About to start a playthrough, I have the following questions:

1) does spell magicka cost decrease as my skills and attributes related to it increase (I play with the Morrowind Code Patch and the Unofficial patch)? I think I remember something similar but it could be from another TES game...

2) I want to use a custom class to maximize the leveling bonuses and get all attributes to 100 eventually: do you know of a build planner I could use to plan the class before I create it? It's difficult to keep track of racial and focus bonuses to skills from the character creation panel. My idea is to create an altmer character, so if any of you tried this before and has a build ready feel free to tell me.

3) is there an unofficial patch for the official plug-ins? Are they comprised in the unofficial patching project?

1. Don't remember the specifics, but some costs go down as you gain skills

2. Just make sure you have Major Skills that are governed by each Attribute, then the same for Minors. Do not make a Major skill something you will use all the time in the game just traveling around (like Athletics or Acrobatics or Sneak) so you don't end up leveling before your combat skills are leveled. It is OK to put your main weapon/attack and armor skill as a major though, as you want those to level a bit faster. However, all that being said, reaching 100 in everything is easy, you don't need a road map, or even a plan, just play the game and use all the skills. By the time your character is L20, your not going to have issues with any enemies in the game. Tribunal, you want to be L30/35, and Bloodmoon, you want to be L50

3. Yes, there is a UOP for the Plugins, I think it is even the same UOP that everyone else uses (sorry, I did my Morrowind Install years ago and have not changed it much since, so forget all the details about that)

Character planner: http://morrowind.inventivegamer.com/tools/chargen/


A few modders have cleaned the official plugins of their problems. I use these: http://download.fliggerty.com/download-13-1079

Does anyone remember the specifics? I've encountered other posts around that say it isn't so, yet I remember some high level spells not being so costly after some skill raising...

It makes the difference for me since if they scale with the skills I could choose another race instead of altmer and still be able to cast late game spells...

Also, what about this one http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/43931/?tab=9&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fmorrowind%2Fajax%2Fmodreadme%2F%3Fid%3D43931&pUp=1?

Does it substitute the plug-ins or is to be loaded after them?

Anyway, thanks for the help so far, the character planner was very good!

1. I did a test once where I fortified a skill with a spell to over 800. All spells were cheaper and I could summon a Golden Saint for an hour.

2. All of my characters got straight 100s in attributes and I never used a planner. If your character started with just all 30s, then you would need 560 attribute points to max out (70 times 8). Most characters can get over 70 levels, so that would be 8 points needed per level up. Accounting for Luck, which gets just 1 point per level, you only need to get at least 7 other attribute points per character level. One way would be to get a 1 skill level increase in a miscellaneous skill (for 2 attribute points) and then a 10 skill level increase from one of your chosen skills (for 5 attribute points). This is easier if you start by adding to Luck deliberately and/or use a birthsign to do this. It's even possible to max attributes before you max level your character.

Altmer are good at magicka skills. The majors I'd recommend are Alchemy, Enchant, Conjuration, Mysticism and Destruction. I grind alchemy to max by buying cheap food ingredients and selling the potions for profit. I then make custom spells to Summon an Ancestral Ghost for 12 second, Trap the Soul on target for 10 seconds and 28 Points of fire damage on target. With Restore Magicka potions, I cast these spells in sequence to fill common soul gems while I level up these skills. It's a grind, but you get a fortune in soul gems to sell or use. Finally, I use the same spell sequence to fill soul gems that I use te refill cheap enchanted items and max out Enchant skill. That should get you started.

Good luck!

I take things like sneak and athletics for majors all the time, and I still don't get them maxed.


I prefer taking passive skills like that as a major because I find they don't go up fast enough as minors in conjunction with my other skills, and it's harder to train athletics and sneak then it is for me to train long blade or any magic skill. If I need some magic skills leveled up, I cast a bunch of spells for a couple minutes over and over and it's all good. Long blade or weapon skills I find go up too fast as it is, while sneak I almost never get maxed, even as a major because it takes so long to get up.


I usually take skills like acrobatics, athletics and sneak as majors while I take my combat skills (except armour, I like to leave those as majors too) as minors because I find they go up faster than my passive skills.


Maybe it's because I know the game so much and have been playing about 15 years, so I'm not wandering aimlessly trying to find places and things to do (I know where I want to go and what quests I'm planning on doing) so my passive skills are usually always lagging way behind my combat skills.


Also I find if you get that galsiah character development mod, you don't have to worry about leveling modifiers and your attributes go up pretty well.

Thanks, you gave me good ideas.

@Golden Sinner: you are right, I don't need careful planning to be 100 in every attribute, but I like to plan in advance. I made a strange custom class that's combat focused but has magic and stealthy majors and minors for that. Also, thanks to your test I can now play as a dunmer, without having to worry too much about magicka.

Also, I calculated that, starting as a dunmer battlemage I only need 42 level to max all apart Luck. Could I keep leveling luck for another 18 levels to max it even with the other attributes at 100 or would I stop leveling?

1. No. Though if you choose the atronach sign you can get magicka back from shrines as well as from both enemy casters as well as initially friendly summons you provoked via attacking. This is why potions, managing magicka, enchantments, and fallback weapons are more important for Mages in Morrowind than in Skyrim. Oh and... If that sounds frustrating or anything, just FYI it doesn't seem all that out of character for me for a mage to use a dagger when out of magicka though maybe that's just me. I'd recommend gathering enchants, and using a dagger or two when running out of magicka... Mages have a long time associated with daggers in TES not just assassins, and it's way more magely than a huge hammer.

2. I'd personally bored of having a maxed out character, but since you have yet to get bored of that I'll provide an answer: The key is to power level misc spells the most efficient means via training with money that have the same governing attributes of other things you raise. If you level at least 3 things at least 5-10 levels with different governing levels each level I think you'll be able to max out fairly easy... The hardest part is leveling luck as it has no modifiers.

3. Yes Morrowind has a few unofficial patches these days.

I have another rather stupid question: does anyone know how much it would cost to train a skill from 5 to 100?

I just know it gets more expensive as it goes up... I think that personality/speechcraft may reduce the price as well as a 100 disposition but then my memory isn't 100% accurate.

A character can make an unlimited number of potions. Then you can sell as many as the character can carry for up to 100k g.p. per day by traveling with Guild Guides, Recall and Intervention spells. So the problem is not money. The bottleneck is that you can only improve a skill with a trainer to the level of that skill's attribute. So if you train 10 skill levels but only get 5 attribute points from it, eventually you get to the point where you cannot use a trainer to improve the skill further.

It depends on deposition with the trainer, but it progressively becomes more expense as your skill increases.

At 100 deposition, it's around 50-300 between levels 5 through 40ish. By the time you pass 85 or so it's in the 500+ range. From 5 to 100, I'd estimate around 30,000 with most of the cost coming towards the end.

Because of the steep increases in costs, it makes more sense to just train a skill from 5 to 50 or 60 and level the rest yourself. For combat and magic related skills, it becomes progressively easier to level because the chances of successful hit or cast increases the higher your level gets.

Skills like sneak and enchant it might be worth buying the levels rather than naturally getting them. Other than that it doesn't make much sense to train a skill past 60.

There are a few simple ways to get around the training cost increases, but that clearly falls into the "spoilers" realm.

Yes if you want to be really cheap and exploit the game, it can be as cheap as 95 gold to go from.level 5 to 100.


There's a spell you can get in moonmoth fort if I remember correctly. It's a,spell that drains a skill. Then you go to spell creation and make a spell drain X skill 100 for 2 seconds on self, and cast it right before talking to a trainer. It should cost 1 gold to level up every level because your skill is at 0.

Since he's playing with the Code Patch, I don't think that works anymore.

Yep, that's exactly what I want to train, and heavy armor, since it progresses so slowly. The other skills I'm leveling through use, like, mercantile and speechcraft to make money for heavy armor training, or athletics and destruction.

Makes sense. I'd recommend Ri'Shajirr at the Shenk's Shovel in Caldera for Sneak. It would also be a good idea to find the Amulet of Shadows for the chameleon bonus.

For heavy armor, Seanwen at the Fighter's Training Area in Vivec Arena Canton is your best option.

I went to Shenk to get the money for training, since he sells booze and he's near the Creeper, but didn't know that Khajiit was a trainer. I usually don't mess with people unless I have too, to avoid spoilers for future quests. Another thing I found useful for training is the ring of medusa's gaze (I think one is a reward for a quest involving slave gutting, and fortunately you can get it even if you save the slave): paralyzing an opponent is useful for leveling weapon skills while avoiding leveling armor skills you don't want. So far I've used a buoyant armiger as trainer for heavy armor, but now I'll wait, because in a couple of levels I'll be at 100 endurance and the last 30 levels of heavy armor will be unrelated to attributes. It's something I like to do, reaching the max level for an attribute so I can use the related skills just as a leveling provoker, so that I can increase misc related attributes and still have a free spot for luck.

I rarely ever pay to train up Enchant, because once you buy a Soultrap spell (and make a cheaper version to use), filling Petty soulgems is trivial and relatively inexpensive. There are a couple of restocking vendors (Caldera, Vivec, Tel Branora, etc.), so availability should be no issue. You can then recharge an enchanted weapon with those filled gems, and that should boost your Enchant skill rapidly enough.

Sneak is difficult to start out with, if your skill is low, but once you reach about 40, it's easy enough to improve through practice. Sneaking past rats and other small critters while traveling should give some experience at it, and Scribs are perfect trainers, because they won't attack you if you fail. The one FG quest to deal with a couple of eggmine bandits is a golden opportunity to gain half a dozen skill levels in Sneak.