-quest relating to her (bring her an invoice for pillows found in a shipwreck off the central north coast, and get an "extra-comfy pillow" reward) did not work for me in OpenMW; I don't know if that's an OpenMW bug, if this mod broke it, or what.
• 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. Still not sure what these toolkits do.
• Improved Resting 1.0 – Seems to be working. A simple alternative to Necessities of Morrowind with much less overhead and fiddling about, and no known incompatibilities (but also doesn't force any necessities; it's all optional). Vendor in Seyda Neen provides "magic" pillow, bedroll, and cooking gear to use alchemical ingredients to prepare healing meals, and to rest for recuperation purposes without it being official Rest that triggers leveling, Tribunal assassin attacks, etc. Has lots of in-game manuals (mostly recipes). Minor issue is that the awning over the vendor is floating in mid-air if you have Seyda Neen Complete installed, because the latter changed the wall. If it bugs you, fix the awning's position with Move in the Console.
• Balmora Grocery – A Necessities of Morrowind shop that did not work with Balmora Expansion. It may work fine without that mega-mod.
• Trintinigant's Bazaar – Mostly works but has a texture issue. Provides a market stall with misc. decorative claptrap. However, some are day-glow due to "fake bumpmapping" or broken meshes or textures. Worked with Balmora Expansion to the extent that it worked. Because the wares are on display outdoors, the broken mesh/texture items are very distracting in the environment; this could be brute-force fixed with Disable in the Console.
• Arcane Armature – See entry in Armor and weapons section. Provides various unusual magic items as well as armaments.

Game mechanics

Stats

• 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 because the original was too cheaty. Honestly, this mod 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 or dust 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 ("Fatigue", as the game backwardly calls it) slowly without having having to use Rest. 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. I really like it for the quite visible, almost palpable, effect on Fatigue of swinging a heavy weapon around. It forces you to think about and buff Fatigue more.
• Fair Magicka Regen – Only works if fixed; see the main Mod status page's entry for patch info. 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 Magicka-using foe in the vanilla game, you generally find them too easy to kill once their Magicka reserve is depleted. Now they don't run dry so fast. High level characters will not notice a difference, since you can just rush in and bash most mages in a few blows, and will have acquired resistance to most of what they cast. Early in the game, it makes spellcasters in bandit caves a force to reckon with.

Magic and alchemy

This section also includes mods relating to ores (Raw Ebony, etc.), since they are coded alchemical ingredients.

See the Stats section for mods that affect Magicka. See the Fast travel section for Propylon and Guild Guide mods that affect travel.

See the Fast travel section for Mark/Recall and other teleportation mods.

• 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. Includes an optional add-on that allows you to mine additional bits out of ores (Ebony, Glass, Diamond, Adamantium); it's supposed to require a miner's pick in your inventory, and will often say so, but lets you get a second load of mined goodies anyway; having the pick has no effect in OpenMW, presumably due to a minor scripting error.
• Index Mod [BM] 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Makes Propylon Indices findable with Detect Enchantment, puts one in each ancient Dunmer stronghold, and puts some extra ones in the game world, so you can probably gather a complete set more quickly if you don't already know where each of their vanilla locations are. It's unclear why this has a Bloodmoon dependency, but the ReadMe says it does. Note: spare indices can also be used for a) retaining copies of individual ones if you have the Master Index add-on; and b) turning into a blank for re-encoding as a different stronghold's index, in a mod that provides an enchanter who will do so (there is at least one, and it may be this one; the enchanter Under Skar in Ald'Ruhn).
• Turn Undead [TB+BM] 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Increases the power of the Turn Undead spell (enough to destroy weaker undead, though not instantly, at high enough magnitudes). Balances by making undead immune to Calm and Demoralize. Recommended if you play a priestly/crusader sort, since it makes the spell no longer a useless waste of time and Magicka.

Ownership

• Owned Beds 1.0b by Spirithawke – Incompatible; relies on MWSE. The ability to remove ownership from beds, containers, and other things that belonged to now-dead NPCs is probably one of the first MWSE features OpenMW should implement natively.

Spawning

This subsection is for mods that only or primarily change the frequency or location of the spawning of items, creatures, or NPCs.

• Grave Goods 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Random chance of more than Grave Dust being found in urns in ancestral tombs.
• Loot Well Urned: Ancestral Tomb Loot Enhancement 1.1 by pseunomix – See entry in #Artifacts section. Aside from adding artifacts in tombs, it also does what Grave Goods does.
• Mixed Guards 2.0 [TB+BM] by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Makes more of the random, generic guards female (the vanilla games only has female named ones and female Redoran generic ones). Side effect: If you are running a random NPC head replacer, you can sometimes get unexpected and funny results, like an Imperial Legionnaire on patrol who is an elderly woman who would more plausibly have a desk job or be retired.
• Dark Sister 1.0 [TB] by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Randomly adds females to the Dark Brotherhood assassins and the respawning generic DBs under Mournhold.

Combat and damage

See the Magic and alchemy section for Destruction and Restoration magic. See the Stats section for Fatigue and other stats mods that may affect combat.

• Hot Floor [TB/BM] 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Steam grates in Dwemer floors can burn you (and follower NPCs) a bit, the longer you are on them; metal boots help a little, other boots help more, and so does running, jumping, levitation.
• Demon Weapons 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working, and recommended if you use companions. Makes Demon, Devil, and Fiend weapons Cast on Strike instead of Cast on Use. Also gives both the weapons and the corresponding helms "more useful secondary effects". None are over-powered; this remains gear for characters who are low to medium-low level. If you use other mods that change this gear, they probably need to be loaded before this one unless they are pluginless (mesh and texture only) mods.
• Riekling Knock Off 1.0 [BM] by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. If you hit a Riekling Raider hard enough for a knock-down blow, the Riekling will fall off his Tusked Bristleback mount and you will have two enemies to fight at once. This is balanced by you having two souls to trap and two corpses to loot.
• Show Ammo Dmg 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Shows the damage range dealt by vanilla arrows and bolts, a strange lack of information in vanilla. Does not work with mod-added ammunition, only that provided by Bethesda in the original game and its official add-ons (including Area Effect Arrows). Includes a version that does not require any add-ons.

Weather

• Sol-Weather Tweak 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Fixes the bug that southern Solstheim has snow on the ground, but never any in the air, by giving a 15% chance of snowing.
• Skies IV – See entry in #Improved meshes and textures section. Includes optional weather tweaks.
• Ambient Town Sounds 1.3 – See entry in Audio section. Includes optional weather tweaks.
• Better Sounds 1.1 – See entry in Audio section. Includes optional weather tweaks.
• Arcane Armature – See entry in Armor and weapons section. Includes an item that provides weather-changing spells.

Crime and bounty

• Stolen Goods Fix 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive – Broken. Is supposed to make Evidence Chests freely lootable so you can recover your confiscated goods after fine/jail, but does not. Also intends to double the theft fine in balance; this aspect has not been tested.

Fast travel

Zero mods with scenic-travel options (where you get to watch the travel in realtime as it happens) appear to have this functionality in OpenMW, though they work otherwise (i.e., they get you there the same way a vanilla siltstrider or ship would).

Fast travel to new landmasses is covered under the entries for those places in the New major landmasses section.

For companion teleportation mods, see the Companion and NPC utilities and misc. section.

• Multiple Mark – Incompatible.
• Multiple Teleport Marking 2.2 by Marcel Hesselbarth and hessi9 – Incompatible.
• Multiple Teleport Marking (OpenMW and Tamriel Rebuilt) a.k.a. MultiMarkOMW 1.2 by rotat, Marcel Hesselbarth, and hessi9 ^N  – In testing, and should work. This is a compatibility-patched version of the above for OpenMW and (optionally) Tamriel Rebuilt and Project: Tamriel's Skyrim: Home of the Nords and Province: Cyrodiil (Stirk), plus a compatibility add-on for Companion Teleportation.
• Daedric Teleport Stones 1.0 [TB/BM] by melian and Trunksbomb – Working. This appears to be the only other OpenMW-compatible alternative to the original Multiple Teleport Marking, using paired teleport items instead of trying to hack the Mark and Recall magic. And it's not cheaty - getting them is hard, and most of them have negative (temporary) effects. The stones come in three types: exteriors, Mournhold (if you install the Tribunal version), and exterior/interior (a total of four pairs; two are of the first kind). The indoor/outdoor one will overwrite your last Mark (no matter where it is) if used in an interior, so it's best used outside anyway. See the HTML ReadMe file included for where to get the stones; if you're starting a new game, then wait and discover them "naturally". You cannot teleport companions with you, sorry; in this, it is just like Mark/Recall and Intervention, and unlike Guild Guide teleportation. The ReadMe says to try cdcooley's Companion Teleportation, but that does not work in OpenMW in my tests so far (see its entry in the Companion and NPC utilities and misc. section). Use a pair of stones by dropping one on the ground, and later equipping its twin as a recall item to that spot. Teleport stones equip as rings, and either cost Magicka to use (via Drain Magicka, Constant Effect – so de-equip it immediately after use), cause a very minor Blind effect, or even give a beneficial Feather. They range radically in weight, from under 1 unit to a heavy 5 units. Look carefully for them, as they are about the size of a Common Soul Gem, but dull-colored and hard to see, especially in low light. When you find one, you can use it to immediately teleport to its twin if that one is outdoors, which most are not; but be prepared, since most are in dangerous locations. Most have to be found manually, and it takes some work. Detect Enchantment is a major help.
• Seyda Neen Complete (covered above) adds a lot of additional ship travel (which makes sense for a port town).
• Balmora Council Club 1.0 by Princess Stomper (see entry in Player businesses section for other aspects, some of which are broken). Highly recommended for travel if you have companions and Tribunal. Adds an NPC to the Balmora Guild of Mages (Davas Ores) and another to the outdoor Temple Courtyard in Mournhold (Sosile), who provide fast travel to and from Mournhold that works with companions, unlike the teleportation provided by Tribunal itself. Be warned that if you use OpenMW-CS and the Console to get around this house/business mod's broken quest scripting, and complete its quests, they will eventually make Sosile disappear from that location to meet up with you in Balmora, and she'll have to be put back with PositionCell after she's done her quest role. PS: I have the sense that Sosile and Davas are also added by another mod (presumably by the same author), because I've used them a long time, but don't recall installing Balmora Council Club until later.
• Imperial Airship – Working so far, though see note above about minor glitch with Kahleigh's Retreat. Does not have a tremendous number of locations, but enough to be useful. Wish it had Ebonheart, which is a hassle to get to (usually multiple striders and ships, or a long walk from Vivec). The mod is not perfect; it causes landscape fractures in several places, some of which are big enough to fall into. I would guess this didn't happen in the Bethesda engine, because they're glaringly obvious and would probably have been fixed before release. It's also possible these are caused by other mods that affect the area.
• 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 to almost anywhere from almost anywhere. If you demand that, just use the Console's PositionCell and CenterOnCell teleportation cheats; 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. Useful for Hlaalu players (gets you from town to fairly near your stronghold quickly). Of no interest to anyone else, since you have no reason to go half-way down the Odai River all the time; if you want to get to the coast from Balmora, take the Siltstrider to Seyda Neen. Given that it's called the Odai Boat Service, it's weird that it stops quite a bit south of there, but it's still closer than Balmora. I may re-mod this to make it actually stop at Odai. There is no return service; it's one-way.
• Private Mobile Base (covered above in detail in Player homes and businesses section) provides teleport options, and can even be entirely relocated. Update: This is actually the #1 suspect in my "parts of Mournhold are disappearing" problem (mentioned in the final section below).
• Boats 1.17 by abot – Working as travel; only the scenic travel options don't work. Provides some additional, much-needed, ship travel in various locations. Minor issue: as with a few vanilla ship captains, ones added by this mod can eventually migrate themselves into the water, drown, and disappear, requiring restoration by PlaceAtPC in the Console after looking up their IDs in OpenMW-CS. You can use the Move command to pre-emptively move them them a bit inland (or fix it, if you find one in the water already and still alive).
• Ashlander Transports – Working, and a great time-saver for repeat players, but too cheaty for first-timers. Adds fast travel from Maar Gan and Suran to an Ashlander camp, and from there to other Ashlander camps. Priceless to me; the Ashlands and Grazelands are quite monotonous, and you only need to explore them once. Conflicts slightly with Suran Archery Tradehouse (see it's entry in the Weapons and armor section for how to resolve it, if you can get SAT to work at all).
• Ashlanders Transport 1.1 – Presumably working, since it's in .omwaddon format. Have not used it directly, so don't know if it also starts in cities like Suran, or exists only between Ashlander camps. Archive includes English, Russian, and German.
• Yagrum Advanced 2.0 – Yagrum Bagarn will allegedly build you a Dwemer airship, though I have not gotten him to do so yet, even after building both of the Dwemer companions (see entry in Dwemer constructs companion mods section, above). You have to check him for new dialogue options like "power source" to do stuff with this mod.
• Kat's Kastle [TB+BM] by Kathryn, Lidi, Tommy Khajiit, NeoLiv, et al. (see entry above in Merchants and Items) – The teleport ring it has, intended to take you to the "mall" island, doesn't work for that, but it does work (accidentally) for getting to the Daedric shrine near Fort Moonmoth, and also has an intentional working option to get to Sadrith Mora/Wolverine Hall (for some reason). This would be useful if you have a house mod in the area that doesn't have its own teleport ring, since you're not always near a Guild Guide who can get you to Wolverine Hall.
• Raven Wings by Fliggerty, Nadaz, and Carnithus – Not compatible, as it is dependent on MWSE.
• Propylon Mod 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Makes the Propylon Chamber network a complete circle, both clockwise and counterclockwise, if you have all the Propylon Indices; you no longer have to back-track through them.
  • See also Index Mod by Manauser, in the Magic and alchemy section.
• Suran Ferry [TB/BM] 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Working. Provides ferry service both ways across the river near Suran. Incidentally also fixes a "levitating" barrel and a too-high step. Unless you are of a low enough level to fear Slaughterfish and unable to use Levitate or Water Walk, you are not likely to need this mod, since the trip is very short.

Meshes and textures

This section does not list any pure texture replacers here unless they are either a) broken, or b) objectively an improvement (i.e., higher resolution and without problems), or c) unusual or special-purpose. The default presumption is that any such mod will work, unless the texture image files in it are corrupted (which would affect the Bethesda engine, too), or it uses "fake bumpmapping" (link is to fix-it tutorial; see summary section about this problem at the Mod Status article).

Suggestion: The easiest way to use mesh-and-texture-only replacers (without a .ESP, .ESM, or .omwaddon) is to create a special directory for them, and manually copy the resource files from them together in a single Meshes or Textures (respectively) sub-directory under it, then put this directory at the end of the load order. Thus, you only use one mod slot for all of them, and other mods that load earlier and use modder textures or duplicate vanilla ones, and override the ones in the Morrowind Data Files directory, will still be overridden in turn by the ones you've chosen yourself. Various texture packs will conflict, providing reskins of the same things, so one must decide which resources from which mod to use. Doing it with this single, loaded-last dumping directory is easier to manage than either trying to work them into the game's own Data File directory, or mucking about with load orders of a bunch of pluginless mods, while providing personal, down-to-each-texture control over final appearance. It also obviates the need to edit openmw.cfg for mesh-and-texture mods (you cannot reorder pluginless mods in the OpenMW app's Data Files manager, only by editing openmw.cfg).

Improved meshes and textures

• Better Bodies 2.4 (a.k.a. Better Bodies ZW) by Psychodog Studios, ZWolol, Akavir, Harborgolfer, and Liztail ^N  – Working so far (as others have reported). This or a slightly earlier version is highly recommended (especially with Better Clothes, below, and a heads replacer), modernizing the appearance of the humanoids in the game to look like 2010s work instead of 2002 work. Makes bodies smooth and realistic, instead of angular and jointed like plastic dolls. This 2.4 patch corrects some problems in the last of the Psychodog Studios versions (2.2), and adds a few details, including fingernails. Like previous releases, it comes in three variants: underwear (and bras on females), "peanut gallery" (bottoms only), and nude. The last of these works best with clothing mods, otherwise undergarments will be awkwardly visible with a lot of mod-provided clothing. However, it is anatomically correct and detailed; some will find that version objectionable for them or their kids (though ... you do know this game is violent, has slavery, a demonic cult, scary monsters, a strip club, and quests that make you a murderer, right? Maybe get the youths a Pokémon game.) See also the Racy and Increased modesty sections, below. There's a BB labeled "2.7", but it is for the Russian edition of the game only, and the version number seems to have been picked at random; this 2.4 is later, and includes improvements released in "2.7".
  • Better Bodies 2.2 by Psychodog Studios ^M  (the "official" final version from the BB Project): Was also working; used it for a month. Ignore 2.3; it was by the same people as 2.4 and just fixes less.
• Better Clothes 1.1 by Psychodog Studios ^M N  – Working and highly recommended. Detailed and more natural-looking replacements for almost all the vanilla clothing in the game (though keeping to the design aesthetics of the original items, and not modifying their stats). Requires Better Bodies (which doesn't do too well with the vanilla clothes anyway) and is best used also with a heads replacer. Should load after any old mods that do anything incidentally with vanilla clothing, and before any post-Better Clothes mods that cite it as a dependency.
• Better Heads (formerly Faces of Vvardenfell) 2.0 by Gorg, Anthrax (a.k.a. DarkSharp), and Motoki ^M  – Partially functional. This is a detailed, varied NPC head and hair replacer (over 400 meshes by a variety of modders). Unfortunately, they all show up with missing necks when this is used with Better Bodies.
• Head Replacer 1.0 by Beryl a.k.a. Beryllium – Working. This is another NPC head-replacer compilation of various modder's work. Does not have the missing necks issue that Better Heads does.
• Windows Glow 2.2 by Max a.k.a. ~NOBODY~ a.k.a. Max Shawabkeh – Working, including with add-ons as noted below. I cannot guarantee that they work exactly as intended, since I don't run MS Windows and can't test and compare in Bethesda's original game engine. I do know that the in-game windows look lit up at night with candle-flicker, when viewed from the outside; and they show daylight during the daytime when viewed from inside, and this appears to be the intent of the mod. Various other glowing-window mods I tried definitely did not work right, just this one and its add-ons listed here. The others either had no effect, gave an effect almost too subtle to perceive, had garish and stuttering results, or caused frame-rate problems. The only issue I've encountered with this is that the flicker effect can become garish and too flickery under certain weather conditions, like rain; I think it's some kind of luminosity conflict in the game engine. But it only seems to affect a few windows, and could even be a problem caused by a locality mod.
  • Windows Glow - Tribunal 1.1 by Max (~NOBODY~) and Nikolaj "Colt17" Gorev – Working.
  • Windows Glow - Bloodmoon 1.0 by Max (~NOBODY~) and Nikolaj "Colt17" Gorev – Working.
  • Windows Glow – Raven Rock (a.k.a. Windows Glow RR) by Nikolaj "Colt17" Gorev – I seem to recall this Working, but have long been using the alternative in next entry.
  • Windows Glow Expansion 1.11 by abot – Working. Improves the effect in Nord and Imperial settlements. (Also adds it to Tamriel Rebuilt and several other mods.) Includes an alternative Raven Rock add-on, which I've been using. (There's another, Windows Glow - Bloodmoon (Now with Raven Rock) by Colt17, that abot says works with his WG Expansion, too, but I'm not running it.) Follow abot's detailed load order notes.
  • Realistic Windows Glow Re-texture 1.4 by Gemini a.k.a Daddy_Gemini – Working. This is a mesh-and-texture-only (no .ESP) improvement, with windows "toned down in brightness with a higher level of detail". Looks very good, and also improves non-glowing windows (i.e. when viewed in the daytime from outside, or the inside at night). Load this one last, or any of the above will override it and make it have no effect.
  • caveat: I'm experiencing a problem where many of the Raven Rock buildings in later phases of construction are severely glitched, including missing exterior walls, even a missing floor (several homes and the merchant shop are affected). One of these mods may be culprit, since I am not running any Raven Rock expansions/overhauls, but making some windows glow seems unlikely to mess up entire buildings. I've had no other Solstheim problems I can recall, though some similar problems in Mournhold (not in the vanilla Vvardenfell landmass). Another suspect is Private Mobile Base.
• 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. It's definitely my favorite skies texture-and-mesh mod so far, and worth the effort.
• Bitter Coast by Spewboy – Excellent. Get it. It verges (no pun intended) on a grass mod, without any of the problems associated with them (there's no moving grass or individual grass blades). Also improves some textures of local rocks and other stuff. Wish this modder had done the whole island.
• Better Skulls 1.4b – Definitely an improvement over the cartoonish originals, though it doesn't affect all the skulls that are part of static bone piles.
• Better Picks-n-Probes – Nothing to write home about, but makes the different quality levels of 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. Main issue so far is that the meshes of BLLDaV look nothing like the icon shapes used by PSaPSF. Someone needs to combine these into one mod.
• 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, with pictorial signs.
• Metallic Road Signs – Working so far. Makes it easier to tell what is down which road without hovering over signs. Purists will not like that the signs are in English (and they're going to be angry when they get to Kogorhun, which has English blood graffiti in it in the vanilla game). 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.
• 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.
• Hlaalu Normal Mapped for OpenMW 1.1 by Lysol – This .OMWAddon works and is nice work for furniture, walls, floors, etc., 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 was a tiny bit distracting. That said, I've gotten so used to Hlaalu furniture looking this way, and it looks so good indoors (including my player home), I'm not willing to sacrifice this mod. 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 and they were too garish for me. I re-modded one myself, and was happy with it, but prefer Lysol's, it's that good.
• Sexy Creatures and Femmons – See entries in the Racy section.
• Extreme Textures series by Masox – Generally a net positive, these are available in 512, 1024, and 2048 resolutions (1024 should be good enough, unless you have a great computer and really huge monitor). The textures are a mixture of CGI work and photographic sources. I'll review ones I've used directly myself:
  • Extreme Textures - Creature 1.0, Packs I–III – Much more detailed textures for vanilla animals and atronachs. Since they're all clearly named, it's easy to remove one you don't like (e.g. the rat, or whatever). Some of these may be too much for some people; the Mudcrab has stark white highlights on it (presumably from "fake bumpmapping"), for example. But many are definitely improvements. Some, like the Slaughterfish, don't seem to make that much difference.
  • Extreme Textures - Hlaalu – Redoes entire places like Balmora, inside and out. A few of the textures, e.g. on doors, seem too high-contrast, but mostly it's good. The OpenMW-specific Hlaalu Normal Mapped for OpenMW by Lysol, above, is arguably better. What I did is installed Masox's first, then Lysol's over it, so that Masox is improving the resolution and naturalness of any textures Lysol didn't.
  • Extreme Textures – Ascadian Isles – Lots of real-nature stuff, and goes very well with Spewboy's Bitter Coast, above. Improves some of the alchemical plants of the region as well as ground textures like grass, roads, and coastal rocks. As with Spewboy's work, this is a good, low-impact alternative to problematic grass mods.
  • Extreme Textures - Menu – Replaces the Morrowind logo opening menu background, the in-game target crosshair, and "this item is enchanted" highlighting in the inventory. I ended up only using the first of these, as other mods did a better job with the other two.
• Joyful Morrowind - Creatures 0.90, by Max a.k.a. ~NOBODY~ a.k.a. Max Shawabkeh – More saturated and less blurry textures for various vanilla creatures, natural and otherwise. This is textures, a mesh for the Ogrim, and an optional .ESP "to apply the fixed Ogrim UV maps" (what was wrong with them?). Without knowing what the .ESP really does, and given that the mesh may require that data file to load, I would advise not using the Ogrim resources from this mod if you're trying to save mod slots. These are the same size as and barely different from the originals, other than being richer. So, it may be good to use most of these as new defaults, then selectively replace them with higher-resolution offerings. Some take a little getting used to; e.g., the Cliff Racer is very ruddy.
• Oblivion Style Dark Brotherhood Armor BB by Westly – Working, but I don't care for it aesthetically and won't use it again. All it does is change the appearance of the Tribunal Dark Brotherhood gear to look more like that in Oblivion.
• Subtle Magic Glow 1.0 by atteSmythe – Recommended. The "Faint" version of this greatly reduces the "shiny plastic wrap" look on enchanted items so that it's barely visible, and this stops the effect totally wrecking the aesthetics of various clothing mods (plus, the original shine just looked ridiculous and hokey). There are two alternatives include to try, if you want: "Fade" which fades a shine in and out, and "Static" which has a slight shine which is not animated (the "Faint" version retains the original shimmer). Unlike some mods that attempt to do something like this, this one does not break the Detect Enchantment spell.
• Vampiric Visages 1.0 by MagicNakor – Impractical to test, as it requires 54 .ESP files, one for each face. This should be munged into a single file. Varied Vampiric Visages by the same author is thus also impractical to test, since VV is a VVV dependency, and it also depends on Vampire Embrace, Vampire Realism, and Bloodlines all at once.
• BB Almalexia Replacer 1.0 by Westly ^F  – Definitely an improvement over the cartoonish original. This is a pluginless replacer, but requires Better Bodies and should load after it. Also replaces the mesh and texture of Hopesfire.
• Daedric Lord Armor Morrowind Edition 1.01 by McMuffin and Bahamut – Will only be partially compatible. Cites MCP as a dependency, and includes "fake bumpmapping", though there seems to be a version included without it. ReadMe says it will conflict with other mods of Daedric armor and of the Dremora creature, so I did not test this directly, since I'm running other mods of both. I suspect that parts of this can be used fine, even with such mods, if the non-bumpmapped version is chosen and mod load order is adjusted. Some may want to try it for the black-and-green items, a nice break from all the black-and-red.

Mesh, texture, and placement bug fixes

This section includes landscape seam repairs, object placement corrections, and the like, which are sometimes not strictly mesh/texture fixes. (Trying to avoid excessive subcategorization here.)

• Pelagiad Fix 1.0 by Manauser, included in his "Mini-Mods" archive ^M  – Unknown. Written to fix disappearing building in Pelagiad, but this bug may have already been fixed in OpenMW. Loading the mod causes no problems, but might not fix any in this engine, either.
• Suran Ferry 1.0 – See entry in Fast travel section. Also includes some object placement fixes.

Audio

I'm listing here stuff that works together (or isn't practical). 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. Overall a plus, though the sound used for interiors with a bunch of PCs in them (a quiet background chatter) is not always 100% appropriate, e.g. inside temples and other places one would not expect to sound like a restaurant.
• Better Sounds 1.1 by JEKA, TJ, and Colobos – Has problems, but is fixable, and is worth fixing. The good: the sound effects work and add to immersion; the mod has been praised by many, and rated as superior for this effect to many competing mods. Works with ATS and Cait's Critters Unleashed, above. The caveats: This incorporates Bethesda's own Bitter Coast Sounds, so disable BCS before running BS. If you have a mod that has a dependency on BCS, by name, you can try loading BCS then BS, but this may not work and you may have to make a choice between mods. You also can't use all the weather effects changes in the config files that are prescribed by ATS and BS (and other mods like Skies IV) at the same time; just pick one set of adjustments and ignore the others. The bugs: It changes the names of three regions (one by introducing a typo, and two by changing their Name fields to match their ID fields); this directly interferes with any quest or mod scripting that refers to any of these regions by name (e.g., it breaks aspects of Jasmine, a Morrowind Companion, among others, and also interferes with at least one Daedric quest in the Sheogorad Region). However, this is easily fixed, and a patch is now available. Second, it includes a sound file that was apparently from the German version of the game (judging by the name); rename or copy the mod's Sound/Fx/Gizels_House02.wav (or copy another tavern ambient sound file you like) to Deseles_House02.wav. While this latter problem caused crashes in the Bethesda engine, it does not in OpenMW (if not fixed, you simply don't get the ambient sound while in Desele's House of Earthly Delights).
• 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.

Races, classes, birthsigns, factions

I have not toyed with these much yet.

• Dremora (Markynaz) Race 1.3 by Westly – Installed okay. I have not played as this race, and that seems to be all this mod adds by itself. I installed it because resources in it are required for Gatanas, Dremora (Markynaz) Companion. PC mod includes vampire head, both genders, and multiple head/hair options. There are other Dremora race mods, including the elaborate Playable Dremora (a.k.a. PC Dremora) by The Dremora Team and Militades; the extremely cheaty Dremora Clone by Jax Shadow; and Dremora and Winged Dremora Races by redwoodtreesprite a.k.a. RTS. I have not tried them.

Note-taking while in-game

• Chalk 3.1.0 by ManaUser – Working, though a bit tedious to use, and with some leveled-list consequences. Allows you to write "in the world" with chalk sticks, e.g. to label doors, draw arrows, etc. Comes in white, red, and glow-in-the-dark. 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 local 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, and it took so long I stopped. I also didn't like that it added chalk as random loot all over the place; no one needs that much chalk, and it's displacing the appearance of other, more useful items. This would probably be resolved by using a leveled list merging tool in Windows, but I don't use Windows.
• Journal Enhanced 1.1 by aerelorn – Incompatible with OpenMW, as it relies on an external program, Morrowind Enhanced (MWE).
• Take Notes 1.1 – Incompatible; requires MWSE.

Misc.

• Key Overhaul 1.1 – Seems to be working. Replaces some textures, but the main benefit is renaming so all [vanilla] keys are grouped in inventory.
• 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"? Alchemy sorter mods will not work with any of these pearls (unless specifically authored to support this mod). The "Colored Pearls" version of this is not compatible with OpenMW, just the base version (though it provides two colored ones, black and pink).
• Lower First Person Sneak Mode 1.01 – Working, and useful if you have a hard time telling if you're in sneak mode, which can happen if you have the toggle option on; if you don't, you don't need this mod – just let go of the sneak key! Only side effect is that the lower angle makes items on high shelves harder (rarely, impossible) to see and get in sneak mode. This has not often been a problem, and usually fixed by jumping onto something else, then sneaking.
• 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 and surreptitious changes to chests or to Golden Saint summoning scrolls for no reason, as the original mod did. See also Better Looking Liquor, Drugs, and Vials in the Meshes and textures 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, that are also known to not be fixed in OpenMW, stop occurring, without new problems being caused by the mod.
• 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. If you're a "thud 'n' blunder" player with no time for alchemy, and who isn't a low-level character desperately taking and selling ingredients, you won't notice or care about this mod's effect.
• Wayshrines of Vvardenfell 1.0 – Functional but massively cheaty. Puts healing shrines on all the roads, but only a few minutes apart. There are literally hundreds of them. This would have made sense if there was maybe one per major road at the mid-way point between major settlements.

Trivial and amusement

• Morrowind Achievements 0.5b – Working so far, though it clutters the Journal early in the game (you'll eventually trigger most or all of the "achievements", many of which are trivial, and won't see more Journal entries from the mod). It also has a book that shows you some playing stats, which is much more useful.
• Hunter's Achievements v1.0 by Trollf – Working so far, and uses its own book (for detailed kill stats). One or both of these achievements mods require a quill pen and inkwell to be in inventory. I keep the books side-by-side on the same shelf with one writing item on top of each, and update them one after the other, about once every game month.
• Morrowind Trading Cards by Danae – Severely incompatible. 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. Furthermore, several vanilla NPCs and locations that have been modded to have something to do with cards will crash the game when you enter those cells or Console-spawn those NPCs. 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 AddItem them to yourself; the cards cannot be added to them. If you give yourself the completed albums (different IDs), 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 Bethesda's 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, and speed up the night even more than usual. While 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.
• Uniform Script Fixes 1.0 – This prevents Imperial and Ordinator troops attacking you if you are wearing their armor (in the case of Imperial, only if you are not in the Imperial Legion faction). I wouldn't use this again, since the armor isn't good enough to waste a mod slot on this, and it might be fun to have to remember to take it off in certain contexts.
• Stripping mods – 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. I tried some early on to get NPCs to drop gear so I could examine it. Later, I figured out you can save your game, open the Console, click on the NPC, and do SetHealth 0 to get them to die on the spot for corpse examination, then revert to your save (because Console-killing then Resurrecting NPCs can break quests). If you get the item IDs, this technique can be used to remove items from a stock NPC if you want to re-dress them in something from a clothing mod. 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). Even the "de-equip rather than drop" mods can be used for cheating, namely to pickpocket items that were formerly equipped. You can do this without a cheat mod by repeatedly using the Disintegrate effect with Calm Humanoid to prevent being attacked while doing it, until the item breaks and is unequipped. Some strip mods (or strip commands in more general mods) also just seem to be intended as "in your imagination" roleplay things, like the command of this nature in Companion RPP. (That also has kissing requests, etc., that don't actually do anything other than produce positive or negative text responses). So, in the end, all stripping mods are pointless.

Racy

Consider this section either a pointer or a caveat, depending on your views/preferences regarding risqué material.

Some effort has been made to identify exposure-oriented clothing mods with materials that can be adapted well with other items for more practical outfits.

• Clutterwear by Illy a.k.a. Illuminiel – Adds various female clothing and armors in the form of bodysuits, high-heel boots, bustiers, tights, and so forth (sexy but not nudie) to several general merchant shops (two in Balmora alone), and also includes male leather-daddy gear like open vests and biker boots and tight leather pants. It's one of the few mods that provides anything for males that could qualify as "sexy". It's also quite high-end armor, and is unbalancing until you already have access to the better vanilla armors, so put off indulging in it until then. I'm listing this one first just because it's unusual for the male fetishy items. It's amusing to dress Caius Cosades in this stuff with the Console, instead of him always greeting you shirtless and in dirty-looking cheap pants.
• The Shrine of Mephala 1.0 by Westly (a Morag Tong enhancement mod I have not tested yet) also includes midriff-baring armor outfits for males as well as females. I'll do a proper entry on it as a mod when I play as MT next time.
• Better Bodies, nude and "peanut gallery" (topless, with panties) versions – See main entry in "Texture Replacers" section. The practical use for one of these is getting various clothing mods to not look like crap due to crude underwear visible under elegant strappy gowns and such. It's also a realism mod – if you strip a corpse, you can't unsee that, and it kinda makes you think about the virtual lives you're ending and whether you're callously defiling their bodies to sell their cheap armor for pocket change (for one thing, it's made me leave alive everyone who does not attack me first at bandit/smuggler caves, Daedric shrines, outcast Ashlander camps, and Propylon strongholds). But I think we all know the real purpose of this is probably just the "boobies and dongs" factor. The two things I don't like about this mod are the excessively large and elevated breasts that look like bad '90s pornstar boobjobs, and the almost total lack of pubic hair on anyone but a few males, another porno influence. It would be much more lore-friendly if all the bodies had bush (like just about everyone in the real world did until the waxing fad started a generation ago), perhaps in varying levels by race – I would expect Orcs and Nords to be particularly hirsute, and elves of various sorts to be much less so, with Imperials and Bretons in the middle. Some hair down there also makes the nude mods a bit less anatomically in-your-face, at least with the females. I actually appreciate, though, the level of detail, and they didn't skimp on the males in this regard, either. The human[oid] figure is nothing to be ashamed of, after all.
• Sexy Creatures 1.1 by Dankbud – Works, and is very good. This is a mesh and texture replacer (high resolution, and much less cartoony than vanilla) for the Golden Saint, Dremora (turned into a female, and doesn't affect the Dremora Lord), Winged Twilight, and Spriggan, each installable separately (or you can combine their folders to free up mod slots). It is markedly superior to Femmons in virtually every way (and the latter doesn't redo the Dremora). This mod's Dremora is a black-haired variant of the Dremora (Markynaz) Race (see above), and thus distinguishable (barely) from Gatanas, Dremora (Markynaz) Companion. If you run with Ranked Dremora, you will not get the female Dremora from Sexy Creatures, which is just as well, since the ones in RD are way better. Anyway, the primary value of SC, if you aren't into animated nekkidness for its own sake, is surely the Winged Twilight: it's downright unsettling to be attacked by a nude, screeching dragon-woman-demon-thing – and the harpy of classical mythology is bare-breasted. So are many goddesses and female demonic figures in historical religions and their myths, because the breast was not so sexualized in earlier times as it is in modern Western culture (only since the Victorian era). So, it's kind of fitting for the Golden Saint and Dremora, even if the motivation for this mod was probably more toward the sexualizing side. A separate patch (available at Nexus Mods) optionally makes the Golden Saint not bare-breasted, but retains all the visual improvements. I don't like the nudity on the Spriggan; it just looks silly (then again, the Spriggan looks silly no matter what).
• Femmons – Works, and is an improvement over the original meshes and textures of the Golden Saint and Winged Twilight. Also replaces the Spriggan, but I did not encounter any before I replaced this mod with Sexy Creatures, which does the same thing better.
• Bob's Armory [1] – See above, under Player homes and businesses. It also includes a boatload of femme clothing armor (high armor rating, poor enchantability, and middling texture quality, but great meshes), mostly in a lingerie style, though some of it is more practical, and much of it can be layered with clothes pretty well. Bob's Armory II (in the "Merchants and Items" section) also includes some stuff like this but is mostly historical arms and armor.
• Balmora Expansion 1.4 [TB], with BE Fixes (see main entry in "Major Overhauls", above) includes a bathhouse and brothel (but the latter's feature to take a dancer to a "love room" does not actually work in OpenMW, so it's just another strip club). Technically, this is a realism mod; a city would likely have these places, absent an anti-nudity moralizing theocracy. These features are out of the way of normal gameplay; you really have to go looking for them, and no quests I'm aware of take you to them. Some of this is pretty puerile, like excessively flirty and exhibitionistic females (maybe males, too, if you're a PC female?) at the bathhouse. The NPC bathrobe seller's name provides a quick laugh, though, and, well, you can get a bathrobe, which is amusing. (Would be even better if it had Exquisite enchantability. You could face Dagoth Ur looking like you just came from a spa.)
• Sexy [type] Armor series by Cenobite (mesh work by NeoLiv and Durgoth), where "[type]" is one of: Bonemold, Daedric, Ebony, Glass, Ice, or Ordinator – These require Better Bodies 2.0 or later, and do not require Tribunal or Bloodmoon even where they include resources from them (High Ordinator and Ice Armor). There's lot of gratuitous nudity and near-nudity, with "armor" that would not be effective at all, but there are a few interesting pieces. Most are sold, a few are available free. Purists will probably complain that Daedric should be almost impossible to get, and not be for sale, but they'll object to many, many Daedric-related mods, and are forgetting you can get a vanilla set for free after one not-very-challenging fight, as long as you've already got your Corprus cured in the Main Quest. I'm disappointed these mods didn't include a lot more tamer options, more along the prettied and de-bulked rather than raunchified side. However, many of the "naughty" ones either accidentally have a black bodysuit effect under them due to a compatibility problem between their alpha channel (transparency) work and OpenMW – and this black effect is arguably an improvement – or they layer to very good effect (sometimes it must be done with loose vanilla clothes, sometimes with tight, Better Bodies mod clothes, depending on the armor item), and skirts can be worn over most of the teensy-weensy armorial bottoms, especially if of approximately the same color in case they clip a little at the waist. The enchantment values tend to be higher than they should be; to not cheat, only enchant them as much as the comparable vanilla piece can be enchanted (these can be looked up at UESPWiki). The included footwear is all armor. Some of the mods include skirt form-factor items that are armor (greaves) and some that are just clothing. Below are mod-by-mod notes on experiments in making practical-looking outfits with this stuff.
  • Sexy Glass Armor Mark II – Functional mod, but these four sets of minimal cuirasses and greaves would not be. It covers very little, and even where it does, it's mostly see-through to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the piece (to my eyes, only the Alpha One cuirass does not have this effect; all of the panties I mean "greaves" are translucent). The one pair of boots look pretty cool, though are more like shoes with hose; these would go well with a short green or black dress, and they can also layer with a few pants for more contrast. Sold in Ald'ruhn by a new vendor, for very high prices, and have a cheaty (Daedric-level) armor rating. But that's okay if you use them on companions to help keep them alive while running around dressed like a combination of Barbarella and a fetish model, I guess (especially if you've nerfed their combat, as described in the section on companion tips). The vendor also has a Glass Longbow (damage: 1-35).
  • Sexy Glass Armor 1.1 – Completely different items from the above, tamer, more practical looking, and with the alpha glitch causing the ninja bodysuit effect. As a consequence of this bug, the "Sexy" and "Prudish" variants are visually identical, so there's effectively one cuirass and one greaves. The two high boots included will not work with the boyshorts greaves in the same mod, because the latter's black alpha clips with those boots (one pair of which looks pretty good, in a neon-green dominatrix way, while the other is a bit goofy – thigh-high pumps with armor bits stuck on the front). The shorts will work with the Mark II boots (above), and many less outlandish shorter boots. The vest cuirass looks pretty nice, and fairly practical, especially when layered with a shirt. Sold in Ald'ruhn by the original outdoor armorer, priced about the same as regular Glass Armor, and with the originals' armor rating. I would have toned down the neon color of the boots a bit and included more black, to better match the vanilla set.
  • Sexy Bonemold Armor – Working. Sold by a new vendor in Ald'ruhn, with Bonemold-appropriate stats and prices. One set of: tight and midriff-abbreviated cuirass, greaves in the form of chaps, and heeled boots; the first two items are each available in a more and less revealing option. These layer very well with tight clothes underneath.
  • Sexy Daedric Armor 1.1 – New merchant in the Assarnatamat Daedric shrine (near Forth Moonmoth and Caldera). The items have same black alpha channel bug, again with good results. Includes two cuirasses which look fantastic (especially on Gatanas Dremora (Markynaz) Companion, in the companions section above), that differ only a little (one was probably partly see-through, but is not because of the glitch). The two boyshorts greaves differ only in a minor detail (one was apparently crotchless but has lost this effect). There's also a "sash" (loincloth) that the bug has turned into a full, long skirt and looks great (equips as greaves), and an animated cape (equips as left pauldron). The armor is priced and has the armor rating of Daedric gear, and the skirt and cape have lower armor ratings and are lighter (though still Heavy class), which makes sense. The boots again clip with the black alpha of the greaves, and are thigh-high pumps, which can be worn with something else. Other boots that are not skin-tight do not clip with the greaves. Also includes two just-clothing skirts, one of which has an insane enchantability level.
  • Sexy Daedric Armor Mark II – Working. Two cuirasses, three greaves, two pair of boots (all different from the 1.1 set), plus one set of pauldrons, and two dresses. Had for free at the Assurnabitashpi Daedric Shrine (W of Urshilaku camp), and there's three of everything, which is a bit much; there's a patch available that makes you buy them. The cuirasses are Daedric faces over the chest; the exposure-oriented one (guess what shows through the eye holes?) can be layered with a tight shirt from a mod, but clips with vanilla ones. Two greaves are thigh plates with a crotch covering or just a belt, and layer okay with black mod underwear, but do not work with vanilla pants (clipping, and part of the leg disappears). The third greaves are the just the thigh parts of the vanilla ones and layer with vanilla pants. The pauldrons are Daedric makeovers of High Ordinator (Hands of Almalexia) armor. Boots: a) an all-new, great looking pair that are tight thigh-highs, and b) a reworking of the vanilla boots to also include the same thigh plates of vanilla greaves (these work with the boyshorts-greaves of version 1.1). Also included are two exposure-oriented just-clothes dresses (shirts), that layer with vanilla pants, loose mod pants, and tight, small mod tops (bras) that don't equip as shirts (e.g. some mod items that equip as pants are basically top-and-bottom bikinis). A really nice set can be put together with parts of both of these Daedric mods, plus vanilla gauntlets and shield.
  • Sexy Ebony Armor 1.1 – Working, and available from a new vendor in Ald'ruhn. One top is breast-exposing, the other is "side boob", and neither will layer well with much of anything, but can be used with a few vanilla shirts (mostly Common) without looking too terrible (you mostly see shirt). The miniskirt greaves are layerable with vanilla pants, but not most BB ones from mods. Both the tops and bottoms come in opaque and translucent. One pair of boots is another shoe-and-stockings number as in Sexy Glass Armor Mark II, and the other is high-heel pumps with armor plates on the front as in 1.1 of that mod and the Daedric mods. Vanilla armor boots may not work with these pauldron-skirts, though BB ones from mods will (this may be true of some or all of the other mods in this series).
  • Sexy Ice Armor 1.1 – Available from vanilla merchant Thongar in Khuul. Like some of the others, has the black bodysuit effect. This looks okay with some pieces, but not one of the boots. Both the boots are decorative pumps. The top is a bubble-chested thing like the Alpha One cuirass in Sexy Glass Armor Mark II. The bottom is boyshorts. Because of the alpha issue, both the opaque and translucent options came out opaque, and thus visually identical. I didn't test layerability with these, since they have the bodysuit glitch and look fine without having to add underthings.
  • Sexy Ordinator Armor 2 – Has the alpha-as-black issue again. Includes Vivec Ordinator and High Ordinator (Her Hands) variants. New merchant in prison area of Ministry of Truth, Vivec, and has quite a lot of options; they cost about what they should (which is a whole lot, especially for High Ordinator), and have armor ratings one would expect. For regular Indoril: there are three tops in varying levels of intended coverage, and five bottoms (two boyshorts/panties greaves that only differ at the belt, and three varied-coverage skirt-greaves), plus two pairs of boots. Most of the tops and bottoms look great with the bodysuit effect, and the bottoms have all become long skirts with armorial accents, due to the glitch. One pair of boots is great, a short and less clunky version of the vanilla ones, while the other is a thigh-high and looks funny because it has silver feet. Also included are the female Ordinator helm from another mod by Sheikizza (less useful because Sheikizza's original just adds a F mesh and texture to the vanilla helm, and it adapts to M or F correctly; this one is an F-specific separate helm), and an open-faced one that does not work in OpenMW (floats above the head!), plus pauldrons (labeled "Silver" though they are not) that are the upper-arm piece without the bulky shoulder piece. The tall boots clip with the panties/boyshorts, but can be worn with something else. The Hands of Almalexia variants: Essentially the same, except one of the boyshorts cuirasses (the better looking one) is mis-coded as boots and is thus pretty useless; no helm variants are included; and two of the cuirasses are visually identical with the alpha glitch. The mod's vendor also supplies some stock parts (gauntlets, shield). Overall, some of this looks really good (armored Temple priestess?) especially with an open-face helm that works, and/or another modder's female Ordinator helm that looks better than Sheikizza's, though hers isn't bad.
• Gothic Attire Complete 1.1 by Qarl and Cenobite (see main entry in Merchants and Items section, above) – Includes lots of racy clothing as well as tamer options. The racy stuff layers well, and the high enchantability means the underwear is useful as "pants" and "shirts" with skimpy outerwear even for high-level characters. If you have trouble with that, be aware that mod armor that is skin-tight will clip with skin-tight mod clothing and often make it disappear; one layer needs to sit a little above the other, so it can take experimentation.
• Kat's Kastle [TB+BM] by Kathryn, Lidi, Tommy Khajiit, NeoLiv, et al. (see entry above in Merchants and Items) – About half the 1,200+ offerings are on the racy side, mostly the more so the deeper you go into the castle. Some of them remain quite elegant despite exposure, not unlike much of female dress in classical Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian art. But other stuff is outright fetishwear. It's almost all clothing not armor, and the vast majority are dresses, teddies, and swimsuits that equip as shirts (with disappointingly low enchanting values despite high prices), plus lots of boots/shoes (higher enchant than they should have). One or two shops have not mannequins but models that are regular NPCs you can get to follow you with Command Humanoid. Some of the male NPCs have open-to-bare-the-chest poet shirts, tight pants, kilts, cool boots, etc, which you can get by killing them or using the Console; none of the male wares are for sale.
• Mods to get NPCs to strip – See notes in the Hacks, testing tools, exploits, and cheats section.
• Dancer (stripper) mods – See Dancers ("exotic" and otherwise) subsection of NPC additions and changes, above.

Increased modesty

In the opposite direction of the above, if you feel even the vanilla underwear is immodest, you have at least a few options.

• CB's Better Bodies v1.0 by Cantina Boy – This is a mesh and texture add-on for Better Bodies that expands the built-in underwear of the no-nude version, to cover even more (both male and female). It's a bit like early-20th-century swimwear.
• House of Earthly Delights, Harem Style 1.0 by NioLiv – Puts Better Bodies veils and harem/genie outfits on the dancers and staff at the strip club in Suran. You can also buy the outfits. (These are also included, in even more variety, in Kat's Kastle in the Merchants and items section, above.)
• Suran Dancers 1.2 by Misty Moon – Puts tops and sarongs on the ladies at Desele's House of Earthly Delights. Pre-Better Bodies. Also fixes the problem of dancers not staying on their stages (there are many other mods for that if you just want that feature).
• Consider also adding any of several mods that increase the variety and availability of Exquisite Robes (or other robes if you don't care about enchantment value).

Note to aspiring modders: Given how much critical material has been written about the impracticality and unrealism of "boob-plate armor" (Google it), the most-needed thing in this category is mesh work to produce "boob shelf" or "bosom bubble" cuirasses, like those seen in various films and other games, providing bust room in an across-the-chest manner without a division between the breasts. To de-emphasize breasts in this game, this solution is required, because the breasts will clip through a flat male cuirass (if you are using a no-underwear Better Bodies version and the character has no shirt, you'll get bare breasts showing through armor; if not, you'll get the shirt, or the permanent bra of the non-nude body model, erupting from the cuirass). There are numerous, flattering approaches to the idea, any of which could be adapted to the rather prominent "rack size" in Better Bodies, but no one seems to have done it for Morrowind yet: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

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.

• Freed Slaves Counter Issued 1.01 – I have started the Twin Lamps quest line since installing this, and have not received a counter yet. I don't need one, since Morrowind Achievements (above) provides one in its book.
• 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 onward kept messing up my game. I would desperately like one, and will try some on my next play-through.
• 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 things 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 may badly break it" problem, I can't reasonably test by removing this mod and seeing if it's still raining (which might not be a good test anyway, if it would continue raining for a set period once it's started regardless what started it).
• More Gondoliers 1.0 – I don't know the vanilla Vivec gondoliers and their destinations well enough to known if this is working. All I know is there needs to be more of them and they all need to go to all gondolier destinations, because even with this installed, the half-assed gondolier system is a pointless waste of realtime.
• Gondolier Destinations 1.0 – Ditto.

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.

• 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 companions (a mod one, Jasmine, not a stock one) disappeared. However, this could be coincidental timing. I restarted and recovered her with he console. Update: After removing this, all the the frequent FPS lags I was getting during rain stopped, so it was definitely this mod causing it.
• Meteors 1.2 – Similar story to the above; I had it installed for over a month and only ever saw a single meteor. It did not appear to causes any problems though.
• Shut Up! – Keeps NPCs from chattering at you unless you are looking directly at them and are close. 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. I badly want this to work, so NPCs stop constantly babbling the same stock stuff at me for no reason.
• 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 merchant had no inventory (a problem still affecting the nearby potted plant seller). 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, though. The armor work is by Jeremy McGuinn, variants of what he put out in his Knights of Tamriel mod series.

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. Sometimes also missing exteriors (e.g., nothing but a door and a glass-like hole in the ground you can walk on, where the building should be.
  • 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 big "!" markers). 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.
  • On restarting the game app and loading a savegame, the player character is falling. Re-opening the save fixes the issue. Sometimes quickly doing FixMe in the console also fixes it, but usually not. Another option is casting Recall, and another is using TCL in the Console and "flying" up to where you're supposed to be, then toggling it back off. It's easier to just reload the savegame. Sometimes the problem goes away, and sometimes when it does it comes back. It's been happening to me consistently for months now.
• Three interiors in Mournhold have lost their floors; in one you fall into water, in the others you're falling in a void. On exterior, that of the temple, is also missing and there's just a door and a big, glassy hole where the building should be. In each case, 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, 100, 1. 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 Private Mobile Base mod is the prime suspect as of this writing.
  • The problem also appeared in Raven Rock (another Private Mobile Base location), as the town is built, and it affects several NPC homes, the player's factor mansion, and the general store (presumably also the smithy if you built that instead). Does not affect the Hlaalu stronghold built at Odai Plateau.
• 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 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. I don't know what mod caused this behavior change. If it happens to you, and you want him there and on duty, the simplest solution is to open the console with him visible, click on him, and then enter StopCombat, followed by SetFight,30 and SetFlee,30 to reset him to typical NPC defaults. If you have a companion who has reacted and is already hostile, they will also need a StopCombat, and may need Calm Humanoid and to be taken out of and put back into follower mode.
• A few wide-open texture seams here and there, including at least three you can fall into and get stuck; just use TCL to get out. Don't use player->FixMe; it rarely actually sends you to a useful location and can make matters worse. One mod that creates several of these is the otherwise functional Imperial Airship, though this may be due to conflict with other mods including more landscape than they need to. If so, this may be resolvable by loading IA later.
• 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, or vice versa (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 underlying pants, shirts, or whatever, that are approximately the same color as the armor item they clip with. 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 don't have to. 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).
• 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. I encounter many problems like this (over a dozen broken quests so far), some of which may be mod problems, but some OpenMW bugs. A definite mod example: in one test game, Fargoth did not do his animated "go to my hiding place" routine, 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; he apparently approaches his hiding place from random directions, and sometimes they do not conflict with the fence. I think it is the same problem as some NPCs getting stuck against walls, under bridges, etc. (see above).