Day 15: Shrines, loot, NPCs, crafting

Good mage loot in daedric shrines

I've been finding several quests along the sides of the roads. One was a very easy, but amusing, escort quest to Vivec. Another was a very strange "quest" of sorts where a bandit just wanted to "steal a kiss." I'm trying to not look these things up until after I've finished the quests.

While I was in Caldera, I ran into a lady who wanted me to recover her stolen heirlooms, which were located in an unspecified hideout somewhere east of Caldera. I ran around for a while looking for such a place, thinking perhaps it might be a tomb I saw against the mountains, but it didn't seem likely some bandits would be hiding out in an ancestral tomb, with all the ghosts and skeletons around, and upon further inquiry in town I was informed that the hideout was on the opposite side of the mountains.

While heading for that area, I found one of the daedric shrines I'd heard about from countless NPCs, and had basically ignored, thinking they were the same as Oblivion's daedric shrines (just a statue with a few harmless NPCs standing around making vague gestures of worship at it). Well, these Morrowind ones are a little different, being larger ruined structures with unique architecture, with columns and walls hiding a high concentration of animals and daedric creatures. I saw dremora, clannfears, and a winged twilight for the first time at this shrine. And more unlike the Oblivion shrines (aside from the cave housing a shrine to Sheogorath involved in the Everscamp quest), these shrines have interiors, where the actual statues are. Anyway, a very different experience, and a great source of souls to trap! Maybe I can actually make a constant effect enchanted item soon.

I also came across a nice staff. Remember how I said a staff suits a mage? I hadn't yet found any staves that had any useful enchantments on them, but this one's called Wizard's Staff, and it has two very nice enchantments on it, which last long enough for a typical fight: Levitation and fortification of the unarmoured skill, for two minutes. I'm not sure really how much I need the armour skill boost, though, considering the levitation keeps me out of reach of the enemies, so I can just throw spells at them. Probably helps protect against archers. I'm keeping this staff! But I'll also keep the Fiend Tanto on me as well, at least for now.

I also saw the Ghostfence, and poked my head into the gate buildings before leaving it for later. Assuming the main quest will take me through there, I went back and reported to Caius Cossades to move that along a little bit.

Need more enemies

One dremora is enough for me in a fight, or any higher daedra (dremora lord, winged twilight, etc.), and some of these axe-swinging barbarians are tough for me as well, but in general I'm finding the caves to be a little too lightly populated. I want a bit more of a challenge when I go dungeon-delving. In Oblivion, I'd regularly find bandits or raiders in groups of two or three, chatting away, and it was a challenge to take one out quickly with the element of surprise so that I only had to deal with one or two more at the same time. I've found a couple of mods, like Tweaks, Sneaks and Better Freaks, and More Enemies, but as far as I can tell they only add enemies to exterior cells, and I only want the actual interiors to be more dangerous, not just walking along the road. There's one called The Undead, which adds 150 new types of undead, but not necessarily more of them. I can't tell from the description. I need something like Mart's Monster Mod for Oblivion. Perhaps Morrowind Comes Alive might help. It says it adds a lot of NPCs, both friendly and hostile. Suggestions would be welcome.

More mods & crafting

I've also found a couple of useful NPC interaction mods. Especially useful to get them to move out of your bloody way when they're standing in a narrow hallway or in a doorway. One is simply NPC Move Command, but there are others for more extensive possibilities, like NPC Functionality (general purpose RPing, with move and follow commands, as well as disposition and other stuff), or NPC Commands (mostly sex-oriented, but also includes move and follow commands), or perhaps Give your orders (works only on people of lower rank than you in any particular faction). These might conflict with the Less Generic NPC series, but I haven't checked on that yet.

Meanwhile, I've toyed around with adding a room to the Magus Realm tower to house my pottery, tailoring, cooking, carpentry, and forging crafts. This was immediately a challenge because I can't find any way to "duplicate cell" in the Morrowind CS like you can in the Oblivion CS, I just wanted to copy a room and its contents, and add or remove things to my new cell from that starting point. Not only could I now find such a command, but the "copy render" and "paste render" doesn't seem to work across separate cells, so I can't seem to load the room I want, copy its contents, load my new cell, and paste the contents into it. Tried several times, and nothing happens. I tried a utility called TESfaith which claims to be able to do this externally, but my efforts resulted in nothing but identical, unchanged duplicates of either the Morrowind.esm or the .esp of the tower. So, I'm doing it the long way.

The frustrating thing about this is that I can't actually use it until I've completed it to my satisfaction, because the game doesn't always update changes to mods once you've visited the cell, and I can't just "clean" it as you might do to get around that problem because I plan to be leaving my raw materials in there, and cleaning the save would reset the cell and make me lose anything I put in there. Well, I suppose I can create my room in a separate ESP, and teleport myself to and from it, so as not to leave my items in there until it's complete, and disable and re-enable the ESP whenever I change it. Just a lot more bothersome than it was to make mods in Oblivion.