Skywind is a non-commercial, fan-made modification for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Special Edition) that seeks to merge the amazing world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with the enhanced graphics and capabilities of Skyrim’s engine.
Ownership of both games is required to play. Mechanically, players run Skywind using the Skyrim engine only. This means that the user interface, combat, and graphics of our mod are based on those of Skyrim: Special Edition, and are only inspired by Morrowind.
No, Skywind is still under active development. You can see our most recent video update on our Youtube channel, and check out our Discord for the latest work that the team wanted to show off – just a fraction of everything that’s going on behind the scenes. With a volunteer community project such as this, progress often comes at an irregular rate, and it is hard to predict a timeline for specific milestones. When we have a release date in mind we will notify our fans via our various social media pages and Discord.
If you would like to help accelerate the development of Skywind we would love to have any qualified volunteers come on board! Please see our volunteer page if you believe you have the passion and aptitude to learn and help.
Skywind is for PC only. A number of reasons prevent us from porting to consoles, such as size limitations, inability to use the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), and intellectual property barriers.
We will require players to have the following installed on your system:
- TES III: Morrowind (including the Bloodmoon and Tribunal expansions, or the Game of the Year edition)
- TES V: Skyrim: Special Edition
You’ll need legitimate copies of both games. Details on version requirements will be published later, but we expect most legitimate installations of Morrowind and Skyrim will work (incl. disc, GOG, Steam). We consider the requirement to own Morrowind to be the fairest way to re-tell the game’s story.
Skywind takes advantage of the graphical capabilities of the Creation Engine whilst having its own unique weathers, detailed environments, and other alterations that will make it somewhat demanding. The recommended system spec for the mod is slightly higher than that of Skyrim: Special Edition. More information about system requirements will be available as we get closer to completion.
Skywind is a full remake. Every asset in the game is being created from scratch to as high a level of quality as possible. Our artists revisit Morrowind and its concept art to explore the intent of the original designs and create modern interpretations.
Beyond the visual overhaul, Skywind is a fully complete game, including all of Morrowind’s original quests and many of Morrowind’s game mechanics like attributes, throwing weapons, levitation, and spellcrafting. Skywind also features a small amount of new content, such as new quests and NPC interactions.
A separate TES Renewal team is working on an Oblivion conversion called Skyblivion. Skywind and Skyblivion are separate mods. Visit skyblivion.com for more information on Skyblivion.
Yes! Every line of dialogue in Skywind will be voice acted. Morrowind characters tend to repeat themselves; this is being addressed. The bulk of dialogue is the same as Morrowind, but we’ve broken them into short segments and edited for flow. All topics will have prompts on the dialogue menu. Some quest and faction characters have more extensive edits. Finally, we’ll be adding a little extra VA material, including a handful of quests and ambient scenes.
Yes! Classes and attributes will be making a return, as well as all of Morrowind’s original 27 skills with unique perks for each skill.
The old Skyrim constellation menu/structure has been replaced with a menu that’s something of a mix between Fallout: New Vegas and the Morrowind stats menu. As for leveling up your character, we’ve restored the major skills system. It functions much like Oblivion, where major skills are the skills tied to your class that increase your level, and minor skills are the ones that don’t. We are exploring ways to reduce the min-maxing that you were forced to do if you wanted to gain the maximum result from leveling attributes.
We were able to bypass Skyrim’s 18-skill limit through repurposing actor values that were used in Skyrim but would otherwise be unused in Skywind, so this system unfortunately cannot be ported to Skyrim or other mods.
Yes! We aim to implement every weapon from Morrowind. We’ve included crossbows and have made great progress with spears and halberds, including custom animations in both first- and third-person. Throwing weapons such as knives and stars are also making excellent progress. Major weapon sets like Dwemer or Ebony will be expanded so that every category of weapon is represented. We have also included some impromptu weapons like pitchforks and paddles, too.
We’ll be retaining Skyrim’s combat mechanics in the main, which we think are better-suited to a realtime action adventure. We’ll be tweaking it to give a Morrowind slant, e.g. giving stamina more importance in the effectiveness of a hit.
Skywind’s armor system is very similar to that of Morrowind’s. We have separated greaves/pants from the cuirass/shirt, and we have independent pauldrons!
There are some limitations – shirt and cuirass slots are mutually exclusive, and likewise pants and greaves slots are mutually exclusive. Robes and skirts can be worn over the top of these.
We are planning to use the Skyrim race appearances. The beast races will have plantigrade feet and will wear boots and helmets as they can in Skyrim. We are considering certain visual changes, e.g. tattoos, hairstyles, and markings that we feel are better suited to Vvardenfell, but it’s not a high priority.
Yes! This has proved a challenge: many spells that we’ve carried over from Morrowind are scripted, and often rely on many other things such as perks, other magic effects, other spells, and global values. This means they’re not simple to create dynamically. Despite that, we’ve been able to make great progress in supporting custom spells, including a full custom interface, and the functionality is now close to complete.
You will be able to use fast-travel and quest markers if you want to. However, the default experience will have these features turned off, as the dialogue and quests are designed with this in mind. This will be configurable in the in-game settings.
Yes, but sparingly! Skywind has a full original score, including our own reprise of Nerevar Rising. This consists of more than 100 new tracks composed for specific regions, cultures, and unique events. However, we will also use the Morrowind tracks found Skyrim’s Dragonborn DLC. As the Morrowind OST is less than an hour long, we’ll likely reserve these for unique moments such as location discovery, momentous story occasions, and other rare circumstances. We think this will hit the balance between nostalgia and ensuring Skywind is a fresh experience for the player.
The scale of the Skywind worldspace is very similar to Morrowind. In a few cases we’ve pushed and squeezed areas of the map around where we felt it was necessary for level design, but by-and-large it will be the same size and shape as Morrowind, and landmarks will be in roughly the same place. Contrary to popular belief, the Morrowind world was really quite big; our landmass is a little over two-thirds that of Skyrim.
Our QA team hates bugs! They’ll be looking to remove all of the bugs from the original game, as well as hunt down any new bugs that are found.
We love that Morrowind didn’t railroad your decisions about important characters, and we’re replicating that approach, wherein you may kill whom you want – you simply get a message that what you’ve done has broken the storyline. To avoid annoyances, we might stop important characters from being targeted by other hostile characters and creatures.
Like Morrowind, your weapons and armor will degrade with use. You can repair your equipment using repair tools, taking into account your character’s armorer skill. If your character is not skillful in this area, you can always pay a smith. Repaired equipment is more effective in combat – this replaces Skyrim’s tempering system.
In addition to making repairs, the armorer skill also allows players to craft certain weapons and armors. The player character doesn’t instinctively know how to craft with certain rare materials and may need to find special training.
Hopefully. We’ve set up a pathway for the community to tackle translations with some guidance from our localization lead. Translating all of Skywind’s text is a huge task, requiring co-ordination and automation, with relatively little support from the wider team. If you’re undeterred, please familiarize yourself with ESP-ESM Translator and contact us on Discord or via the application form.
The expansion packs will not be in Skywind’s initial release. Our current focus is getting the main game complete and released to the world. While we would love to work on the expansions, departments need to finish their required work before they can work on DLC. The official plugins have been considered on a case-by-case basis.
Like Morrowind, Skywind will not have horses nor any other mounts. As well as staying true to the original game in this regard, we think it’s important that Vvardenfell maintains the impression of a vast island to explore. Mounts introduce a smaller world by travel time, and inevitably increase scope for creature implementation, game mechanics, and so on.
No. Skywind will act as a stand-alone game in its own directory with its own launcher. We’re happy with this from a creative perspective. Morrowind tells the story of the ascent of the Nerevarine: a hero reborn in the mantle of an outlander, shipped to a hostile and alien island, and left to fend for themselves, and to discover their destiny. Having crossover with the story of the Champion of Cyrodiil or the Last Dragonborn detracts from this story, and we’re content with Skywind telling the story that The Elder Scrolls III set out to tell.
We are not working on Skyrim VR compatibility; the existing scope of the project is already plenty! With custom SkyUI modifications, SKSE plugins, and other changes we’ve made under the hood, doing so would be a whole extra project in and of itself.
(P.S. Even though it’s a huge job that we don’t intend to take on, we would love to see it happen.)
Generally, no. We are changing many of Skyrim’s mechanics, so established mods may not work with our changes. However, Skywind will be fully moddable! We hope that the community will create compatibility patches and other new content for the game.
No. Moving Skywind to a new engine is out of scope. Starfield is a space shooter, so anyone who tried to create a fantasy RPG mod for it would have to start totally from scratch. TES VI we know even less about, and we can’t speculate, except that it’s very unlikely that we’d be able to port without a major amount of work (and rework).
In short, Skywind is remaining as a Skyrim: Special Edition mod.
No. We appreciate the wish to support, but the best way to help the project out is to volunteer your time.
In the past, we accepted donations to help us with operational costs – most notably website hosting and service subscriptions – but this was never for the profit of individual team members. We will never charge for Skywind, and we will never accept donations to provide exclusive access or other preferential treatment. Don’t accept any imitations!
The team is putting their heart into making Skywind the best product it can be, and we want to make sure that our fans get to experience our vision as it is meant to be. Due to the alpha stage of the project we have decided to keep our work internal and update you via our various social media channels. Currently, many aspects of the game are still a work in progress and it would be hard for anyone not directly involved in the project to know what is or is not a bug, or simply unfinished at this stage.
We greatly appreciate the interest our fans have in the project and understand how much you want to play it and we’re working hard to make it what it is destined to be. If you are interested in volunteering your skills to help speed up the project please check out our volunteer page.
We’re open to suggestions, but note that we get a lot of them, and it’s really important that we limit scope creep. Feel free to make the suggestion, but please understand that it might not be feasible or practical!
Probably not. Everything that gets implemented in-game has been worked on by a whole group of people, from ideas to concepting to modelling to getting it into Skywind. It would be unfair for any one developer in that chain to release it as “their” asset. As a team, we’re totally focused on bringing Skywind to completion and at this point we don’t see a benefit releasing bit-by-bit; perhaps we’ll reconsider further down the line. As concerns mechanics such as spellcrafting and persuasion, Skywind’s systems use modified values from Skyrim and aren’t really separable without replicating major changes under the bonnet.
It depends! Within days of Skyrim releasing in 2011, modders from TESR Morroblivion started tinkering with the new engine. With the release of the Creation Kit on February 7th, 2012, Morroblivion porting began in earnest.
Six months later, Skywind had a name and logo. So if you want to bake us a cake, the 2nd August is as good a date as any!
Around 2016, the nature of the project morphed into a game that will recreate every asset, from texture to mesh to sound. This was a gradual change, not a pivotal decision on a specific date. That leads us to the complete remake project that Skywind is today.
We are still exploring our options for distribution. Once Skywind is ready for release, we will make it widely known where and how it can be acquired. For right now, we’re focused on getting the game to a release-ready state.
