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.

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.

Happily, the town of Hlan Oek, its NPCs, dialogue, and quests are very nearly complete – our new and returning quest developers have been quite the busy bees in the last several months.

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 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.

Tamriel Rebuilt is an ambitious, 20-year-old modding project for TES III: Morrowind that adds the mainland of the province to the game. We develop the mod as a series of fully realized expansions complete with thousands of interiors and NPCs and hundreds of quests. Currently, about 40% of the province’s mainland has been released to players and our next updates will bring that closer to 50%.

In September, we filled you in on how the assets and art department has been doing since July; this time, we’ll do the same with mod implementation – i.e., our exterior worldspaces, interior locations, NPCs and quests.

Once again, huge progress was made in these past months, especially on our upcoming Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire expansions! In brief:

Welcome to another development diary for Tamriel Rebuilt – the massive mod for TES III: Morrowind that adds the mainland of the Morrowind province to the game world, in accordance with the lore and vision of TES III. Currently, roughly half of the mainland area, along with 360 quests, is fully completed and released to players.

We have not been idle over the latter half of Summer and have much to show, as our developers are busy putting together the last bits of our upcoming expansions.

You might notice, however, that this news post is titled “Art and Assets” – our quarterly progress reports grew to such an unwieldy size that we decided to split them into two distinct newsletters. This one will focus on concept art and assets, the first half of our development pipeline, whereas the second one will feature progress on exteriors, interiors and quests, which form the final part of the pipeline. Going forward, we hope to publish the second part of the newsletter next month, then reserve November for a more focused content teaser, and repeat the whole cycle starting in December.

With that past us, let’s see what our artists and modellers have been up to since the middle of July! As always, beware of spoilers when clicking the links and bear in mind that many of the linked pages don’t represent the current or eventual state of the assets.

Concept art

Tamriel Rebuilt is a massive community modding project for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind that aims to seamlessly add the mainland of the Morrowind province to the original game. The mod is released as a series of fully-realized expansions which are ready to be played. The released areas so far include more than a third of the mainland’s landmass, thousands of interior locations and roughly 360 quests.

Welcome to another Tamriel Rebuilt progress roundup, following on from last April’s. There is exciting news this time – the grand merging of the Dominions of Dust expansion has now begun! Our internal, in-development mod is organized into different “section files” – Morrowind .esp plugins which contain large chunks of our new lands, interiors, NPCs and dialogue. Significantly, the particular section files that make up Dominions of Dust have very recently been merged into our main plugin, TR_Mainland. This means that Tamriel Rebuilt has now permanently grown by several hundred new exterior cells, for the first time extending to the western border of Morrowind – there is no turning back!

As a consequence of this and the earlier merging of our Embers of Empire development plugin a few months ago, it is now inevitable that both of these upcoming expansions will be released simultaneously, as a double feature combining to make the biggest single Tamriel Rebuilt release yet (at least in terms of the amount of playable content).