Day 10: RPing in Pelegiad, crafting, rings

This time I made it to Pelagiad, though my travels were waylaid several times by interesting places I discovered along the way. As I neared the town, which I could begin to see off in the distance, I met a smartly-dressed Breton woman who was pining away out of love for a charming highwayman who had robbed her. Now that's the kind of quest I can get into -- one with a little romance in it! It's a shame that the quest designers have something against such quests, as evidenced by the dialogue options and journal entries. You have the option to be rude and critical about the girl's story, but even if you happily offer to help her, the journal entries criticise her as "foolish" and "silly". Being that this is a role-playing game, I'll thank Bethesda not to insert someone else's character's thoughts into my character's thoughts. Where are my options to be rude and critical about Ranis Athrys' obey-or-die quests?

Cooking

Anyway, I won't say what happens in that quest, and instead talk about the crafting opportunities I found during my brief stay in the tiny settlement of Pelegiad. There's nothing special about Pelegiad as far as crafting goes, except that this is the first place I've seen that has a well. When I clicked on it, I was given the option of either taking a drink, or filling a bottle. A bottle! Suddenly a use for these clutter items I'd never saved. Complete Morrowind adds a lot of crafting opportunities, but the documentation lacks detail in some areas (like a list of what can be made with each method), so I'm still gradually figuring out what can be done.

Fortunately, despite being a tiny village, Pelegiad had a large number of crates and barrels sitting around outside with random junk in them, and I found five bottles. I filled a couple of them at the well, and saw that this bottled water provided a small amount of health and stamina restoration (I refuse, by the way, to perpetuate Bethesda's antonymic usage of the word "fatigue").

It was also here that I experimented with equipping a few odd artifacts I found in my dungeon-delving. One was called an "extractor", and I believe this was added by Complete Morrowind, because I don't see an entry for it on UESP, and when I equipped it, it gave me options of making various juices from certain foods. This, too, required a bottle. I successfully made some comberry juice and willow juice, and I saw that it also gave the option of making those strength-boosting potions I mentioned before (Flin, Greef, etc.), except that unlike the simpler juices, it won't tell you what ingredients are needed for it. I believe you're supposed to find the recipes during your travels.

So far, I've found several items that allow you to make different lists of items when you equip them. Activating a pot lets you make various stews. Equipping a bowl lets you make things like that marmalade I tried to make before. A knife gives you the options to make certain foods and also carved wooden items (I keep a rough knife over by my wood and metal shop areas, and a clean silver knife in my cooking area now). A frying pan lets you cook various steaks out of the raw meat you may have collected. Activating a forge has some kind of options that I didn't get to explore yet, while a hearth has to do with pottery. And of course, activating the extractor lets you make juices. I wouldn't be surprised if there are yet more items I haven't discovered yet. I know I haven't yet been able to try any of the sewing, for lack of thread.

There's also an option that's supposed to let you chop down trees with any axe, to gather logs, or use a mining pick to mine rocks for ore, but I didn't activate it because I thought it might interfere with Vality's replacement trees. Not sure about that. Not really necessary, though, since I've been finding metal bars and logs in various locations anyway, without the need for that.

Useful magic rings

The reason I can't help poking my head into all these caves and tombs I've been happening across is that, unlike in Fallout 3, there's a good chance that I may find some useful magic items in the random loot! I've found quite a few magic rings and amulets that I've been carrying around all the time. Although you can only wear two rings at a time, and one amulet, most of these items are "cast on use" anyway, so the very act of readying the spell you intend to use from a ring causes you to wear it, so it's no impediment. (Though it does, as I said before, cause me to keep unwillingly unequipping my Mentor's Ring.)

These items are lightweight, and are a mage's second line of defense (and offense) in the case of running out of mana. They each have their own mana pool, recharge by themselves over time, and are instant cast, unlike spells you cast by hand. This means rapid-fire spellcasting. The effects of rings may be tiny, but they do add up. I have a couple of healing rings, many offensive rings (poison, lightning bolt, fireball, etc.), and two rings for hiding (one of chameleon and the other of invisibility).

Callenwald

Before I forget again, let me mention this -- If you've installed the "Texture Fix for Balmora Expansion," it includes an .esp called "BE-Callenwald.esp", which I mentioned briefly before as a player home that I found too large for my tastes. Well, there's a more serious problem with it, which leads me to advise you not to use it. It seems to completely override the "little secret" dialogue option for all NPCs everywhere, so they no longer tell whatever information they told before, but only talk about the baths at Callenwald. This is not only annoying and repetitive, but sometimes valuable information or even quests can be found by that "little secret" dialogue under normal circumstances. The house is worth a look, but that bug alone would kill it for me.

Fix for Purchasable Alchemy Lab missing texture

This is a minor bug that finally got on my nerves enough to find a solution for it. There's a texture missing that gives an error when you load the mod, usually at the start of the game. The missing textures appear to be from another mod called Better Books for Morrowind, from which the model for the improved Alchemist's Formulary came, and the author of the lab simply forgot to include the textures. Install this as well, and the error should go away.