Morrowind is one of my favorite games ever made and what introduced me to the Elder Scrolls series. I remember my father giving me a copy for the original Xbox as a gift and how I spent hundreds of hours exploring and never doing the main story line.

One of my favorite aspects of Morrowind is how quests are not given to you in a “hand holding” manner. Rather than having a map with a quest marker, you will be given a vague description to follow. This often leads to distractions, where you can set off on a quest and notice something of interest to explore and hours later realize you never made progress on your original quest.

Morrowind is a single player RPG but a group of developers have been working on a multiplayer mod that is playable. These are some steps to setup Morrowind to play with your friends over the internet.

Base Game Installation

You must purchase the game and install it. I’ve done so through Steam but other stores should work.

Installing Multiplayer Mod

  1. Navigate to https://github.com/TES3MP/openmw-tes3mp/releases

  2. Find the latest release, which at the time of writing this is TES3MP 0.7-alpha

  3. Download this tes3mp.Win64.prerelease.0.7-alpha.zip

  4. Extract the zip into any desired location. You’ll be launching the multiplayer server and client from this location. This is very much personal preference.

  5. Run the openmw-wizard.exe from the tes3mp folder you just extracted and point it to your Morrowind installation

    For Steam this is generallyC:\Program files x86\steamapps\common\Morrowind\Datafiles

  6. Finish going through the install wizard

  7. Modify the tes3mp-cleint-default.cfg to have destinationAddress = [desired IP]

    This is the IP address of the server. If you’re hosting your server on the same PC you’re playing you can put in 127.0.0.1. Otherwise you’ll want the IP of the machine on your LAN or your virtual LAN. (Virtual LAN connection will be covered in the next section)

    If I sent you here, ask me for the IP address to enter here.

  8. One person has to run the server by running tes3mp-server.exe

    If I sent you here, I will take care of this step and you do not have to do it.

  9. Run tes3-mp.exe to start playing

Its good to note that quests in the multiplayer mod are server wide, so if you join a server that already exists, read your journal to see what has been done.

Additionally, you’ll have to remember your username and password to reconnect and continue playing the same character. This also enables you to have multiple characters in the same server.

Joining Virtual LAN

  1. Install zerotier
  2. Launch zerotier
  3. Ask me for the Network ID
  4. Join the network
  5. Let me know you’re requesting access so I can accept you