Up-to-date mod guide for TES Morrowind [closed]

Question

There used to be a good blog about installing mods for Morrowind that some day I would have liked to step through to mod this excellent game, but I've simply had no time. Last time I checked, it was down, though...

The URL was: http://www.somethingfornobody.com/2011/morrowind-modding-guide/

If anyone knows where it's gone, please let me know.

This is a beauty of a game on itself but becomes a complete dream with the right mods. The problem is that there are over hundred mods that make the game significantly better, both concerning graphics, gameplay, sound, fixes and general improvements. There are also a bunch of tools like Wrye Mash to keep the game sane and playable instead of having continuous CTD's.

Since I really would like to play this game with the experience I once had (with too low FPS, see below), I wonder if there's an up-to-date 2011 or 2012 mod guide, with a list of mods and tools. I know somewhere in 2011 a bunch of mods were packed together but I'm not in favour of doing it that way cause I'll need to spend a lot of time to remove those I don't like plus I'll miss others. And the ones in the package will not be in their latest version, too.

Parcticularly important to me is graphics, with the improvements of MGE XE. There is one problem though, at some point when you make so much graphics improvements, the framerate becomes low no matter which machine you have. I have done that on a rig with an AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3,4 gHz, an nVidia GTX560 and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. The game was on an SSD. When monitoring CPU/GPU load, they weren't even used to their full extent, but the framerate was about 12FPS. I think it's just engine limitations...

There are a lot of good sites that catalogue mods, but I'm really looking for a guide. And I already know about http://morrowind2009.wordpress.com/ but this is slightly outdated and doesn't mention MGE XE, just MGE.

I intend to use the guide to get a good basic install and expand with more mods that I already know. Such guide brings the rather huge advantage that the combination of mods in it has been well tested. Anyone who has modded their Morrowind install will know that conflicts are unavoidable, and fatal in a lot of cases.

Answer 1

I remember that guide and it was brilliant.

Knots' Morrowind Modding Guide

The guide you linked to is Knots' Morrowind Modding Guide and appears to be recently down temporarily or gone permanently. Knots recently tweeted that he made a backup in case of site outages, but it's apparently not up-to-date and it's not loading for me. Knots' guide is available as a Google Cache apparently though! It was so slow to load for me that I nearly gave up on that tab (I guess Google had to go to the back of the warehouse and find it in a dusty file cabinet for me…) and Google Cache pages eventually expire, so if you manage to get it to load, use your browser's "Save Page" feature to grab a copy. It's ugly and unformatted, but it has the images and it will do the job. It might only be down temporarily, as the Google Cache has links to Knots' tweets dated October 28th, 2012, so it's a recent thing and not (yet) a case of a linkrot.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has an archived copy of Knots' Morrowind Modding Guide last crawled 2012-08-20, before it went offline. There are other older versions of the guide at the Wayback Machine too.

Other guides

However, Knots concerned himself almost exclusively with graphical modding, and it sounds like you're interested in guides to more than just graphical mods.

MD's Morrowind Modding Guide doesn't touch on graphics – except to recommend MGE for its integrated Morrowind Script Extender that's more stable than the standalone one – referring readers to Knot's guide instead. Despite that, it provides a good solid base of mods to start from.

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Both of those together should give you an excellent start to a beautiful Morrowind experience.