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

CRC-32: d9e84a0e
SHA-1: 8dd63c4638e043df703fa9702c5239d442a309b3959cb1ca8b18de05d0ed56f0
MD5: 94b331ce3c2aed1f04426859db128163

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.

October 2022 Progress Update

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:

Tamriel Rebuilt Website Hosting Donations

Welcome to the second dozennial Tamriel Rebuilt website hosting fundraising drive!

Update 2022-10-31: We are pleased to announce that thanks to your generous donations, $2,065.72 has been raised to offset our hosting costs. The outpouring of support has been humbling, and very much appreciated. Our gobsmacked webmaster and Systems Engineer Magamo tells us that the amount raised is equivalent to 18 times our worst-case-scenario monthly hosting bills. Since our goals have been met (and exceeded), we have removed the donation link and we are closing this fundraiser. On behalf of Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel, a sincere THANK YOU to anyone who donated or helped spread the word! And be sure to read Magamo's own words on the fundraiser and his work for our projects here.

Update 2022-10-06: Within six hours of this post going live, we reached $1000 raised! This message will stay up for at least another week, possibly until the end of the month, for those who still want to contribute and help fund our hosting costs for the longer term, but consider our immediate needs met and our expectations wildly exceeded! Thank you so much for your support!

Original: Tamriel Rebuilt the project is a long-term, ambitious volunteer effort to create mainland Morrowind. To date, about 40% of the mainland's landmass has been released to the public, and our next two expansions, set to be released simultaneously, are poised to push that percentage closer to 50%, and to bring the number of quests in our released files close to that of the original game. This content is, and always will be, available for free to everyone to play and download. Indeed, TR has a strict policy against paid modding, and we do not accept unsollicited donations. Due to the volunteer nature of our project, TR is essentially a shared hobby of its members and modders, and accepting donations would do little to nothing to speed up development. But that does not mean that keeping our project alive and in the air is without cost. Our website and infrastructure hosting costs are rising, and to alleviate this, we will be accepting donations, for a limited time, through this article. These donations go directly to our webmaster Magamo, who pays our AWS bills. Read on to find out more about our reasoning behind this fundraising drive.

September 2022 Art and Assets Update

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

TR Developer Interviews

This month, our public relations team was partially on holiday, hence why there is no in-depth progress teaser. To tide you over, we’d instead like to direct you to a variety of interviews given by our developers within the past few months.

To start off, check out a recent stream by our old friend Zaric Zhakaron with our senior developers Gnomey and Taniquetil. Our developers introduce the project and the thinking behind it, then take a closer look at our upcoming expansions, Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire:

For more of Gnomey, see the below video interview made in Spring by Danae for Morrowind’s 20th anniversary celebrations:

Next up are a multitude of short text interviews made by Danae as part of her long-running Modder’s Interview series, which dive into the personal motivations of different modders. You can find some of the more TR-centric ones below:

Abby, a tireless TR questline developer and, as of very recently, a quest reviewer;
Cicero our long-time daedra-head, vanilla purist and all-around developer/reviewer;
Denis418, a prolific interior designer, playtester, PR-man and heart-of-the-community;
Mort, a veteran quest developer and now an iron-willed quest reviewer;

The below interviews by our contributors focus on their personal projects, but are still worth checking out:

July 2022 Progress Update

Looking over the Armun Ashlands and the stronghold of Volenfaryon towards the Velothi Mountains. This screenshot uses Zesterer’s Volumetric Cloud & Mist shaders and the latest in-development build of OpenMW.

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).

An overhead map of vanilla Morrowind and our latest in-development TR_Mainland plugin (i.e., the playable area of the mod), showing the new lands added towards the south-west in the upcoming expansion. You can still see some rough edges, like the straight-line transition between Roth Roryn to the north and Armun Ashlands to the south, which we plan to address prior to release.

Tamriel Rebuilt Poster

Recently, a member of Tamriel Rebuilt privately comissioned a full-sized movie-style poster for Tamriel Rebuilt from our talented professional concept artist, Feivelyn. The poster is now freely available -- it's simply too beautiful not to share!

To explain what you see, Feivelyn has compiled her vision of many of the leading characters in vanilla Morrowind and designed several new ones to boot, to be implemented in Tamriel Rebult in the future. Starting from the top is the main antagonist, Dagoth Ur. Below him are the three gods of the Tribunal faith with the ghost of Nerevar hanging above them and the Daedra Prince Hircine looking on from the left. The third row constitutes leaders of Morrowind's Great Houses -- from left to right, Redoran, Hlaalu, Indoril, Dres and Telvanni. Below them, from left to right, are King Helseth, Caius Cosades, Sul-Matuul, the Daedra Prince Azura, Nibani Maesa, Divayth Fyr, and Yagrum Bagarn.

You may find the full-resolution version of the poster in our gallery -- feel free to have it printed! And if you do, why not share a photo of it on our Discord or Twitter?

What about those islands?

Tamriel Rebuilt is a major community modding project for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which aims to add the mainland of the Morrowind province to the original game’s island of Vvardenfell, sticking closely to Bethesda’s original vision. The mod is released as a series of fully-realized expansions; currently, over half of the mainland is released to players, including thousands of interiors and NPCs and over 360 quests.

Over the last year, we have showcased our major upcoming expansions – Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire, as well as the future ones after those. However, many of you have been asking about the few obscure bits on our planning maps that are not contiguous with any of the aforementioned expansions. In fact, we left those bits obscure on purpose, to explain them in more detail for this month’s teaser article. These upcoming additional lands (mini-expansions, if you will) are the islands of Olanar, Vounoura and Firemoth; we will examine each one in turn.

The three highlighted islands will be released as parts of upcoming major expansions.

Olanar

Olanar is the easternmost of the Telvanni Isles that jut out into the northwestern Padomaic Ocean. The idea and name for this island comes from our developer Taniquetil, whereas its location and shape is taken from Lady Nerevar’s famous map of the Padomaic Ocean. In our lore, the island used to be the domain of a particularly reclusive and fanatic Telvanni summoner. As she died and the tower fell to ruin, the various Daedra she summoned continued to roam the island, making it an extremely dangerous location. Today, Olanar attracts only the occasional pirate and the most reckless of looters – but few know to look for its real treasure.

The island of Olanar can truly be described as the end of the world. Exterior work by Cicero.

Tamriel Rebuilt