Morrowind
Main parent category for all posts about playing Morrowind
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In Which Tembriel Has Trouble in Odirniran and Ebonheart
This was one of my more challenging sessions of Morrowind to date. Started trying to run the Odirniran quest for House Hlaalu, only to discover exactly why Greater Bonewalkers are a goddamn problem. So there was a lot of retreating being the better part of valor here, and eventual fallback to trying to finish off a different plot entirely!
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In Which Tembriel Solves a Murder for House Hlaalu
A very busy and profitable session for Tembriel, running multiple quests for House Hlaalu, and racking up enough drakes to be able to pay for quite a bit of training. Solved a murder in Balmora, escorted a noble from Vivec to Pelagiad, delivered some orders to a clothier spy in Ald’ruhn, and picked up owed money from a pauper in Hla Oad!
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In Which Tembriel Quests for House Hlaalu
This session of Morrowind was all about Tembriel working on maintaining her public cover story as per Caius’ orders. So this time around, I had her working on establishing her presence in House Hlaalu.
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In Which Tembriel Takes on Bandits in Ulummusa
This was a very low-key session, mostly all about experimenting some more with playing on the Steam Deck. But also experimenting with magic! And investigating Ulummusa, since I’d seen the entrance to that but hadn’t checked it out yet.
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In Which Tembriel Gathers Intel for the Blades
This post marks my first attempt to play Morrowind on my new Steam Deck! And aside from that, a fairly busy session! Main highlights: stealing a book and then returning it, for a colleague in the Mages Guild; killing a kwama queen in an egg mine; checking out a disturbance in Maar Gan; and hunting down three different informants for further information about the Nerevarine and Sixth House cults.
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How to fix misnamed save files in Morrowind
Tried out my Morrowind playthrough on the Deck tonight, and this mostly went swimmingly (with a couple of minor exceptions which I’ll go into when I do the session post). This post, however, is me running into an unexpected hurdle that I didn’t run into with Skyrim: namely, that Morrowind actually makes you name your save files when you save your game.
Which you have to do often! Ten sessions in, and I am so far definitely saving more often than I do in Skyrim, just because Morrowind’s been prone to crashing on me a lot more often than Skyrim is.
And here’s the problem with doing that on the Steam Deck: I am still not comfortable with its on-screen keyboard, and this caused me to wind up creating bad save file names for most of tonight’s saves.
I’d been trying to maintain a pattern of “Tembriel” followed by simple increasing numbers. So tonight my last save was supposed to be “Tembriel 46”. But I fucked this up in various creative ways, which wound up getting me save file names like “46” and ” Tembriel 40 ” (with spaces on either side) and “Temm”.
I knew this was going to nag at me if I didn’t figure out how to fix it, so after I stopped actually playing Tembriel tonight, I dug into this problem. And found, once I located Morrowind’s save files, that I’d also fucked up a few earlier ones from the PC side, too, where I’d mistyped “Tembriel” as “Temtiel”. And I hadn’t figured it out at the time because the font that Morrowind uses for its text makes it very hard to tell a small r and a small t apart.
It ultimately had to be solved on my PC, just so that I could manipulate files without having to fight with the Deck’s on-screen keyboard, or try to manipulate files in its file explorer, Dolphin.
This is what I had to do, in two phases, first re-saving each impacted save file in-game to generate better in-game save names, and then renaming the actual physical save files outside the game itself. Like so:
- Open up Morrowind and load each save file in sequence, starting with the first one with a fucked up name, which happened to be “Temtiel 33”. I saved back out correctly as “Tembriel 33”. I had to start with the oldest one first, so that they’d still be in chronological order next time I actually played.
- Exit the game.
- Then re-load the launcher from Steam, to make a point of having it open, so that when I changed my files locally the changes would immediately go up to the cloud.
- Starting with the newest save file, I worked my way backwards to rename the actual files that had been badly named before, now that they had better save names inside the game data.
What made that process of renaming the physical save files a bit more interesting than I expected: I discovered they were named with hex numbering. So not just Tembriel0001, etc. They ran up through Tembriel001A, Tembriel001B, etc. So I had to rename files accordingly, which took me up through Tembriel002D.
And yes, this was absolutely fucking tedious, but I knew it was going to nag me if I didn’t do it, so I went ahead and did it.
Only afterwards did I also see that I’d missed a t in the save file for “Tembtiel 35”. That one I have decided to let stand, just because doing this once was enough. Wanted to write this up in a post, though, for the sake of Future Me in case I have to do this again. And also for any curious Morrowind players who might need to know what I did.
In the process of doing all this, it’s also worth noting that I did finally figure out a control combination on the Deck that let me properly double-click in its Dolphin: Steam button + Right Trigger, which is a Left Mouse action. So if I do it twice, it’s a double-click.
I was driven to look this up after repeatedly trying and failing to double-click via the right side trackpad. Which can work in theory, I guess? But I find it super awkward to do correctly. Steam + Right Trigger worked much better and will help me a lot in working in Dolphin when I need to.
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In Which Tembriel Steals a Skull and an Alchemical Formula
For a character who hasn’t joined the Thieves Guild, Tembriel sure does seem to be doing an awful lot of thievery! Acquired in this session: the skull from the Andrano Ancestral Tomb that Sharn wanted, and the alchemical formula demanded by Nileno of House Hlaalu. Also, there was a side helping of light flirtation with a charming thief!
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In Which Tembriel Finds the Plot
First of two back to back session posts for Tembriel in Morrowind! Which I’m doing in separate posts rather than combining them, just because everything in Morrowind is new to me! So plenty of commentary to go around. Main highlights of this session: clearing Arkngthand to get the puzzle box so I could get new information for the Blades, which gave me a notable milestone in the main plot! Then I went and collected a debt for the Fighters Guild.
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In Which Tembriel Investigates a Murder and Acquires a Code Book
In this session, I managed to advance enough to get official orders from my Blades handler! But apparently I have not advanced enough to actually make it through the next stage of what I need to do for the main plot. So most of this session’s action was all about initial side quests, investigating a murder in Seyda Neen, and getting that code book for the Fighters Guild.
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In Which Tembriel Hunts Smugglers for the Fighters Guild
Meanwhile, back on the island of Vvardenfell, Tembriel the Bosmer continues establishing herself as a member of both the Fighters and Mages Guilds, and quests back and forth between Balmora, Caldera, and Ald’ruhn! Main highlight: hunting down Telvanni smugglers at the ebony mine near Caldera.