Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt still being developed?
Absolutely! Even after all these years, the Tamriel Rebuilt community is very active! We mostly communicate through our Discord server, where we discuss current work, propose new ideas, and conduct semi-weekly meetings on Sundays. Our meeting notes are kept here.
That said, we can always use more hands on deck. The best way to start helping the project is to read through this page.
Of course, becoming a developer is not the only way to become active in the TR community. Even if you feel you have nothing to contribute to the project, please stop by the Discord and introduce yourself. It is a great way to participate, whether you want to join in our official meetings or just ask us questions or share your own ideas.

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt part of Project Tamriel?
No. Neither is Project Tamriel part of Tamriel Rebuilt.
Tamriel Rebuilt is a province mod focused on bringing the Morrowind mainland to TES III, and houses the small (dummy) province mod Eye of Argonia.
Project Tamriel [Project Tamriel] is an umbrella for several other province mods: Province: Cyrodiil, Skyrim: Home of the Nords, High Rock 427, Project: Hammerfell, and Elsweyr: Paradise Sugar can be found there.
We are sister projects, meaning that we share quite a few developers, a common asset base in Tamriel_Data, and lore and worldbuilding. Neither project is part of the other, however; we just cooperate in order to build a coherent game world.

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt an official mod?
No, Tamriel Rebuilt is not associated with Bethesda Softworks at all. The project exists because we like (making) mods.

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt going to be a paid mod or part of a Creation Club?
No. For both practical and philosophical reasons, Tamriel Rebuilt will be free forever.

Q: What is the policy on donations?
Being an effort of volunteers, our project has little use for donations. Consequently, Tamriel Rebuilt does not accept unsolicited donations and does not use crowdfunding platforms. We may host rare donation drives to pay for website hosting. This has been necessary only twice in our history so far. Any such donation drives will be announced on and organized through our website, not third-party platforms.
Any account actively soliciting donations on behalf of the Tamriel Rebuilt community on crowdsourcing platforms is not affiliated with us and likely a scam. The name of our community has previously been misappropriated to set up an unsuccessful scam on Patreon [PCGamer], and we encourage anyone to report any suspect activity to both us and the host platform.
Beyond that, feel free to contact individual modders to see if they have a Patreon, if you are determined to give someone money. Tamriel Rebuilt places no restrictions on the individual financial choices of its members, so long as it is made clear that any such donations benefit the individual and do not go to the community at large.

Q: What do all the different ESPs do?

• TR_Mainland.esm - finished landmass, including fully playable quests and interiors.
• TR_Factions.esp - integrates faction questlines and progression, contains additional Hortator and Nerevarine quests.
• TR_Firemoth_vanilla_patch.esp - fixes a land shape conflict for users of the official Bethesda mod Siege at Firemoth.

Q: Where did TR_Preview or TR_Travels go?
Tamriel Rebuilt used to package our unfinished, in-progress lands as the optional plugin TR_Preview – lands that do not contain most interiors, NPCs or any quests, and are hence not meant to be played, except for sightseeing. However, all too many players enabled this plugin without reading our readme and realizing this. Inadvertently, these preview lands were the first contact with TR to many players, and they left with the wrong feeling that TR was largely a contentless experience.
Furthermore, the bulk of the exterior lands present in TR_Preview were completed between 2010 and 2014. They have since diverged from our current quality standards and planning and will see substantial rework prior to being released. They also by now suffer from missing meshes and many other issues. Hence, TR_Preview is no longer representative of Tamriel Rebuilt's future work.
For these reasons, the team has decided to desist from further releases of TR_Preview. If you still have an old version of TR_Preview.esp in your Data Files folder, you should disable it, as it will throw errors otherwise. However, our unfinished lands are still publicly available in the Release Files section of our website – ask for help on our Discord server if you can't figure out how to use them.

Likewise, the optional TR_Travels (and all versions thereof) used to add travel links between Vvardenfell and TR by modifying vanilla service providers. We have now decided to instead offer travel by use of separate service providers, leaving the vanilla characters unmodified and thereby increasing mod compatibility. Furthermore, TR_Travels is now rolled into TR_Mainland, meaning you don't need this plugin any more. If you still have an old version of TR_Travels in your Data Files folder, please disable it, as it will throw errors otherwise.

Q: Do I still need to register Tamriel_Data BSA files?
Not anymore! As of v10.1, Tamriel_Data no longer uses BSA files. It instead packages all assets as loose files inside the downloaded archive. The BSA files included in the archive are dummy files meant to overwrite older versions for people who are updating their Tamriel_Data.

Q: What is TR’s policy on people making mods based on TR?
Go right ahead! Gameplay modifications, edits, putting houses, etc into our landmass, all is fair and great.
Please beware that TR_Mainland is undergoing revisions periodically and that TR_Preview will be deprecated with the next release. Contact us via Discord if you need some pointers on what to be aware of.

Q: Can I use some of the assets Tamriel Rebuilt uses in my mods?
In general: yes. If you use Tamriel_Data as a master, you are free to use anything in it in your mod.
If you do not want to do that, but prefer to extract and use individual assets instead, you will need to do some more legwork. First, you need to be aware that Tamriel_Data contains the assets of several different mod projects; depending on whether the assets you want to use are in the folder 'tr', 'sky', or 'pc' (corresponding to Tamriel Rebuilt, Skyrim: Home of the Nords, and Province: Cyrodiil), the assets are subject to slightly different usage rights.
We include two documents shipping with Tamriel_Data in the Docs subdirectory: TamrielData_Credits.txt and TamrielData_Usage.txt, which outline required credits to third party modders and our policies in regards to asset extraction and use in other mods.

Q: I have an older version of Tamriel Rebuilt, can I update and keep my saves?
There may be errors and we offer no guarantees; the official position is that you should start a new character if you update the mod. If you will want to risk it, you can try to update your save with Wrye Mash after updating the mod.
Here is a download link and a guide for using it to update your save.
If the version you were using was from before Tamriel_Data, see this question. However, note that the amount of potential incompatibilities will increase the older your version was.

Q: Why am I seeing yellow exclamation marks everywhere?
Q: Why am I getting "actor has no animation class" errors?
Q: Why is my game crashing at character selection?
You may not have (correctly) installed the latest version of Tamriel Data. Try (re)installing it; see the instructions here.

Q: Why am I getting "Unable to find cell id 'x Region' errors?
If you are getting "Unable to find cell id "Mournhold Region"" errors, Tamriel_Data.esm was placed above Tribunal.esm, which is the wrong order.
The only correct order for your esms are: Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Tamriel_Data, TR_Mainland.
If you are getting "Unable to find cell id "Red Mountain Region"" errors, you might be using a foreign-language version of Morrowind (presumably the Russian one). Until a Russian translation has been made, you will need to go into the Construction set and fix these problems yourself.
Find out more »here«.

Q: I've updated Tamriel Rebuilt, why are NPCs doubled?
While it is often possible to update to a newer version of Tamriel Rebuilt, you need to update your save with Wrye Mash.
Here is a download link and a guide for using it to update your save.

Q: Why am I getting a haybale error?
The full error is "Expression Error Unable to find cell id "Ebon Tower" in script TR_m3_oe_act_haybale_script" and is the result of one of the other mods in your modlist overriding Tamriel Rebuilt's cells. The haybale script requires a cell named "Ebon Tower" and that cell no longer has that name.
The only mod currently known to do this is BTB - Game Settings, which edits every single cell of vanilla Morrowind so that the player cannot sleep there. Manually cleaning that cell via CS or other tools will prevent this error.

Q: Why am I getting errors referring to “map1” and “map 2”?
Either your saved game or your mods used a very old version of Tamriel Rebuilt from before the release of Sacred East in 2012 and the switch from Map1.esm and Map2.esm to TR_Mainland.esm.
While you can fix this by running the filepatcher included in the Tamriel_Data download, updating the masterfile dependencies with Wrye Mash [The Assimilation Lab], or creating dummy ESMs with the same names, and then patching it (see above), we strongly recommend you start a new game to play Tamriel Rebuilt and look for new versions of your mods.

Q: Why is my minimap cut off?
The Morrowind minimap has a hardcoded size limit that cannot be changed by mods.
You will either need to use the Morrowind Code Patch [Nexus Mods], which has an optional "extended map" change that doubles the space the minimap can cover, or you need to switch to OpenMW [OpenMW], which has no hardcoded minimap limit.

Q: Where can I find Tamriel_Data?
Tamriel Data is the asset repository and master file of Tamriel Rebuilt and the Project Tamriel mods. It is vitally required and all of our downloads have notifications on where to find it.
Links are available in our download section.

Q: I need TR_Data, but it's missing. Where can I find it?
Tamriel Data is current the asset repository and master file of Tamriel Rebuilt and the Project Tamriel mods.
TR_Data.esm is the old asset repository and master file of Tamriel Rebuilt, its Project Tamriel counterparts were PC_Data.esm and Sky_Data.esm; all three of them were replaced by Tamriel_Data.esm in 2016. While TR_Data can still be found it bundled in old versions of Tamriel Rebuilt, you should not need it anymore.
There are several scenarios where you will encounter messages telling you that TR_Data is required. All of them are wrong. You can find out more »here«.

Q: I found a bug! What do I do with it?
Report it in the Bugtracker. Give us as much information as you can, such as a screenshot, coordinates, error log, etc.

Q: Does Tamriel Rebuilt add quests?
Absolutely! TR_Mainland adds hundreds of miscellaneous and faction quests, and the number will only increase with time.
For more information, please see a detailed response »here«.

Q: Does Tamriel Rebuilt have a main quest?
No. The only main quests in Vvardenfell and the mainland are going to be the Nerevarine's journey to Red Mountain and the following conflict with Helseth.
Tamriel Rebuilt's "main quests" will be the Great House questlines, with each of them aiming to be equal in scope to the Nerevarine's journey. We plan on adding an optional epilogue to that same journey, but it is not going to be our main quest.

Q: Does Tamriel Rebuilt edit Vvardenfell? What about Mournhold and Solstheim?
Yes, and we have been for a while, but not to any extent that most people would notice: TR_Mainland changes landscaping data on Inner Sea ocean cells and changes some cells' region data. As of version 22.11, it also includes new travel NPCs in Seyda Neen, Vivec, Dagon Fel, Sadrith Mora, and Ebonheart. As of version 23.10, it overwrites a select few lines of dialogue for Vodunius Nuccius (Seyda Neen), Caius Cosades (Balmora), Ajira (Balmora), Tenyeminwe (Sadrith Mora), and Tongue-Toad (Ald’Ruhn), as well as adding a new courier in Rethan Manor, in order to direct the player to the mainland in as non-intrusive and compatible manner as possible.

More intensive changes to the vanilla game are contained TR_Factions, with changes to faction progression and the late-game questline. Find out more »here«.
Almalexia will eventually replace Mournhold totally, with the Mournhold cells simply being disconnected from the game world. Find out more about these plans »here«.
There are no plans to edit Solstheim, although in the future we may require the use of Anthology Solstheim or another mod which moves the island to its lore-friendly position on the world map. That, however, is far from decided and many years off, in either case.

Q: How does Tamriel Rebuilt affect factions?
Tamriel Rebuilt adds quests to existing factions, but keeps Vvardenfell isolated from the mainland. TR_Factions changes the faction progression, adds Hortator and Nerevarine quests and will change the endgame questlines.
Find out more about these plans »here«.

Q: Why isn't Tamriel Rebuilt designed more like [XYZ] mod?
Q: Does Tamriel Rebuilt aim to be better than vanilla?
At this time, Tamriel Rebuilt aims to follow vanilla style and design principles as closely as reasonable in all aspects of the mod, be it assets, exteriors, interiors, or quests. This was not always the case, and earlier TR content may deviate greatly from vanilla design – we are working on rectifying that. This philosophy is not taken to the extreme; we still aim for better quality assurance and consistency than vanilla, and still try things that go beyond what vanilla provided.
You can read why we've adopted this design philosophy »here«.

Q: What parts of Tamriel Rebuilt are finished?
The finished content of Tamriel Rebuilt is contained in TR_Mainland, constituting roughly half of the Morrowind mainland, fully interiorised, NPC'd, and quest-filled. The finished parts include the Telvanni peninsula, most Indoril lands in the province's heart, and contested areas just to Vvardenfell's south – the regions of Aanthirin, Roth Roryn, Armun Ashlands, and Velothi Mountains.
The rest of the mainland is in various states of completion. Most of our current focus is concentrated on the southwest of the province, in lands controlled by House Hlaalu. Next in line will be either Redoran lands to the northwest, which were previously worked on in the early 2010s, or Dres lands in the southeast.
For more details, check the detailed response »here« and the Progress Report.

Q: When is Tamriel Rebuilt going to be complete?
Good question! The joke answer is 2090 and the optimistic answer is 2035.
However, "it will be done when it's done" is unfortunately the only true answer: attention and contributions to Tamriel Rebuilt vary, developers come and go, and plans change. All of these factors make it pretty hard if not impossible to predict when Tamriel Rebuilt will be officially "complete".

Q: Will any of the finished content be redone?
The first three releases, which roughly encompass Telvannis, the Sacred Lands around Necrom, and the east around Akamora and Bosmora, will be redone in the future. Both landscaping, questlines, and dialogue need an overhaul to put them in line with the new standards we have developed.
The first part of this rework, the area around the cities of Firewatch and Helnim, and the island of Althoa, was included in 2022's Embers of Empire. The next overhaul is in progress, targeting the Sundered Scar region. Other areas will likely wait a while before any major overhauls are undertaken.

Q: Will Tamriel Rebuilt become OpenMW-exclusive?
Possibly, but not anytime soon.
Several possible scenarios exist when such a move would be seriously considered:

1. The file size of our mod becomes too large for the Morrowind executable to handle, when even splitting it into several files no longer works,
2. OpenMW becomes the overwhelming standard engine to play Morrowind in,
3. OpenMW (and the mod ecosystem around it) reaches features parity with MWSE-Lua and adds additional killer features (such as per-cell water levels in exteriors).

Q: Will Tamriel Rebuilt use MWSE-Lua features?
Yes, starting in release 22.11, we have included optional features requiring MWSE-Lua, currently including new spell effects. However, this does not mean that Tamriel Rebuilt is exclusive to MWSE. Instead, we currently provide seamless fallbacks for the vanilla Morrowind engine and OpenMW. Once OpenMW supports the needed functionality, we will port all of our MWSE-Lua additions to OpenMW.

We strive for Tamriel Rebuilt to be usable by the vast majority of players, making it dependant on MWSE-Lua (or, in turn, OpenMW) at a point when this would lock out a considerable amount of players is not a goal we strive towards.

Q; Is Tamriel Rebuilt lore friendly?
Q: Why the hate against Elder Scrolls Online?
Opinions vary. For most new players, Tamriel Rebuilt is not considered to be lore friendly anymore, sometimes even aggressively hostile to new lore.
Generally, we consider Tamriel Rebuilt's game world to be friendly to the lore of TES III, the First Pocket Guide to the Empire, Redguard and Battlespire first and foremost.
Later changes and additions to the lore were made when Tamriel Rebuilt had already been in development for years, making it necessary to pick and choose which lore bits we include in our version of Tamriel even when the only new lore was contained in TES IV: Oblivion. With a consistent game world as one of our main goals, a lot of new lore simply doesn't fit.
Find out more about our lore policy »here«. 

Q: Will you add Bleakrock Isle?
Tamriel Rebuilt is not going to explain the absence of, include, or allude to Bleakrock Isle. In fact, there are plans to add other, unrelated islands in the place where Bleakrock would be.
If any mod creator desires to make a Bleakrock Isle mod, they are welcome to do so. It is beyond our scope.

Q; Will Solstheim be moved?
No edits to Solstheim are currently needed for Tamriel Rebuilt.
It is possible that we will require either Anthology Solstheim [Nexus Mods] or Solstheim - Tomb of the Snow Prince [Nexus Mods], which move Solstheim to a more lore-firendly location on the world map, but that is far from decided and many years off in either case.

Q: Why is Old Ebonheart an Imperial City?
Ebonheart was depicted on the mainland in TES I: Arena and said to be a rival city to Mournhold-Almalexia. Morrowind moved Ebonheart to Vvardenfell and made it Imperial. While it was inconsistently referred to as "Castle Ebonheart" in dialogue, the placement and name made it necessary to compromise when adding an "Ebonheart" settlement on the mainland. An Imperial settlement of "Old" Ebonheart with the backstory of the old Dunmer settlement of The Real Barenziah having been burned down after the Armistice.
For a more detailed response see »here«.

Q: Where have the settlements from Arena gone?
The Arena settlements have gone through several name changes, some as far back as Morrowind itself (Stoneforest -> Balmora). We include more or less all of the settlements which were depicted on the Arena province map, although some have been renamed into something vastly different.
For a more detailed response see »here«.

Q: How will Tamriel Rebuilt implement the Vvardenfell quarantine?
Not at all!
The Vvardenfell quarantine is a staple of Morrowind Lore that Tamriel Rebuilt helped introduce, and consequentially buried when it turned out that TES III dialogue does not actually support it.
A lot of NPCs move from Vvardenfell to the mainland as consequences of their quests, such as Vodunius Nuccius [UESP] who plans to travel to Narsis, Tashpi Ashibael [UESP] who escapes from Maar Gan to the mainland, and Caius Cosades [UESP] who departs Vvardenfell to travel to the Imperial City. What is actually blocked off with the excuse of a quarantine is travel from Vvardenfell to Mournhold. The player sneaking in with the help of sympathetic NPCs is a plot point in the Tribunal expansion, but it talks about Mournhold isolating itself.
In the end, we decided to officially abandon the pretence of a quarantine in 2015, around the same time we added official travel links between Vvardenfell and the mainland. A lore justification which ties into the assassinations carried out by the Sixth House and Balmora tax revolts can be found in "The Eastern Quarantine" [UESP], a book so recently written that very few instances will be found in-game.

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt compatible with OpenMW?
Yes, the odd bug notwithstanding.
OpenMW is as much in development as Tamriel Rebuilt and bugs can and will happen. You can find OpenMW's stance »here« [OpenMW] and notes about compatibility »here« [OpenMW].

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt compatible with Skyrim: Home of the Nords and Province: Cyrodiil?
Absolutely, starting with our common asset base (Tamriel_Data).
All of the province mods which are part of Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel have the aim to create a seamless, fitting gameworld. There are currently some rough edges (lore and landscape), but they will be smoothed out in time. Our goal is to make it possible to travel across a consistent and interconnected Tamriel.

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt compatible with Skywind or Morroblivion?
This cannot be answered with either yes or no, because the question itself is wrong.
Both Skywind and Morroblivion are mods made for later games in the Elder Scrolls franchise, TES IV: Oblivion and TES V: Skyrim (Special Edition), respectively. To make Tamriel Rebuilt (a TES III: Morrowind mod) "compatible" with either would mean porting our content (assets, landscaping, dialogue and quests) to the games these two mods were built upon.
For Skywind, this seems out of the question due to time and work constrains. As of 2022, and 10 years of development, it still hasn't had a public release of any kind. It can be assumed that the project is still busy porting the content from the Morrowind base game and will only be able to start work on converting Tamriel Rebuilt after this is done, assuming this is something the developers are even interested in.
The same holds true for Morroblivion; however, there was an effort to port Tamriel Rebuilt’s cells over to it. Find out more »here« [Internet Archive].

Q: Why is Tamriel Rebuilt incompatible with Morrowind Rebirth?
Morrowind Rebirth [Nexus Mods] is said to be incompatible with Tamriel Rebuilt due to some overlapping landscaping edits (particularly around Andothren), balance changes which make Tamriel Rebuilt content overpowered, and model replacements that reduce navigability in our mod.
While most of these are not game-breaking, the overwriting of landscape around Andothren is, and we cannot currently consider Rebirth as compatible. There is also Trancemaster's (the author of Rebirth) recommendation to not use Tamriel Rebuilt and Morrowind Rebirth together, as Tamriel Rebuilt undercuts the balance changes in Rebirth. A patch was available »here« [Nexus Mods] for older versions of the two mods, but is no longer maintained.

Q: Is Tamriel Rebuilt compatible with [Mod]?
We cannot guarantee compatibility with landmasses that conflict with ours, but generally speaking most mods that edit content on Vvardenfell should not have much of an impact on Tamriel Rebuilt as of yet. Many popular content mods have compatibility addons for Tamriel Rebuilt. Texture replacers (such as those included in the popular MGSO compilation) will not conflict with Tamriel Rebuilt, but may not cover custom assets provided by the project. Mesh replacers (particular On the Rocks, also included in the MGSO compilation, or Morrowind Rebirth) are incompatible in the sense that their changed models make parts of Tamriel Rebuilt hard to navigate or - as with On the Rocks - block some cavern doors. See more on our incompatible mods »here«.
Morrowind Code Patch and Patch for Purists are not only compatible, but strongly recommended. See more on our recommended mods »here«.

Q: What is the the Filepatcher for?
The Filepatcher, a java tool shipped with the Tamriel_Data archive, does two things to ESPs, and two things only:

1. Changes the master files, "TR_Data.esm" is changed to "Tamriel_Data.esm", "Map1.esm" and "Map2.esm" are changed to "TR_Mainland.esm".
2. It reads the translation.txt (which needs to be placed in the same folder the .jar itself is in), a list of old and new IDs, and replaces the old IDs in the ESP with the new ones. You will need to recompile your scripts afterwards.

Q: What mods are recommended to use with Tamriel Rebuilt?
An incomplete list of recommendations is available »here«.