Welcome to Tamriel Rebuilt !

Tamriel Rebuilt is a modding project that adds Morrowind's mainland to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for you to explore. We follow Bethesda Softworks' original lore and creative vision so that you never lose the sense of a coherent game world. 

To date, about half of the mainland is playable, with additional in-progress work available for preview. Seek out exciting new adventures in the Telvanni east, the Indoril heartland, and the contentious Aanthirin region. Download Tamriel Rebuilt here

Our team of artists, modders, and writers is passionate about expanding Morrowind into a whole province, complete with diverse new landscapes, cities, stories, and hidden secrets. Though the project is over two decades old, work continues with people like you joining periodically. You can help us reach our goal by becoming a developer today, no experience required. 

Also check out Project Tamriel, our sister project. Through shared assets and lore, we are coordinating the (re)building of much more than Morrowind alone. 

September 2022 Art and Assets Update

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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

Feivelyn portraits

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 OlanarVounoura 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.

Looking Back at 20 Years of Tamriel Rebuilt

An ancient, 2004 trailer for Tamriel Rebuilt by Prometheus, featuring theme music by Dragonfly.

Rejoice! The celebrations of the 20th anniversary of Morrowind continue this month. There is much to be grateful for – how many other games still have an active modding community after two decades, perhaps stronger now than ever since the very early 2000s? Tamriel Rebuilt owes very much to the wider Morrowind modding community, whether it is sharing assets and modders or simply benefiting from the community improvements.

In fact, TR has been a prominent part of this modding community since its inception, which stretches back even before the game was released. Parts of TR are likely some of the oldest mod content still actively being played. Hence, it feels fitting in this month to take a look back at the history of our mod.

Released areas of Morrowind province covered by Bethesda’s and Tamriel Rebuilt’s expansions are marked by clear areas and years of initial release. Future in-progress expansions are marked by shaded areas and teal italic text, numbered in expected order of release. Planned reworks of older areas are marked in red.

TR’s past can be divided into several eras, each with their own distinct character, closely mirroring that of the wider modding community. You will see that this history was often filled with over-the-top modder drama, innumerable setbacks and content re-dos; the fate of the continued endeavor often hung in the balance. Yet, each era has also been characterized by slowly upwards-creeping quality of content, built brick by brick through the trial and error of countless modders of yesteryear.

The context within which the earlier parts of the mod were developed not only helps us understand its quirks and oddities, but also allows us to better appreciate each part of the mod, by connecting us to the people and times that they represent.

20 years of Morrowind

Morrowind's 20th anniversary is finally here! To celebrate, Danae, a prominent modder and streamer in the wider Morrowind modding community, has been working over the last few months to create a wonderful book of stories, screenshots and artwork from the community to share with us the experiences that make this game so special.

There are no ads, cookies, or paywalls -- just the book and links to related podcasts and interviews. So sit back, relax and enjoy the memories these last two decades of Morrowind have made. May there be many more to come!

Click here to access the Morrowind 20-year anniversary book.

April 2022 Progress Update

Telvanni Dustlands by Feivelyn — a concept for a future reimagining of the Telvannis district.

Tamriel Rebuilt is a large-scale mod that adds the mainland of the Morrowind province to TES III: Morrowind, according to the vision and lore of the original Bethesda team. At two decades old, it is one of the longest-standing modding projects still active. Work continues on the western areas of the province, but since we release our mod as a series of fully-realized expansions, players can already enjoy content that includes roughly half of the Morrowind mainland and around 360 quests.

We last updated you on our ongoing modding progress in mid-January. Since then, there has been a ton of exciting progress, as we develop not only our next upcoming expansions, the Dominions of Dust and the Embers of Empire, but also the ones beyond those. Some major items were the merging of Embers of Empire reworks into our main in-development .esp plugin, allowing for quest re-implementation to begin, and the completion of the final assets required before Othreleth Woods goes into development.

The new, improved Firewatch now stands guard over the Inner Sea. Landscapes around the city are still works in progress.

Introducing NFTels

Tamriel Rebuilt believes that the potential of Morrowind can be realized when we start with imagination, not limitations. No boundaries, no lead developers, just modders making cool plugins, together. In Tamriel Rebuilt, fans and players are owners and creators, and in the game of Morrowind, everyone can create and play together on one team.

Twenty years ago, Tamriel Rebuilt set out to change the world. We toiled, we were ridiculed, we collaborated, we innovated, and above all we prevailed. And through it all, we never lost sight of our vision: to keep our project simple, sleek, and modern. You've enjoyed our simplicity registering the Tamriel_Data BSAs and navigating the broad array of plugins that ship with our every release. You've enjoyed our sleekness by walking between our finished and unfinished areas without even noticing except for all the doors not leading anywhere all of a sudden. Now we want to show you our modernity with the next step in our evolution: we’re moving to web3, baby.

We were interested in the possibilities of web3 since we first heard of it, but were worried that, after working on the project for twenty years, we were too old and out of touch to understand what web3 could really do. But we wanted to provide you, the players, with a truly modern experience, so we pooled together our spare cash (originally a fund for hiring the original Morrowind voice actors, but we decided using it on this was better) to pay some crypto bros to explain it all to us in the most wanky-private-school language. It felt like we were on the receiving end of the opposite of one of those Nigerian prince scams, because they were using smart words and made us feel smart. So we knew we could trust them. They sold us on the possibilities of web3 immediately, and we hope we can sell you on its possibilities, too.

Over the next few years, you will see some exciting changes here at Tamriel Rebuilt. The first of these is NFTels: a collection of 10,000 unique digital collectibles living on the Dreamsleeve blockchain. Each NFTel is completely unique, and algorithmically generated from over half a dozen possible traits, including trunk thickness, fungal phyla, and magicka reserves. They’re all amazing, period. The NFTels are stored as Memospores in the Dreamsleeve. Purchasing an NFTel costs a mere 100 TR Points, but supply is limited! Once the initial batch of NFTels sells out, the only way to obtain one will be by buying them from their current owners.

Just look at these cute little Tels. Who wouldn't want to burn down a rainforest to own one?

Daedric Designs

Tamriel Rebuilt is a major, two-decade old modding project that aims to complete the mainland of the Morrowind province in the The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind engine, in accordance with the lore and vision of the original game. We develop the province as a set of expansions, many of which have already been released to players and include more than 360 quests.

By necessity, Tamriel Rebuilt relies on the lore and aesthetics of TES III: Morrowind, which it holds as supreme over the more recent lore decisions and retcons of TES IV, TES V or Elder Scrolls Online. This is mainly required to create a consistent game world within TES III but is also more agreeable to us Morrowind grognards. However, in order to fill out the remaining parts of this giant province, we do like to draw on bits of lore from both earlier and later games. Mostly, we prefer to rely on games like An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (1997), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998) and The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey (2004), since these ones largely shared their development team and lore building vision with that of TES III: Morrowind (read more on our lore page).

One of our lead developers, Cicero, is particularly enamored with the elaborate daedric lore present in Battlespire and has been working hard to bring more daedric content into TR. For this month’s teaser post, I asked Cicero to highlight some ways in which Tamriel Rebuilt harkens back to this intriguing but lesser-known Elder Scrolls title.

Daedra (Creatures)

An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire contained many lesser servants of the daedric prince Mehrunes Dagon – the main antagonist in the game – that were never seen again in the mainline series. Such examples include the Vermai, Morphoid, Herne, Daedra Counts, and Daedra Lords.

Tamriel Rebuilt aims to eventually recreate all of the daedra seen in Battlespire and has already made quite a lot of progress towards that goal. Below are some examples of creatures already present in our development files or in late stages of work.

Xivilai

Xivilai Moath in Battlespire Level 5 (left) and the TES IV-inspired TR model by Aleist3r, Cicero and Rats (right).

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