Denina's Morrowind Forums

[Denina]

Yep, I've done it again, but this time something a little different.

From the Read Me...

Miscellaneous Items to Static Items
Version 1.0
Requirements: Morrowind only

This is a modder's resource. It adds nothing to the game. This .esp attempts to save time and effort while creating other mods.

It takes most of the miscellaneous items and turns them into static items, such as bowls, plates, platters, keys, and most everything else too. This is an attempt to make decorating easier, without making the items steal-able or sell-able, but still having the look of decor. It will also prevent respawning of items in mods when they've been moved.

For example, in many house mods, the mod makers place nicely positioned plates on the hutch shelves so that the decoration of the plate is displayed prominently. But with a miscellaneous item, if you accidentally picked it up, there was no way to put it back in the same position, which ruined the look of the decor. By using statics, this is no danger. I decided to take that idea one step further and make almost all miscellaneous items into statics because you never know when you'll want to do that with other items, depending on the mod.

That's what this resource intends to do.

I was actually inspired to do this by Phoebe's excellent mod, Abu Manor. She had used many miscellaneous items that I thought might be better used as statics. For example, she has vases all over with flowers, but if you accidentally activated the vase instead of the flower, the vase ended up in your inventory and it was a real pain to put it back just right so it looked like the flowers were still in the vase. She also used bowls to the same purpose and I thought having those items as static would be better. Using this .esp, you can do that in new mods as well as modify existing ones.

While I was at this, I also made the bottles of alcohol into miscellaneous empty bottles of such and into static furniture bottles. I always thought Bethesda should have done that to begin with, but I guess they didn't think it was worth the bother.

I have named the IDs of these items as closely as possible to their miscellaneous counterparts or by the artwork used for them, and in some cases, more specifically than Bethesda did. All items have the prefix furn_ in order to keep them all in the same section as other furnishings.

How to use this mod: First, do not add this mod to your permanent games. This adds NOTHING to the game world itself. It is strictly to be used while making mods.

For a new mod: Select your master files and this resource. Press OK. You will get a message box that says "You have not selected a file as the active file. Do you wish to continue?" Press YES. You do not want to save any modifications to the resource, but you want the resources available.

For a mod already in progress: Select your master file(s), this resource and the mod you want to work on. Make the mod you want to work on the active file. Press OK. That will load these fine. Once the items are placed in the game world, you will not need to continue to load the resource .esp after that. Your mod will not be dependent on the resource .esp.

Credits: Bethesda, since everything I modified was their work.

Ideas, suggestions, constructive feedback always welcome, as usual.

I hope you all find this as useful as I do.

[Denina]

Besides the examples that I listed, if you have any other ideas for using the miscellaneous to static items, please tell us about them in this thread. That way we can get maximum mileage out of this and maybe inspire people to make more mods, which is always a good thing (providing that they are high quality).

Thanks.