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.

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.

Aside from many miscellaneous quests, you will find two major questlines for House Hlaalu and the Tribunal Temple. The Hlan Oek Temple will deal with the themes of pilgrimage and will put you in difficult moral situations as you try to bring mercy and healing into this Camonna Tong town. This questline is already finished by pralec and Revane. The House Hlaalu questline, also finished by hardycore and Rats, shows you a particularly nasty side of the Hlaalu, as you haggle with smugglers and sabotage Indoril interests in Aanthirin.

Almas Thirr

Almas Thirr is the great bridge-fortress of the Tribunal Temple, raised in the place where Saint Veloth first crossed the Thirr River during the Chimer exodus to Morrowind. Being the only bridge over the Thirr north of Narsis, it is also one of the main marketplaces of the Thirr, tolling both river and overland traffic. The fortress was the centrepiece in the 2019 Aanthirin expansion, and many players are already familiar with it. It may come as a surprise to you, then, that we have reworked both its exterior and most interiors for the Andaram expansion.

In fact, the Almas Thirr that was released in 2019 wasn’t exactly the one we wanted to release – since its interiors hailed mostly from 2011 to 2012 and suffered from lapses of quality common to content from that era, we had been wanting to overhaul them for a while. Yet, delays to bigger priority items kept us from doing this, and Almas Thirr was released in 2019 as-is.

But more important than interior quality is that the Aanthirin region, despite being one of the most populated regions in Morrowind, has a distinct lack of faction content. Sure, there are already a number of miscellaneous quests and a major Temple questline in Almas Thirr, but players of Imperial characters will get comparatively little out the region. (The Imperial factions in Old Ebonheart are mostly concerned with happenings in the city itself.) This is a significant issue, as much of Morrowind’s core gameplay revolves around the three Imperial guilds.

Almas Thirr would be perfectly situated as a faction hub, yet nearly a decade ago, when we first conceptualized the city, we found it unlikely that the Tribunal Temple would allow Imperial guilds to set up shop in their holy stronghold. This was a reasonable supposition, but does it really track with what we see in vanilla Morrowind? In fact, the original game has a great example of one of the holiest cities in Morrowind – Vivec, the seat of the god-king him/herself. Yet, that city does accommodate the Imperial guilds, although in a contained manner in its Foreign Quarter. Hence, not only would adding the guilds remove a major gameplay issue, but it would also agree with Vanilla depiction of Temple-Imperial relations.

With these points in our favor, we felt confident to greenlight a substantial overhaul of the canton-city, which Pralec completed already early in the year (with contributions from Vern and Chef). He was careful to keep the spirit of Aeven’s 2010 original exterior intact, but managed to make the city properly symmetrical and to remove the once-ubiquitous mish-mashing of vanilla assets, instead employing Mwgek’s wonderful new purpose-built canton pieces. Now, the addition of Imperial guilds doesn’t mean that all Temple sanctity was thrown out the window – the canton itself will still be the domain of the holy and the humble, whereas the guilds found homes on the bustling market bridge.

A more laborious process has been the rework of most of the old interiors. Our interior makers and reviewers have, thankfully, been remarkably quick in this task, with nearly all of the work already done. Happily, one of the developers of the old Almas Thirr iteration from more than a decade ago, Bero, has rejoined us for this reconstruction.

Worth a special mention is the Almas Thirr Waistworks. While we loved the iconoclastic version made by Yeti in 2015, the in-progress rework by Bero (with contributions from Shadowhawk and Peter) is needed to properly fit it inside the canton exterior. Moreover, we hope to find a happy architectural middle-ground between Yeti’s vision and the strict (possibly religiously significant) setup that all vanilla cantons adhere to.

At the heart of the rework are the guilds. Located in a tower on the Almas Thirr bridge is the Mages Guild, led by Tynachos, a Bosmer enchanter. In the upcoming questline, Tynachos will have you collect an increasingly ridiculous collection of souls, sending you to battle various exotic beings all across Morrowind.

The neighboring Fighters Guild instead focuses on the Hlaalu-Indoril conflict on the Thirr river. The guild is not blameless in escalating these tensions, as they have made bank playing contract muscle for both sides; a less scrupulous player will find many opportunities to dip their hand in the pot, too.

The Thieves Guild needs to keep a low profile in Almas Thirr, due to the ever-watchful ordinators on the one hand and the increasingly hostile Camonna Tong on the other. After a couple jobs swindling pilgrims and burglarizing the rich, it is the player’s job to find a way to deal with the Tong and buy the guild some breathing room. This questline is already finished by FlinSunset.

The final questline out of Almas Thirr will be for the Morag Tong, and is already finished by Revane. As is the case with Morag Tong quests in vanilla, this will be a simple series of writs, some of which will also be available from the Andothren guildhall, that take you to interesting locales in the surrounding regions. But don’t expect all of the assassinations to go off without a hitch.

As you can see, the bulk of the work is already done in Almas Thirr. Much is still ahead, however, including the re-implementation of old questlines to fit the newly overhauled city.

Aanthirin Additions

Aside from the above two settlements, we have taken the opportunity to work out the remaining kinks in the Aanthirin region. Ever since 2016, we have successively been replacing Aanthirin’s reused vanilla assets with unique ones, and aim to complete that process in the Andaram expansion, with new trees, bushes, and textures awaiting to be implemented.

In addition, we noticed that the region had a low density of wilderness locations compared to vanilla Morrowind, so we fixed this with the addition of several new ruins, tombs, and caves, almost all already completed by the busy bees in our interiors department.

A few new Aanthirin questlines are in the pipeline, too. First, Threetooth has already finished a short low-level questline for the Hlaalu plantations on the west bank of the Thirr, dealing in themes of both intra-Hlaalu and Hlaalu-Indoril rivalry. It is also possible, but not yet clear, that we will include the long-teased knightly tournament in Old Ebonheart – work on that is ongoing but at an early stage.

Lastly, should asset developers grace us, you may also see a certain foreboding presence waiting for you at the bottom of Lake Andaram. Players of the 2019 quest “Shadows over Aimrah” in southern Aanthirin region will have an idea of what I’m talking about.

New Wilderness Regions

Coming together with the Andaram expansions are the first small tastes of two brand new wilderness regions with their own unique looks. One of them is the Coronati Basin, i.e., the middle part of the Thirr river basin, most of which is centered around Lake Coronati. There, iconic mushroom mangroves border small Hlaalu towns and innumerable plantations on both sides of the river.

We will also include a small slice of the Othreleth Woods, a great canopied mushroom forest that fills most of southwestern Morrowind. Although the Hlaalu have cleared much of the region for agriculture, the remaining forest still holds diverse and alien mushroom foliage, and dangers aplenty.

You will have plenty of reasons to visit these areas, as they are all filled with small settlements, ruins, and dungeons, and host numerous wilderness quests, nearly all of which are already implemented. Most significant is a string of quests for the new Kenassa Tong, being currently implemented. The Kenassa Tong is a newly conceptualized organization of reclusive scholars and archivists – part mystery cult, part fraternal order, above all they are collectors of secrets.

Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire update

That concludes the overview of the Andaram expansion, but we have one more thing in store for you. It is no secret that when we released Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire in November 2022, we were forced to cut quite a bit of content. Before the Andaram expansion, we hope to release an imminent update to address some of these gaps.

One of the most prominent pieces of cut content was the mammoth Andothren Thieves Guild by Rats, which we could not quite manage to review in time for the main release. Thankfully, Abby has now finished the review and this major questline is ready to step into the limelight in the upcoming update.

Along with this will come many new miscellaneous quests by various authors to pad out the somewhat sparse Andothren experience. A set of bounties offered by the Andothren Imperial Magistrate, made by Threetooth, will now give you more reasons to explore the Dominions of Dust lands, as do a few other miscellaneous quests added to these wilderness regions.

One final postponed questline, that of the Baluath vampires in the Armun Ashlands originally made by Dillon, has now re-entered development but it is unclear whether it will make it into this interim update or will be delayed further.

As with most game or mod releases, our initial release also had quite a few bugs. We have already put out four substantial hotfixes, which will all be incorporated into the update along with many new fixes, minor content additions, and performance improvements. All of this is so that you could finally experience the definitive versions of the Dominions of Dust and Embers of Empire expansions.

We hope that you are just as excited for the surprisingly content-filled Andaram mini-expansion as we are. Rest assured that this is not all that the Tamriel Rebuilt team is actively working on – progress also continues on the Sundered Scar, Narsis, Saint Seryn, and Kragenmoor expansions, and the assets needed for further ones still. But we always need more volunteers to help make Morrowind’s mainland come to life. If you would like to help us out, either by becoming a developer or playtester, check out our in-depth modding tutorials and come say hi on our Discord server. Morrowind modding is very easy to get started with; no prior experience needed!