Morrowind Mod: Vil's Indarys Manor

Indarys Manor, lower hall.

This week, I put the finishing touches on my long-overdue Morrowind mod, Vil's Indarys Manor. In the course of the game, you have the option to join one of the great Dunmer (dark elf) Houses and eventually build a personal stronghold. However, I was never fully satisfied with Indarys Manor, the stronghold of my favorite House Redoran. Several Indarys mods existed at the time, but none were to my taste, most of them expanding the manor into a mansion rivaling those of the House leaders in Ald'ruhn. My aim was to create a more tasteful expansion, acknowledging that it is a military outpost first and a manor second.

Bal Isra, Vil's Indarys.

Bal Isra, unmodded. Screenshot from UESP.net.

The vast majority of this mod was completed over the summer of 2011. The start of my senior year delayed its completion significantly, and by the time it was ready for publishing the main Morrowind mod site at the time, Planet Elder Scrolls, was in the early stages of decline. It never made it online and I promptly forgot about it, occupied with wedding planning and graduation. This year, I finally returned to Morrowind, once again preparing this mod for release and working through my vast collection of old mods. In the area of graphics mods in particular, this is still a work in progress; the screenshots posted here are with my partially modded version, most notably missing the Morrowind Graphics Extender's Distant Lands feature.

The most challenging portion of this project was the need for certain architectural components that simply didn't exist in the base game, most due to the unusual layout of the manor's main hall. These included a half-width wall segment and partial hallway segments needed to complete certain intersections without overlapping parts which could cause display problems in-game. I managed to fumble my way through the necessary modeling programs to alter the necessary meshes, but given the option I'll definitely be sticking to text-editing mods in the future.

Gilyne Omoren: Smith interior.

With the addition of a second tower, I reorganized the retainer housing as well. Gilyne Omoren, the manor smith, was given his own house which is built during the second stage of construction, while Uvele Berendas, the priest, was relocated into the new tower which is built during the final stage. This required a complete redesign of the priest's house given the different interiors, and the smith's house was made from scratch.

Object count became an issue with the interior of Indarys Manor; while I reused elements from the original manor interior wherever possible to minimize the number of records, I still found myself bumping against the game's upper limits for number of objects in a single cell. I wound up splitting the lord's quarters into a separate cell, which resulted in a major improvement in frame rate in the manor proper.

Indarys Manor: Lord's Quarters interior.