How to Mod Morrowind using OpenMW and Mod Organizer 2

hey kids welcome to robshed hotspot and welcome to a new tutorial video today we're going to be talking about how to mod one of the best rpgs ever made morrowind you'll find most of the instructions you'll need to mod morrowind using openmw on the excellent website moddingopenmw.com i highly suggest you follow along with the guides provided on this site which includes mod lists and various links to utilities thank you to ristos for creating this site and for featuring this video please note that this video is designed for windows users it is however possible to install morrowind using openmw and mod organizer 2 on a mac or linux system i don't have one handy right now but instructions will be provided on modding openmw.com for those systems to start off we're going to need a legal copy of morrowind which you can get at steam or good old games i would recommend installing the game on an ssd if you have one this will speed up load times you're also going to need to create an account on nexusmods.com that's where we're going to be downloading most of our mods next up we're going to create a couple of folders to keep things organized so head over to your c drive or whatever drive you're going to install then you want to install the mods on create a new folder call it modding now we're going to head over to our downloads folder and we're going to create a folder called modding temp this is where we'll be storing anything we download related to morrowind just to keep it separate from any other files you might have in your downloads folder now we're going to download openmw to go to openmw.org downloads i highly recommend downloading uh one of the nightly versions these versions have the latest features and some mods require them the nightly versions can be found at the get lab page following this link the download button there go to windows ninja engine release let's put this in our modding temp folder in the modding temp folder now you'll find the artifacts.zip we're going to extract that throughout this guide i highly recommend whenever you extract a zip folder we're going to have to do this a few times whether you're using 7-zip or winrar whatever you're using it's your choice but i really recommend extracting it to a folder some some of the zip files found on these modding websites have a lot of loose files in them and you can lose a bunch of files all over your downloads folder it can turn into a horrendous mess so just extract everything to its own folder like that inside that folder we find yet another zip but don't hit extract here hit extract 2 and the folder name let's open up a second windows explorer window we're going to go to our c drive in the modding folder here and we're going to grab this openmw underscore msv etc and we're going to drag it over there that's the main openmw program folder now open up openmw launcher.exe first time you run it you're going to see this message run installation wizard now we need to tell openmw where morrowind is so we're going to select existing installation if you installed it with steam it'll be in c program files x86 theme steamapps common morrowind we're gonna go to data files and we're gonna select morrowind.esm dot esm stands for elder scrolls master now we hit next we can leave these options ticked and click finish this is the openmw launcher you can see that tribunal and blood moon are already in there and you can also set your resolution to the native resolution of your pc for example we can quit openmw for now next we're going to grab mod organizer 2. you can find it at the nexus mods website it it may be in either the skyrim section of the website or the fallout section it's the same program for all these games whenever you're downloading mods from the nexus mods website make sure you don't don't press don't click these download links up here go down here and click files sometimes you're going to need to pick particular ones for today let's download the installer and we're going to put that in our modding temp folder once again now we'll head over to our modding temp folder once that downloads done double click the installer we're going to be installing this in the modding folder in a folder called m02 do the recommended install so we're going to launch mod organizer when we finish it here we have a couple of choices and this is a bit confusing uh like the description here it might not make a lot of sense to you so i'm just gonna i'm gonna explain it briefly uh basically if you want to use one copy of mod organizer 2 to mod multiple games let's say you have skyrim fallout 3 and morrowind or something you can just click create new instance the mods are going to be stored in a hidden folder inside your user account folder if you want all of your mods to be installed within the c modding folder that we created you can click portable so i'm going to click portable here we're going to select more wind you're going to have an option to run a tutorial when you first start the program it's actually quite a good tutorial i would recommend it for if it's your very first time using mod organizer i'm not going to do it today because i'm going to show you most of the things you need to know so it's up to you also going to see this pop up here that says register this is going to register mod organizer with the with your nexus login so it's very very handy and i highly recommend doing this so let's hit yes you go into tools nexus i'm not going to show you because it shows my username but if you go into tools nexus you can double check to make sure that it's connected to your nexus account head back over to modding openmw.com hit getting started managing mods and click this link here mod organizer to openmw we're going to go to the download page once again we are on the vortex go to files click manual download and we're going to download that to our modding temp folder in the modding temp folder we're going to extract that file now we're going to our c modding folder we're going to open mo2 open the plugins folder take openmw.ico and openmwxport copy and paste you're also going to need an up-to-date version of python head over to python.org downloads and install that if you don't know what python is don't worry about it we it's not like a piece of software we need to learn how to use it just needs to be installed for things to work just gonna double check that that plug-in is installed we open up mod organizer two again click on this button here you can see that there's now an export to openmw button now we're ready to start modding head back over to modding openmw.com the getting started menu here head over to tweak settings we're gonna go into our documents folder my games openmw we're gonna open the settings.config file if there is no settings.config file here right click click new text document and name it settings.config i highly recommend reading through the information on this page here it's going to tell you what the different settings do but if you don't understand what some of these settings mean or you're just feeling lazy the recommended settings down here all tweaks are excellent so you can just select all this text here copy and paste it straight into your settings.config file save the file and exit if you are running on a low end system you should definitely read the performance tweaks section here and probably not use these settings uh obviously morrowind is a fairly old game but if you're if you're running it on say a laptop that doesn't have a dedicated graphics card you might want to turn some of these settings off also very important make sure that you're in the documents folder my games openmw and your and not in the openmw main folder which has a file called settings default don't edit this file at this point we're going to choose what kind of experience we want to have so we can go back to moddingopen.mw.com but to browse all lists here there are a number of recommended mod lists as you can see a total overhaul mod list has 253 mods so i this is what i use uh i use most of the mods on this list there's a few that i've excluded so if it's your first time playing morrowind ever i would recommend either the i heart vanilla or the i heart vanilla director's cut which includes tamriel rebuilt if it's your first time modding morrowind you might want to go for say the expanded vanilla one there's also a graphics overhaul that really just only changes graphics and doesn't change any gameplay mechanics and then there's the total overhaul if you're doing a total overhaul i would recommend having a dedicated graphics card uh probably at least eight gigabytes of ram and it's also going to be about 25 or even up to 50 gigabytes depending on what texture mods you choose and stuff like that sometimes you'll have a choice between uh 2k and 4k textures and things so if you're going to go a full 4k total overhaul mod you're gonna you're gonna need a pretty decent graphics card for the purpose of demonstration i'm gonna head over to the i heart vanilla director's cut and we can see the list of mods we basically got 20 things here that we need to download the best way to use modding openmw.com is to click one of these lists and hit the start this list button that will put us to step one and and as we move through the mods here we're just going to go next and it'll follow through and that way you won't lose you won't lose your order if you follow these lists exactly you won't need to do any complicated changes to your load order uh everything these mod lists work there there are not conflicts in these mod lists if you follow the instructions so let's download our first mod uh when you're using this website i highly recommend reading the descriptions obviously and most importantly the usage notes uh things like requires bsa we'll talk about that after and there's also the list of plugins here occasionally you'll see suggested folder structures and things like that there's a lot a lot of useful information on these pages let's start by opening the download page for patch for purists in a new window we can see that it is a mod on the nexus mods so head over to files here we're going to grab the latest version and now we can use the mod manager download you're going to get a window like this i'm going to say open nxm link proxy and hit always allow and then click this button that'll that'll bring up mod organizer 2. in mod organizer 2 we can head over to on the right panel here we can head over to the downloads and if you have any downloads in progress you'll see a status bar here you can see that this one has already been downloaded to install mods very simple you just double click here it's going to prompt you to give a name to the mod most of the time you can stick with the default name there are some instances where we're not going to do that and this is the quick install menu so we're going to hit ok and then the mod is going to appear on our mod list on the left here it's also going to show installed in the status here over here we're going to tick this box here to enable the mod and now when we head over to plugins we can see that that the three plugins that come with patch for purists is installed to double check that we've done things correctly we can go down to we can go to over here we can see the plugin list if you need to change the order of the plugins you can click and drag in the plugins panel here so generally speaking this esm esm stands for elder scrolls master esp stands for elder scrolls plugin so generally speaking esm should come before esps and it's as simple as that we can head over to the next mod read the description here see that this this mod actually has a conflict with better balanced combat which is on another one of the lists so you know you can follow these pages here and get information if you're looking at particular mods you can see here as well that it says download both packages we're going to download the main link here using the mod manager download to our downloads tab here double click it keep that name unofficial morrowind official plugins patched okay we do need the merged and compatibility versions according to the instructions here so we'll grab that now when we when we double click this this patch here this is what's called a bain package installer so bain installers are used mostly on the nexus mods platform they give you options in terms of which parts of mods that you install we can actually see on openm on modding openmw that we're going to use the data files from the main file so the icons meshes sound textures but we're going to use the plugin from the merging compatibility file so in order to sort that out if you see here when we look in our plugins here we see that we have a whole bunch of these plugins here that come with umop right click on the mod here go to information you can also double click if you want to get this you can see optional esps so we're actually going to take these plugins and we're going to stick them over to optional close now you see that they disappear so we've downloaded the merging compatibility versions i'm going to double click that we know that we need the umop compatibility merged now we're going to actually merge this with the previous mod because they don't need to be in they don't need to have separate names so we can press ok uh don't hit the replace button here hit the merge button now we look at our plugins we can see that this plugin here needs to be enabled so we can either click it here and enable it we can also see in this one here that we're now using the merged plug-in just leave it there and leave these ones over there make sure we enable that i'm not going to go through all these in order but the the first few here allow me to demonstrate a few features of mod organizer 2 so for the morrowind optimization patch here we're going to go to the download page we're going to use the mod manager download again double click this we see another bain installer so if you don't know what to click here look at the bottom where it says suggested folder paths on the website we can see that we need zero zero core zero one fixed vanilla textures and zero two lake fielding antisuck so here we have some instructions basically uh open modding openmw.com is suggesting that we we put a folder inside this mod folder um but since we're using mo2 we don't really need to do it that way so we're going to uh we need to download this archive here we're going to put it in our modding temp folder anything that doesn't download through uh anything that other that doesn't download directly from the nexus into mo2 we're going to put here we can see the folder is called trees.zip head back over to mod organizer two we can actually enable the morrowind optimization patch here uh when you enable you can see that this mod here is overwriting the previous one uh so don't worry too much about that we can see that when there's a minus button there it means that something further down the list is overwriting it and this one is showing you which mods it overwrites if you're following the order on the website you don't need to worry about this these these there shouldn't be any conflicts here so we so when we're not using a nexus link directly we can hit install a new mod from an archive we're going to navigate to our downloads folder we're going to go to modding temp we're going to find that trees folder and it's going to give you a little tutorial on how to do this here but i'm going to show you so let's click through that um this you're going to see this warning occasionally what this means is that the mod is not formatted in a way where mod organizer 2 knows what the files are but we know we know what the folder structure is supposed to be because it's given to us here so we need to create a folder called prefix uh meshes and f and we're going to put the files inside that so basically what we can actually do here in a right click data files create directory we're going to call it trefix okay we're going to right click here create directory meshes great directory f okay now we can take all these files select them like that just as though you were in a windows explorer window click and drag them down to f okay mod organizer 2 now needs to know what the data folder is so we're going to right click prefix and we're going to set as data files directory then we can give the the mod a name so that we remember what it is so i'll just call it mop prefix or you can call it prefix or whatever you want and then hit ok and we can enable that mod just make sure that it's after the morrowind optimization patch and any time that we need to if there are mods where the website recommends that you make changes to folders and names you can also right click you can also right click the mod here click open and explorer and you can also do those kinds of changes like moving files around or maybe even renaming file names in windows explorer it'll just shortcut you into windows explorer and you can do it there so here we have a mod that actually ships with an installer which is really cool mod organizer 2 will run the installer for us which is fantastic so some of the times again there'll be there'll be choices to make here sometimes there's even preview windows if you're confused about which options to pick uh remember lots of there's lots of information uh given on this on the website so i like the interior sunrays for example make different choices here and we can see here for example that uh if you're using tamriel rebuilt you need a tamriel rebuilt patch we hit yes if we're going to use dark mole egg mar in this case we're not going to so then we have some options here just make sure you don't pick patches for mods that you're not going to install so we're not going to install windows if you're confused about whether the windows mod for example is is going to be used in this list just you can always go to the back to the website here and just go like open up a page with the the full mod list sort of go down and see oh there's no dark modeling so i'm not going to use that we're not going to use windows you don't need that patch a lot of these are just choices though we hit install we can see here so for this mod for example graphic herbalism uh we can see that we depending on what models we're using we may need some patches and we're definitely going to need the patches for project atlas even if we're doing the vanilla install we'll grab the patches and replacers optional file as well as the main file here just make sure the main one is enabled if if we needed to install any of these patches if we leave the name the same up here we can actually merge the patches straight into the into the same mod in this case that we probably shouldn't because we actually need one of these patches needs to come it needs to be applied after another mod so let's just cancel that for now we'll just leave it there for now and we need to install project atlas first so let's do that once we have project atlas installed it's here in the load order and enabled we can go back and grab the gh patches and replacers there's actually a separate page on the website for this to tell us which ones we need here so we can see that we want just number 12 atlas smooth bc mushrooms or the vanilla one if you didn't use the smooth one there we go now once again we don't want to leave the same we don't want to leave the same name up here because otherwise it's going to overwrite the first mod and it needs to come after project atlas so we actually do need it to be a separate mod on the list so just name this something that makes sense to you i just call it vh patches replacers for example and also it's usually there's name suggestions up here i usually go something like that and enable that mod uh one thing you might notice is the the version column here telling you that mods are out of dates i honestly i would just ignore that uh this this is not particularly this information itself is not particularly up to date i wouldn't pay attention much to these so don't worry about these little warnings here um if you're you're using this website you you should not need to pay attention to those i've worked my way through the list here and i'm actually on step 11. which is the tamriel rebuilt mod probably the most interesting and one of the best mods ever made for any game ever i'm going to grab the hd version here of the data file download it straight into straight into mo2 the tamriel rebuilt is a mod that requires us to register bsas as you can see here there are a number of mods especially on the longer lists on this website that require you to register bsas whenever you need to register bsas go to documents my games open mw and it's going to be in openmw dot config we open this file we hit the top there are vsas for morrowind and the official expansions and these are labeled fallback dash archive so we can actually just grab one for tamriel already built here and paste it in any other mods that you need to do this for it's just going to be in here like this also there are some of the graphics mods that require you to paste other fallbacks in here not the fallback archives but these other settings here like related to light and clouds and stuff like that you need to make any changes to those that's always going to be in the openmw.config file which is in your documents my games openmw folder any changes you make here just hit save and close it okay so here we have a mod that was made specifically for openmw and it uses the omw add-on file format we're gonna manually download this mod into our modding temp folder we're gonna unzip this folder we're going to go in here and we're going to change omw add-on to esp also another uh another name change that we need to do in here because there's a special character that uh that doesn't work so i'm gonna rename that just hit yes omw add-ons can be changed to dot esp so that mod organizer 2 can read them for the time being there's basically no difference in terms of the file format so don't worry about that i've had that confirmed from multiple sources now in order to install it in mod organizer 2 we're going to need to zip it back up again so just add to archive just change the name auto ammo equip for omw for example going to use the install button here grab the new archive that we've made and there we go take a look at our plugins list here just make sure that it works there it is so once you've installed all the mods that you want and you're at the end of the list you'll find that at the end of every list is this omw llf mod we need to do one step in mod organizer two before we can run omw llf we're gonna go up to this plugin button here and we're gonna hit the export to openmw hit yes and then okay what this has done if you go to your documents my games openmw in the openmw.config file what this has done is it's taken our load order from mod organizer 2 and put it into the openmw config file so that openmw knows where to look for the mods and knows what order to load the data files in all this information here and if we open openmw we look through our data files we'll see that all of our mods are now appearing in the openmw launcher uh you may see a few little yellow exclamation points like this uh like this and just hover over them you can see that blood moon needs to load after tribunal tr factions here needs to load after your mainland just uh drag and drop them around i find generally with openmw that this this load over here tends to have a few minor issues like that but most of them are pretty easy to fix just make sure you go through your entire list and look for those little exclamation points and we're gonna do our final step here which is openmw leveled list fixer uh just like every other mod we're gonna go to the download page i'm gonna open a get github page here follow the github download link here click the code button here just download zip i'm going to download that to our modding temp folder now we'll head over to downloads modding temp as usual we're going to unzip open up the folder and all you need to do is double click this when you double click the uh the python file there you'll you'll see that box open up and you'll see if you if if you depending on how many mods you have and how long it takes and how fast your computer is you'll see it basically go through the entire list that we've just generated and so that's a good sign and what that mod what that script does is it throws a mod into the my games openmw data folder here which is kind of the default mod folder for openmw and as we can see it says omw llf mod with a date stamp on it uh you need to run this anytime you make substantial changes to your load order we wanted to run more one directly from mod organizer 2 we could actually change this file name into an esp file extension and zip it up and load it as a install it as a mod using the button up here i personally don't recommend using mod organizer 2 as a launcher for the game the the openmw launcher here is actually quite good allows you to do most of what you need to do if you absolutely want to use mod organizer 2 as a launcher for openmw you can go in here press edit you can see i've already got i've already got it here but basically what you would do is you would hit add an executable add from file and you're going to navigate to where we installed openmw which was in the c modding openmw and you would go open mwexc not the launcher the exe that's launching the game directly and you would put that in this list here and then down here go down to openmw and press run as i said though my advice is that you use mo2 to download your mods and to make your initial load order and then once you've done your export and you don't you're not going to need to use this anymore open up the launcher here you'll notice that the omw llf mod is already in the in the launcher here so it doesn't need to be you can just move it all the way down to the bottom of the list always right at the bottom of the list this mod and ticket like that and that's it we are ready to go so i hope you've enjoyed this video if you want to see more morrowind content head over to rob's red hot spot where you can see my let's play uh much of which is in tamriel rebuilt so brand new content in a heavily modded morrowind using the total overhaul list on modding openmw.com i'll also be making more modding videos in the near future see you next time ciao you

Channel: Rob's Red Hot Spot

Views: 97,678

Keywords: morrowind mods, morrowind, elder scrolls 3, tes3mp, openmw, mo2, mod organizer 2, the elder scrolls 3, modding openmw, tutorial, guide, beginners

Id: cJvzXVi3lAg

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021