In Which Tembriel Goes Looking for Mushrooms and Flowers

Three sessions in on Morrowind, and I’m still level 1, and discovering that harvesting ingredients for low-tier quests is not as easy as you would expect!

Highlights

• Play date: 8/12/2022
• Session number in this run: 3
• Picked up where I left off at the Mages Guild
• Ventured out into Balmora
• Found the armorer’s shop; bought more netch leather armor from him to get myself better kitted out, also a chitin short sword, bow, and arrows
• Ventured out of Balmora to try to find the mushroom samples; took a little while to actually find the right area to be in, but found the mushroom samples finally
• Successfully fought: two rats, three cliff racers, and I think at least one mudcrab
• Not successfully fought: killed by a kagouti
• Thrown back to Balmora, and had do the mushroom search again, fpfpbptf
• Second time through, killed by nix hounds
• Third time through, looked at my inventory and saw I already actually had two of the samples Ajira wanted, so now that I knew where to look I got in and out fast, and brought her back all the samples
• That got me promoted to Apprentice, but had to go back to Ajira for more duties
• She sent me to plant a fake soul gem in Galbedir’s desk upstairs, and that got her calling me friend, heh
• Got a new quest from her to go gather flowers
• Got stuff out of the Guild supply chest, and went out to look for the flowers
• Found a shrine called Fields of Kummu
• Successfully fought: a rat and a kwama forager
• Not successfully fought: killed again by a kagouti and thrown back to Balmora
• New plan: find the Blades trainers that Caius talked about
• Found all three of them and got moon sugar, an alembic, steel armor, and a steel helmet from them; sold everything except the alembic
• Upgraded most of my netch leather armor to chitin, and heh it doesn’t look any nicer in Morrowind than it does in Skyrim
• Thusly outfitted, set back out to look for those flowers
• Derped around till I reached the fort again, and veered temporarily north because of spotting something that looked like a city on a hill by a bridge but I couldn’t make it up there
• Swung back south to get back on target for the flowers
• Killed a couple more cliff racers and kwama foragers, and I think another mudcrab in there somewhere
• Found an NPC, Nevrasa Dralor, and guided her to the Fields of Kummu shrine; got 150 septims
• Wandered a little further and found another NPC, Edras Oril; this guy was looking for his lost friend
• Wound up getting killed by kagouti shortly after–that quest involves them and I am clearly not ready to take them out yet 😛
• But not thrown back very far this time, just back to just before talking to Edras
• Avoided engaging with Edras second time through and instead backtracked around the lake to look for the remaining flowers
• Arrived back in Pelagiad and did a bit of brief shopping, then cut back towards Balmora
• Passed Ulummusa but did not check it out yet
• Likewise Shulk Egg Mine though I talked to a couple of miners outside
• Returned to Mages Guild and gave Ajira her flowers
• Couldn’t get any new duties yet from her, so sold her the alembic I’d gotten from the Blades trainer
• Then went back to Rithleen and got her to train me in Medium Armor since that’s what I could afford
• Saved for the night

Commentary

It has become rapidly apparent to me that leveling up in Morrowind is going to take me longer than leveling up in Skyrim! I’m three sessions in, and I’m still only at level one.

In the interests of keeping it simple, as well as trying to work on establishing the cover story I’m in theory supposed to be establishing, I made this session’s goal just “go do the minor quests for Ajira”. Which meant, gathering mushrooms for her, then gathering flowers.

And since this character is not very fast yet, a lot of time in this session was just spent tromping around from place to place, exploring the territory around Balmora, and trying to follow Ajira’s directions for where I had to be looking for the ingredients she wanted.

It probably would have behooved me to check my inventory before I went out looking for the mushrooms, though–because I only realized on the third attempt that I actually already had two of the ones she wanted. LOL. But at least by that point, I’d figured out where to go looking, and it saved me time to just have to get two and then come right back!

Same deal with the flowers. I already had heather so I needed only to find the other three. But that was also made a bit more complicated by Ajira’s quest in my journal saying I was supposed to find “Willow Anther”. I didn’t find anything called “Willow Anther” in exploring, but I did find “Willow Flower”. Which was apparently what I was supposed to get.

Not the slightest bit confusing, that! But wanted to make a point of calling that out here, for Future Me on future Morrowind playthroughs.

The other thing I learned about Ajira was that she’s apparently got some kind of thing going on with Galbedir, the Wood Elf with a desk up on the top floor of the Guild’s headquarters. She wanted me to plant a fake soul gem in her desk. So I’m getting pulled in Guild drama? Joy. Ah, the perils of being a game protagonist. 😀

The two most important things I discovered while out tromping around looking for mushrooms and flowers were:

1. That I really do periodically need to use that healing ring I got during the character setup, because apparently my health will not regenerate on its own like it does in Skyrim
2. At level one, I am so totally not able to take out kagoutis!

Took me a little bit to work out how to use a ring. I had to get it queued up on the things I can cycle through wielding for magic effects, apparently? Once I did that, I had to hit the R key on the keyboard to raise my hands, and then hit my Y key on the controller to actually trigger the effect.

Which leads me to thinking I really need to check and see if I can set some of these things to be triggered on the controller. I need to check Steam’s button mappings for this, it’d be nice to be able to do this without having to hit stuff on the keyboard, but so far the impression I’m getting is that I’m going to have to play this game with both controller and keyboard.

(Also noting for Future Me: OpenMW’s mapping of my controller buttons seems better than Steam’s, actually? Some of the functions are set with controller buttons in OpenMW, like getting at the journal. I’ll need to compare maybe and see if I can replicate the same mappings in Steam for the vanilla build.)

The ass-kicking handed me by the kagoutis eventually made me decide I’d better go find those Blades trainers that Caius mentioned. That got me some useful gear to sell–which let me upgrade my armor and short blade. This still didn’t help me not get killed by kagoutis, but it made it take a little longer, at least!

And I did wind up getting enough gold that I could pay Rithleen for a round of training in Medium Armor. But I’m clearly going to need a lot more training!

Next time

Folks on the Skywind Discord tell me that part of the reason I’m having trouble killing things in melee fighting is just that I’m still a very low level character. So even if I looks like I ought to be hitting and killing a target, it’s not working well just because my skill at it is not good.

What this tells me is, I need to pay way more attention to training at this stage of the game than I’m used to doing in Skyrim, where combat skills seem like they level up much more readily on their own just by you fighting stuff.

And that means I’m going to have to find more low-tier quests to do, so I can actually afford to pay for training! I’m told there’s some simple quests I missed back in Seyda Neen, so I’m going to swing back there and try those out.

And I’ll look into joining House Hlaalu, because there’s apparently a guy there who can train me in both Marksman and Short Blade, both of which seem highly relevant to my Archer interests.

Screenshots

Editing to add

• 11/23/2023: Restored missing gallery.
• 10/10/2024: Converted gallery to a native WordPress one.