Skip this paragraph if you don't care about why I stopped playing morrowind before. Just an interesting story I like to tell people.

I have had Morrowind for awhile and played it once, since I enjoyed Oblivion so much, but I ended up getting angry and just stopped playing when I spent 3 hours (I can spend a LONG time deciding what playstyle I want to use and what skills I would like.) and entered a random cave just to get stuck due to some monster putting a curse or something on my that made my carry space 0. I even waited about 2 hours (Realtime) waiting for it to wear off and it NEVER did. I hadn't saved at ALL before this so I just quit the game and never went back.

Now that story aside I decided to try it again and would like to know if anyone has any tips for me. I personally enjoy either a sneaky character or a mage (I prefer a mage but I like sneak as it makes most use of my favorite race, Argonians) so anything as to anywhere I should go, skills I should use, or anything in general that may enhance my time playing this game.

Morrowind's a tough game when you're at lower levels, don't be afraid to explore Seyda Neen thoroughly and partake in all the quests as you'll want to work on raising a few levels before venturing out into the big wide world.

Here's a link to give you a leg up -

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Starting_out

This can happen in Morrowind if some baddy damages your attributes. To prevent this stopping you, and a lot of other misfortune, go to Nalcarya in Balmora. Buy a Mark and Recall potion. Go to a temple and stand next to a shrine that grants Restore all Attributes. Drink the Mark potion. Now if this ever happens again, just drink the Recall potion and you will be immediately sent to the shrine that fixes this. The recall also works if you are falling to your death or are about to drown or are getting pounded into dog food. Just right click to activate your menu screen (and freeze action) and take the Recall potion.

That may help, I am still used to Fallout's and Oblivion's way of you can get anywhere with no real fear of anything being TOO big of a jerk. I'll also check out that link when I have time, most likely when I am about to play it again lol.




I will make note of that. That enemy was, like I said, the sole reason I just could not get into Morrowind. I just want to know, do these "Mark" and "Recall" potions cost a lot? They sound like something that would basically empty my wallet in most other games.

I think the potions will feel semi expensive early on in the game. but after a while you should have no problem getting money. Of course you can always learn the spells and forgo the potions.

As for a couple of other tips related to this:
Save often and esp before entering any cave, tomb, dungeon
Learn restoration spells (fix your drained attributes)
Carry some restore magica potions
Carry some restore attribute/cure disease/cure poison/heal potions or learn the spells

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind_for_Oblivion_Players will also be a helpful guide to re-orientate yourself with the gameplay.

Save all the time, and keep more than one Save file.
Save allllll the time.

If you take the package to Cosades as you are told, then he gives you more than enough money to purchase the potions. Always have a Recall potion on you. Casting the spell or using an enchanted item that does the same thing is fine except in an emergency. Your character may die before the spell is cast. Freezing action and taking the potion will always get you out of trouble.

Aww, that svcks. It's not a totally hopeless situation though, you can drop everything (except gold, which is weightless) and walk back to town naked, but obviously that's not much fun. So as someone else pointed out, it's a good idea to carry intervention scrolls, and/or restore strength potions at all times.

Anyway, other tips, let's see...

Don't try to maximize your stat multipliers every level. It's not fun, and Morrowind is forgiving enough that you won't be crushed just because you character isn't perfectly optimal.

Make a note of shops that have more than a couple thousand gold. These will come in handy for selling pricey loot later.

The ingredients from certain plants are worth harvesting to sell if you don't have much capital yet.

Unlike Oblivion, you can safely stash items on the ground or in containers anywhere.

Morrowind's handling of stolen items is rather poor, so never pay your fine to a guard if you can help it. They will almost always confiscate things, even if you actually acquired them legitimately. The Theives' Guild can take care of fines for you without this problem.

Look up on Google how to find the "Talking Mudcrab Merchant", it's a merchant with 10,000 gold that replenishes his gold everyday. If you have expensive items, sell it to him/it (DON'T KILL THIS MUDCRAB, IT LOOKS JUST LIKE AN ORDINARY MUDCRAB!). Sweet way of raising some money in early/semi-early stages of the game. Money can help you training your attributes and thus increasing your level more. There is no training-limit per level like in Oblivion and Skyrim.

PS. You can only sell weapons/armor and potions to the mudcrab merchant.

Thanks, I'll be sure to do that when I have the chance to load up the game.



That's the thing, I DID drop everything. I even dropped all my gold, I just could not move at all, my carrying space was at a full 0 and I couldn't move. Thanks for the other tips, I am sure they will help. I honestly did not think this much from Morrowind was changed in Oblivion



Wait.....there is a talking mudcrab? I think that Morrowind is now my favorite TES game period.....I am not even kidding this is the most epic thing I heard all day lol

Okay the biggest tip I'll give you: ALWAYS have a fairly recent save before you enter any interior place. I wish someone told me that with my first character, but the game was so new at the time had no way of knowing. Do you mean being over encumbered? That's called damage strength. It bothered me so much I actually made a constant effect restore strength/speed enchantment before. It may be a pain but until you can get that enchantment it's worth stocking up in lots of restore attribute potions. Even more so than cure disease potions I think. If you're playing vanilla (AKA no mods). If you are on a console you are almost certainly playing vanilla. In that case, I would recommend sneaking+archery+a melee weapon for when you are low on magicka or don't want to expend it.. And then primarily conjuration+destruction for most combat support. Alteration also helps a lot with mobility. Illusion is the very blending of sneakiness mixed with magic typically, it is useful though it may also risk making the game feel too easy. Restoration believe it or not, can also be useful for fortifying your abilities/stats to create even more powerful spells.

As for signs, I'd recommend either the Apprentice or Atronach. Mage feels like too small of a boost to magicka. Atronach means no regened mana when you sleep, Apprentince means spells kill you easier, and no extra spell absorbing. Also restoration can help you restore your own attributes, if you make a spell to restore every attribute. If you go that route, all you need to do is stack restore magicka potions. Cure disease potions are important, but restoring attributes is even more so. Also so you know before hand: Some containers CAN respawn, and you can lose unique items FOREVER that way. Do some searches on various player homes before storing your stuff there. The sooner you can find somewhere to store your stuff, the sooner you can stockpile the sooner you can advance through the game.

You'll want a player home with non respawning containers. It can be a vanilla one or one added through a mod. Just make sure you know for sure a container doesn't respawn before storing your stuff. Also the maximum amount of items you can store in a single cell is about 150 I think. Also you can only enchant something once, so just remember that.

Wow that was a lot. I am playing on PC (To my personally displeasure because I just feel so much better using a controller the M+KB but that's my personal opinion) and yes it is at the moment unmodded but I do have both Blood moon and whatever the other one is (Blood moon was the main reason I want to get back into Morrowind as from what I heard how the werewolves work is how I wanted them to work in Skyrim) if that means anything at all.

My only problem with that is I am just flat out terrible at using bows in any game besides Zelda, I just can seem to figure out the arch and just miss every shot. The signs I might just use as I have always just choose Steed or Shadow (Shadow due to RP reasons) because I just never liked the idea of having something decreased right from the start.

Also how much do the racial stats matter for the whole combat style tips you gave me? Like I said I have always preferred Argonians and want to know if I can still be one or if I have to figure out some other race to play as.

That's not supposed to happen, but it's not terribly surprising that it did. Probably your unloaded weight got pushed to 0.1 or something due to some kind of bug. Normally such little glitches are easily overlooked, but in that case it makes all the difference.

PC? I consider that quite lucky then. I wish when I was playing Morrowind I could've played it on PC. The mods are amazing. A big problem I think Morrowind has balance wise, is that endgame the lady sign, apprentice, atronach, and mage, all seem to benefit the player no matter how powerful they get. Yet most (if not all) the other signs have extremely bad problems with scaling. Racial ability wise it's not so imbalanced. Altmer, Bretons, and Nords all seem to have abilities so powerful that it's unfair to the other choices. More magicka is a huge deal unless you choose to be a purely melee/archer type character. Nords have outright immunity to frost, resistance to shock plus woad, and like Orcs they have high starting hp+endurance. Argonians have decent racials though the lack of free cast waterbreathing combined with very little to compensate for being permanently barefoot seems unfair to me. As for bows, spells have optional area effect, and I think are easier to use than bows. Also some mods provide arrows with area effect which will make aiming easier if you want them.

Racial starting stats are not a big deal other than getting started, it's the abilities which last you even late into the game that are a big deal.

Regarding using a bow, if your archery skill is low you will miss a lot. Maybe spend a little to up your skill in it. As for aiming I do the following. If it is far away I aim higher. If it is close and small like a rat I usually have to aim at the dirt in front of it. I think archery is my favorite because, I like being able to kill things before they get close to me. If you are bad at dodging incoming spells, your arrow will kill the spell before it hits you.

Racial stats help in certain areas to give you a boost in being able to use a weapon or cast spells. Is it very important? No but it does help esp in the begining of the game to get your feet under you. Often when a skill like one handed swords gets high, I start using another weapon. If I start losing a fight, I just switch back to me good weapon skill.

Oh I had sort of assumed you were on XBox. You definitely want to install the expansions, even if you plan to stick to the original content for a while, that's because they include interface enhancements as well. Like the ability to sort your journal by quest, and make notes on the map.

Like I said I have always just felt more at home with a controller then M+KB, I also always refused to allow the idea of mods to make me think that in any way PC > Consoles. Yeah the mods are great and all but I just always enjoyed playing games vanilla over modding it, and I also feel that a game should never be good solely due to mods, to me mods and multiplayer stand in the same area. Sure their a nice thing to keep the game interesting, but if the game can't stand on it's on it is NOT worth any money in my opinion. Not to mention, besides the Curse of Hircine mod for Oblivion, I never really found any mods that interested me for any game.

Now that my huge rant on my feelings to mods are, on to the other stuff lol.

Yeah when I first played Morrowind coming from Oblivion it just felt kind of unfair with the Argonians and their lack of ability to wear boots or certain helmets, and the thing that they just got a water breathing spell and not just a passive effect personally made no sense to me. The reason I liked them in Oblivion and Skyrim was my love of just swimming in games and playing as them just made it possible to swim ALL the time (Stupid reason I know but I am a very weird person) and I also don't like playing humans in fantasy games, it just feelings boring and I would just much rather but something that I am not. I never wanted to play Breton, Nord, or High Elves (I believe that is who the Altmer are, I am not too read up on TES lore on them as I just hate the race for reasons unknown to even me) solely because I just dislike classes who seem to be geared solely to a single combat style.

And the spell/Bows thing is what I did in Oblivion and that was what I was hoping to do in Morrowind, like I said I am just terrible at using realistic bows lol.

So was I a bit against modding games, because I hadn't found any good mods to other games. Elder Scrolls, however, really aren't that comparable... These modding societies are... gigantic. Huge. Experts. No comparison! For example, your Argonian's-should-have-constant-effect-water-breathing and combat clumsiness are easily changeable with, you guessed it, mods!

A bit off-topic but my read on Argonians on Morrowind is that they're pretty primitive. They don't have full lungs anymore, they can't breathe underwater for how long they want. But their reptilian legs aren't suited for boots yet. Yes, the latter hinders the possibilities suited for that race, but somehow that never bothered me. I guess I just narrow-mindedly play those thiefish type light armor/unarmored Argonians!

Anyway, the combat should be the only thing hindering your play. The immersion and dark and dangerous atmosphere of the world itself is simply stunning and always absorbs at least me inside so that I could care less about graphics or combat.

I am not against modding games, heck I can't ever see my self playing minecraft without the timber mod again, it's just I never liked being looked down upon and told that the version I played was crappy because it couldn't be modded, and in my opinion, yes the mods for TES are AMAZING and really fun, but the game can very easily stand on its on, and I was able to play and enjoy Oblivion, on my xbox until Skyrim was released, without mods. I only JUST recently got Oblivion on the PC and already found a mod I enjoy and adds some more hours of enjoyment for me. I will most likely search for and find plenty of mods I enjoy, but I will still be on the look out for a copy I can get on Xbox as I personally just prefer controller.

On the topic of the Argonian lore, that is really interesting. I have been meaning to look up some more lore on them but have been for too busy to find any free time to do it, and I guess that also explains why their legs go from lizard legs in Morrowind to human legs in Oblivion (That was always something that bugged me)

Combat wise, the only thing that bugs me is the missing thing. I just don't like the fact of if I see my sword hit a mudcrab for it to, by some godly force of nature, to no damage to said mudcrab what-so-ever. If I see my sword hit something I would like for it to....well....hit, but like always that is all just personal opinion I guess, and is not in anyway a big enough problem to me for me to not play it.

Modding is a personal opinion, and you can enjoy the game for a long time without any mods.

But, I would highly recommend using the two community patches. They actually fix thousands of bugs and glitches, and in some cases, fixes major game breaking flaws.

And install the expansions. They are essential to updating the game.

The time span between Morrowind and Oblivion is, what, 7 years? I didn't mean that the Argonian race has evolved, just that the developers used two different points of view in these games. Actually lore-breaking more than lore, but still an interesting change of view on the fly it would seem. Adding boots of course just made their character builds a lot more variable at once, so nothing wrong with that gameplay-wise.

Ah, and I get that you prefer the controller. Have one on PC! I don't know about those so I don't know if it would work. Why wouldn't it though?

And yes, the game definitely can stand on its own. The expansion Tribunal (or is it Bloodmoon?) just makes the journal bookmarked, that is, readable at all, sorted by quest trees and not just unsorted pages after pages. That's the only extra thing I actually need for my vanilla game to this day! I have one or two saves going on with the vanilla game with expansions, and I'm enjoying them as much as others that are modded.

After looking it up the time span between Morrowind and Oblivion is 6 years....so yeah the evolving thing now makes no sense lol

Yeah I can use a controller on the PC but at the moment I only have my Wireless 360 controller that doesn't want to work on my laptop anymore (It used to in the past....it just stopped one day for some reason) and a Logitech (I think that is what it's called) controller that has very crappy control sticks and just doesn't work with anything first person.

Yeah I saw the bookmarks in the journal. I got the expansions when I got the game and had them installed since I had the game so I thought the bookmarked journal was just in the main game. That explains why everyone said the journal was annoying to read.

You definately do not need mods but they can often be helpful or make things look better. But I would recommend the mods that fix some of the errors/bugs in the game. They don't change the game but fix things like bad directions from NPCs and such. Othr mods I use add a personal house and add new areas. Personally I would recommend playing through the game the first time with out using mods that add land, creatures, items. I added those things after I had beaten it. It added some new flavor and challenges. Makes your later games interesting and new again.

My two main player types are the character that tried to do everything and the player that avoids quests and just explores and raids tombs and generally trying to see the areas that my 'good' character would not go (NPCs locked areas). The beauty of the game is that you can play whatever style fits you: fighter, mage, thief, hybrid, good, bad, etc.

A few items of note:
If you have the Morrowind Code Patch (MCP), arrows will no longer bend in mid-flight if you're playing a tall race (Nord, Imperial, Orc, Altmer), depending on how far above or below you the target is. That makes it a lot easier to judge shots. You'll still miss a lot at low level, but Marksman combined with Sneak becomes devastatingly powerful as the game progresses. I could one-shot Scamps at the edge of sight and take down most Daedra with 1-3 plain iron arrows (with an enchanted Bonemold bow) before I decided to "retire my bow" and switch to magic, because it was becoming too game-breakingly effective.

Carrying a Restore Strength potion (very affordable) or having a simple "Restore Strength 2 points for 3 seconds" spell re-tailored at almost any Mages Guild (so that you can cast it over and over with minimal Restoration skill and almost no drain on magicka), will solve the damaged attribute dilemma, if you encounter another Bonewalker or an NPC with the spell. Spells over time are a bit easier to cast and use slightly less magicka than the same total effect "all in one shot". As long as you can get a few points back, you can at least make it to a healer, healing altar, or alchemist. There's a Recall amulet available for sale in one of the towns, if you've got a couple hundred Septims, and you can use a Mark potion or scroll to set the location anywhere you like (such as a cleared bandit cave to serve as "home", or next to your favorite merchant to sell your loot).

You don't need to sell items for purely cash; barter expensive items for a combination of whatever the merchant has in gold, plus a few items in trade. That works either way, so you can sell your current equipment in the same transaction that you buy the other item, if neither you nor the merchant has sufficient gold to cover the cost. You can "prime" a merchant's inventory over a period of time by selling semi-expensive items to them every couple of days, and then go back a day or two later to sell something that they don't have nearly enough cash to afford. Just take the previous items plus whatever cash you can, and then sell the trade items back in a few days when the merchant's gold renews.