FAQ: Almalexia

Frequently asked questions

  • What is Tamriel Rebuilt's plan for the city of Almalexia?
  • How will Tribunal content be incorporated into the game?

Frequently provided answers

In short: The city of Almalexia is not yet part of our released mod. Development planning is underway, though, and some 3D assets needed to recreate the city are already made. Finalization of needed assets and level design is likely to begin in the next couple of years, though development will doubtless take at least two years, if not longer. An old and unfinished, circa-2013 version of city used to be available to players in the since-deprecated TR_Preview.esp plugin file, but it no longer represents our vision for the city. TES III: Tribunal content will be completely reimplemented and redistributed into the new city of Almalexia.


Almalexia concepts by be-a-stranger.

In detail: The location where the city of Almalexia should be is currently a conspicuous hole in the Tamriel Rebuilt map. As one can imagine, this was not our original intent, but is rather the result of two failed attempts at making the city. After the failure of the second attempt became evident in 2014, we decided to throw in the towel for a while and work on other areas of the Morrowind mainland instead. Still, we always intended to return to Almalexia one day. That day now seems to be close.

The 2013 version of Almalexia, crafted by Nemon.

You may have seen screenshots floating around on social media or our website of Nemon’s grand 2013 take on the city’s exterior level design (made after the earliest attempt dating from 2003-2006(-2011) was deemed unworkable). This design integrated the circular Mournhold from TES III: Tribunal on a raised plateau in the middle of the larger city of Almalexia. Since the Mournhold seen in Tribunal is in reality an interior cell, the version shown in the exterior worldspace is a stand-in fake – something the raised plateau location was meant to hide.

Many have wondered why we didn’t just finish that version and release it to the public, especially given the significant press we once gave it. While that city does look very nice at first glance, it hides some fundamental issues:

  • Nemon’s Almalexia constituted ~25 exterior cells and ~250 interior claims (a significant portion of which are large buildings with 5+ interior cells in them), being many times as large as any other city in the game. While Almalexia obviously is intended to be the largest city in the game, its size presented concerns about the play-feasibility of the city and about our ability to provide quality interior purposes to its many enormous buildings.
  • There was very little internal logic to make this version of Almalexia navigable. The only navigation feature baked into its design was the existence of a raised Mournhold to give the player an idea of which direction to head as they circumnavigate that object. Some neighborhoods were later instituted ex post facto based on what already existed, but these are not strictly followed and do not form a logical whole:
    • Sandil Manor, home of the most powerful living Indoril, was tucked in a corner in the foundation of the Imperial Quarter;
    • the Gates of Symmachus opened onto a small, unimportant, nondescript wing of the lower-middle class section, far from the palaces and temples of the outer city;
    • there was a vast, industrial waterworks between the major Temple and Indoril neighborhoods;
    • there is no clear “main street” through the different neighborhoods, allowing the player to navigate from these far flung different parts of the city;
    • etc…
  • There was no high-concept for this version of Almalexia. It was just a big and beautiful city in the Mournhold architecture set, with a raised inner city because that inner city was depicted in TES III: Tribunal. Compare this to Blacklight, an example of a city with a very clear high concept: Blacklight is surrounded by craggy rocks which create a feeling of spears and a shield, it is a visual metaphor for the Redoran's role as border warriors of Morrowind.

It became clear that the fundamental starting concept of integrating TES III: Tribunal’s Mournhold level design into a larger Almalexia, while keeping the former hardly touched for mod compatibility purposes, was the root of most of these issues. One of the problems was that Tribunal’s Mournhold makes little sense: while often thought to be a "forbidden city", it is instead shown as a suburb filled with outlanders, the temple of the goddess Almalexia is shoved in one corner with the palace of the (Imperial) king in the center, and there is no sign of Great House Indoril – which is supposedly dominant in the region.

Worse, depicting Mournhold in the normal Morrowind worldspace is deeply problematic as the city is not implementable – it is not even a circle. To make this issue less visible, Nemon’s 2013 implementation of Almalexia raised Mournhold up, out of ground sight, but this merely made the millstone around its implementation less visible without fixing it in a satisfying manner.

Hence, we made a decision in 2014 to (1) remake Almalexia anew, scrapping the 2013 version and (2) do away with TES III: Tribunal’s Mournhold, instead re-implementing and re-distributing all of its content in a city of our own design. But by that point, dozens of mod developers had collectively spent thousands of hours crafting the city’s exterior and its 200+ interiors. Faced with the need to redo all this work for the second time in the space of three years, the team instead opted to punt any work on the city to the very end of the mod’s development arc.

Now, however, we have recovered from this particular trauma, especially given how well the development of Narsis, the huge Hlaalu capital, has gone. In 2022, Tamriel Rebuilt started a side-project to revamp our empty-seeming Indoril lands in a piece-wise fashion. The first part of this project is the upcoming Poison Song expansion, after which areas further east will be tackled, with the end goal of having all Indoril areas – including Almalexia – brought to modern standards. Almalexia, however, will be such a large project that its development will require more time than the other parts of this touch-up. Hence, we hope to start work on the required 3D assets and level design in the very near future.

Proposed city layout and another concept by be-a-stranger. The concept won't be followed 100% but is a good starting point.

The guiding concepts for the upcoming new Almalexia were recently made by our concept artist be-a-stranger. The city will be roughly circular, with the Orethan river flowing through it. On the central island, the forbidden Mournhold, will be Almalexia’s temple, with all other buildings and landmarks from Tribunal’s Mournhold distributed throughout the city in a way that makes much better sense. The original Mournhold cells will be left as they are and will remain accessible via in-game console.

Tribunal’s quest content will not be scrapped, but will instead be duplicated and reimplemented in Tamriel Rebuilt without being shackled by the odd and inconsistent design of Mournhold. Content-wise, Tribunal will play much the same way it does now. Questlines and NPCs will likely remain the same, though there may possibly be a few minimal quest, dialogue, and lore changes.

One specific departure will concern the reference to Vvardenfell being quarantined for the Blight. This reference was originally added in Tribunal to explain why you could not enter the entire city, but it does not make sense in the context of the base game, where characters are routinely said to move between the mainland and Vvardenfell. Instead, the quarantine is relegated to recent history.