September 2024 Progress Update

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive community mod for TES III: Morrowind that adds the mainland of the Morrowind province to the game world (Bethesda only included the island of Vvardenfell in the original game). The mod is released as a series of expansions that seamlessly integrate with the original game, each adding a new area of the mainland fully developed with interior locations, NPCs, dialogue, and quests. Players can already download and play an area twice the size of the original game and containing north of 600 quests – substantially more than the original game and its expansions combined.

This newsletter tallies our progress on the implementation of the Morrowind game world over this past year, since the last similar newsletter in July 2023.

2023 and 2024 have been busy years, two of many good ones we’ve had in this decade. The organization appears strong and the pool of volunteers shows no signs of drying up, despite the considerable age of the game. This is aided by our ever-improving documentation and the recent advancements in tooling for TES III modmakers, which makes Morrowind modmaking, already famously easy to pick up, more convenient than ever.

The scale of what Tamriel Rebuilt is attempting to do is demonstrated by the more than 700 “claims” that received updates since the last tally in July 2023 – claims being our formal divisions of work, each intended to be tackled by a single “claimant.” If you keep in mind that each claim typically requires a couple to dozens of hours of volunteer work for the developer responsible – or, in some cases, hundreds – you can start to gain an appreciation of how much it takes to make the Morrowind mainland come to life.

The Clambering Moor region, i.e. Tamriel Rebuilt returns to House Redoran lands. Gif by LogansGun.

Development Roadmap April 2024

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive mod for TES III: Morrowind, which adds the missing mainland of the Morrowind province to the game world. You can download it here.

Greetings! In the last update we covered everything that you can expect from our next upcoming expansion, Grasping Fortune. But Morrowind is a massive province and Tamriel Rebuilt is developing on many fronts in parallel. The last time that we went over our full plans for the future – our development roadmap – was in late 2021. Hence, it’s high time we update you with how those plans have changed and give you a high-level overview of each of the new and exciting expansions that we’re currently tackling.

Remember, Tamriel Rebuilt is developed as a series of episodic releases or expansions, with new chunks of Morrowind’s mainland released every year (aspirationally, at least). Whenever an expansion is released, the new areas come with the full complement of interior locations, characters, and quests, all seamlessly tying into the base game and the prior expansions.

A map of all prior and currently in-development Tamriel Rebuilt expansions.

In order for all this to work, teams focusing on different fields of mod development are chipping away at different parts of the province. Asset developers bring the work of our concept artists to life, creating the 3D assets that our level designers need. Only once the asset palette for a new region is more-or-less finished, can exterior level designers create a new area of the overworld. Once that is done, a drove of interior level designers descends to fill out the (sometimes) hundreds of highly detailed interior locations – buildings, caves, dungeons – that each expansion needs. And only once the latter work is winding down can quest developers fill the lands with hundreds more memorable characters and quests.

Below, we will walk you through the different expansions we are currently working on, roughly in the order that we expect them to be released. All of this is, obviously, highly tentative and subject to change at any time. Furthermore, no dates are offered, as everything here is done by volunteer effort, the ebbs and floods of which are infamously hard to predict.

Grasping Fortune Teaser

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive community modding project more than 22 years in the making that aims to expand the game world of TES III: Morrowind by adding the missing mainland of the province. The mod is released sequentially as a series of fully realized expansions that add new landmass along with all interior locations, NPCs, dialogue, and tons of quests. Players can already download and play a completed landmass that comprises about half of the Morrowind mainland, including hundreds of interiors, NPCs, thousands of lines of dialogue, and more than 600 quests – much more than the original game and expansions combined.

Having given you time to digest the Andaram expansion that came our last October, it’s time to tease you with what we are up to next: introducing Grasping Fortune. This massive expansion will extend the available mainland all the way to Morrowind’s southwestern border with Cyrodiil and will bring you Narsis, the capital of House Hlaalu and one of Morrowind's prime cities.

A map of the playable area to be added in Grasping Fortune. Colors correspond to different regions: blue for Aanthirin, mauve for Othreleth Woods, yellow for Coronati Basin, and tan for Shipal-Shin. The inset on the top left shows the location on a map of all of Morrowind.

This one will be among the largest and most content-rich expansions we will have attempted, but the good news is that the pace of development on this has been quite fast. To see what you have coming your way, read on.

Narsis

The highlight of this expansion is surely Narsis – the second-biggest city in Morrowind and possibly the richest, sprawling across a mesa on the upper Thirr, where the great river first becomes navigable.

Narsis has long been a bit of a holy grail for Tamriel Rebuilt, ever since Prometheus, a talented early level designer, first designed a monumental iteration of it in 2004. Beset by technical and conceptual issues, the city has been remade three times over the course of two decades, but is now finally well on its way to release.

December 2023 Art & Assets Update

Tamriel Rebuilt is a large community modding project that aims to add the missing mainland of the Morrowind province to TES III: Morrowind. The mod is developed and released as a series of fully realized expansions that are seamlessly integrated into the vanilla Morrowind worldspace and with each other. Currently, players can download and enjoy roughly half of the mainland, which comes fully equipped with thousands of interior locations, NPCs, dialogue, and more than 600 added quests – many more than the original game and expansions combined.

Happy holidays, readers! Despite the release of our last expansion, Andaram, only a short while ago, progress on new expansions to the Morrowind mainland is ongoing, as those following the much-more-frequently-updated #progress-updates channel on our Discord server well know.

Now, as the year is drawing to a close, it is high time we update you on what our prolific artists and asset developers have been doing for most of this year. We last tallied this progress in early March, so we will be covering almost a years worth of assets progress – prepare for a long read. Some brief highlights of what that includes:

Reams of new concept art on the Mournhold and Velothis districts, and on innumerable other topics.
An entire new, alien culture for the Dreugh including eerie citadels, new enemies, and innumerable clutter items.
Tons of new ships from all across Tamriel to fill our harbors with.
An entire new architecture set modeled on the Old Mournhold ruins.
Lots of progress on assets needed for Indoril region overhauls, most especially in the Mephalan Vales region.
Many new armors, creatures, clutter sets, and more.

The below post will walk you through the fruits of what are essentially the first two legs of our development pipeline – conceptualization and asset creation. Only when concepts are set in stone and unique assets created can new regions and cultures be called to life by our level and quest designers.

Tamriel Rebuilt - 23.10 Release

Dive into Andaram, the 7th expansion from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind modding project Tamriel Rebuilt that aims to add the mainland of Morrowind to the original game. The expansion is centered on the middle Thirr River, and the dark secrets which lie under its waters.

Download Tamriel Rebuilt 23.10: Main Mirror | Morrowind Nexus | Morrowind Modding Hall [pending]

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SHA-256: 2ada479cffb877e48d0c601a7642841221a607915250231c03c92638b0bef097
MD5: ffd016bb0e8ee2b969682d4350a15167

The newly released area of the mod is highlighted. Blue overlay marks the Aanthirin region, yellow is the Coronati Basin, and mauve is the Othreleth Woods.

The villainous Camonna Tong rules the port town of Hlan Oek while its Hlaalu governor has his mind on other matters. The great Temple city of Almas Thirr, first released in 2019’s Aanthirin release, has been expanded and updated and is now open to Imperial influence from the Fighters, Mages, and Thieves Guilds. Even the sleepy fishing village of Idathren has secrets to uncover. Meanwhile, the Dreugh Queen Paruddma broods in her Citadel deep beneath Lake Andaram’s placid waters.

Left to right: the new town of Hlan Oek, the revamped Almas Thirr temple-city, and the small Hlaalu Ferry on the south bank of Lake Andaram. See more on the website gallery.

July 2023 Progress Update

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive community modding project for TES III: Morrowind that adds the mainland of the province to the original game, aiming to quadruple the size of the game world. The mod is developed and released as a series of fully realized expansions that seamlessly integrate sections of new land into the rest of the game world. Many such expansions have been released in the more than two decades that the mod has been in development; hence, players can already download and enjoy a landmass twice the size of the original game with thousands of interiors and NPCs complete with dialogue, and more than 500 new quests.

It has been quite a while since the last implementation progress update – all the way since October 2022, just prior to the release of our double expansions, Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire. Those who read our previous teaser on the upcoming Andaram expansion will know that Tamriel Rebuilt development has been progressing at rapid pace since then.

This post will cover most of what the implementation team – that is, exterior and interior level designers and quest developers – has been doing in the past nine months (asset development has a separate progress report). For a Too Long; Didn’t Read edition:

release of Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire expansions (duh)
completion of more than a hundred new quests for the Andaram expansion
a major expansion and update to Almas Thirr’s exterior, interiors, and quests
interior work on the Narsis expansion is close to conclusion, and the first quests are now being worked on
several exterior claims of the new Sundered Scar and all the interiors of the remade town of Darvonis are now finished
the first exteriors for the Othreleth Woods expansions are finished, and interior development has begun
the Tamriel Rebuilt version of the island of Firemoth is very close to being finalized, and a few new islands have been created on the fringes of Morrowind

Read on for a more detailed breakdown of this progress, divided between the different expansions which we mean to release in succession.

Andaram Expansion Teaser

Update: We now no longer aim to release a final bugfix update to Dominions of Dust, as was stated in the article below. Instead, the changes will be rolled straight into the Andaram expansion, which will be released soon enough in the coming months.

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive community mod that adds the mainland of the Morrowind province to TES III: Morrowind. The mod is released as a series of fully-realized expansions that players can already enjoy – the currently released lands contain roughly half of the mainland, thousands of interior locations and NPCs, and several hundred quests.

Only a couple months after our last major content expansion, we are making rapid progress on finalizing the next one, tentatively called Andaram (previously referred to as Hlan Oek). Now is high time to give you a teaser preview of what we have in store for it.

This upcoming expansion will, predictably, centre around Lake Andaram, just south of the Aanthirin region in central Morrowind. The two main centers of interest in Andaram will be the sleazy Hlaalu port town of Hlan Oek, and the updated and expanded Temple fortress of Almas Thirr.

The new landmass that will be added with the Andaram expansion. Color overlays signify different regions: light blue is Aanthirin, mauve is Othreleth Woods, and yellow is Coronati Basin.

This area was initially proposed to be released together with the rest of the Coronati Basin region to the south of Aanthirin, but most of that region will instead be packaged with the huge upcoming Narsis expansion. The smaller area around Hlan Oek and Lake Andaram will then serve nicely as an interim expansion. We hope that this is a welcome change from our usual several-years-long release cycles. In any case, it will give the Tamriel Rebuilt team the ability to fix several lingering issues around the Aanthirin region and buy time to make Narsis truly shine.

Hlan Oek

We have covered this town quite a bit in previous progress reports, but to recap, Hlan Oek is a gritty Hlaalu port town that hosts both an important Temple on the Veloth’s Path pilgrimage trail and a busy dockworks on the Thirr river trade artery. More infamously, the town is also corrupt to the bone, being run more by the Camonna Tong thugs than any official authority.

March 2023 Art & Assets Update

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive community modding project that seamlessly adds the mainland of the Morrowind province to Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The mod is developed as a series of fully complete, but interconnected expansions, each bringing a new part of the Morrowind province to life. Currently, players can already enjoy our released lands, which constitute roughly half of the mainland area and are fully populated with interior locations, hundreds of NPCs, thousands of lines of dialogue, and almost as many new quests as were in the original game.

It has been a few months since we last updated you on the ongoing progress in Tamriel Rebuilt – okay, we did release a major double-expansion in-between, but still. This month, as we last did in September, we will get you up to date on all the progress that our concept and asset artists have made. These are the building blocks of the mod, the first part of its development pipeline, which our level designers and implementers can later use to create the world of Morrowind.

Be mindful that the below concepts and assets are works-in-progress, and may not represent their final form in the mod. Furthermore, while the sources for each piece are linked – either messages on our Discord server or the asset browser – these are often no longer up-to-date with the current progress and planning of the mod.

Now, lets dive back into the nitty-gritty of TR progress – as we haven’t updated you in a while, there is a lot to show!

The concept art section is much longer than usual, thanks largely to our new artists be-a-stranger, Tammilisäke, igor~, and Illithid Bob, among other new and returning contributors.

Mephalan Vales

Be-a-stranger seems to have developed a fascination with the Mephalan Vales region. We hope to overhaul the Vales in the distant future, while keeping its DNA in place – purple-hued rock labyrinths dividing dark, misty forests.

Yearly Recap 2022

Tamriel Rebuilt is a mod for TES III: Morrowind that aims to add the mainland of the Morrowind province to the game, as Bethesda would have done it. The province is released as a series of expansions; players can already download and enjoy a landmass twice the size of the original game and containing an amount of quests roughly equal to that of the base game.

Happy new year from the Tamriel Rebuilt team! As is our hallowed tradition dating back at least to 2005, let’s take a look back at what went on in Tamriel Rebuilt throughout 2022.

Of course, the biggest thing to happen this year was the release of our twin-expansions of Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire on November 24th. Dominions of Dust in particular was a long time coming and a tough slog for our developers. This expansion – centered on the borderlands of House Hlaalu and Redoran – was plagued by issues stemming from its more than a decade-long development process. Counter-intuitively, repurposing old work is often much harder and less motivating for our developers than building things from scratch. In particular, quest development for this expansion had taken a long time, as many our initial drafts for the questlines turned out too complex or disjointed, and since quality issues with old interiors and exteriors commonly interfered with quest work, requiring long stretches of downtime while the issues were fixed.

The city of Andothren. Its exterior was originally made by kingfish, and was overhauled by Gnomey and Chef.

The Embers of Empire expansion – a full rework of the western coast of Telvannis and its Imperial settlements – was born in late 2020, largely out of Taniquetil’s frustration with Dominions. In contrast to Dominions, many developers took to this expansion with much enthusiasm. However, Embers, too, was problematic in its own way, given the tendency of its scope to keep expanding, drawing development out much longer than originally intended.

A view towards Firewatch. The city was rebuilt by Taniquetil, the landscapes around it by Chef.

Tamriel Rebuilt - 22.11 Release

Trailer for Dominions of Dust.

Tamriel Rebuilt, the 21-year-old modding project to add the mainland of Morrowind to The Elder Scrolls III, is proud to announce release 22.11 including the twin expansions of Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire.

Download Tamriel Rebuilt 22.11: Main Mirror | Morrowind Nexus | Morrowind Modding Hall

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Dominions of Dust centers on Andothren, a huge Hlaalu trade port on the Inner Sea southwest of Vvardenfell. West of the city are dangerous and sparsely inhabited borderlands, in contention between Great Houses Hlaalu and Redoran.

Embers of Empire completely overhauls the western shore of the Telvanni peninsula with its Imperial settlements of Firewatch and Helnim – the lone outposts of Imperial power in this most hostile part of Morrowind.

Newly released areas of the mod are highlighted.

Tamriel Rebuilt