Morrowind talk:Houses

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Archive 1: Oct 2006 - Nov 2011

Anywhere?

Couldn't you technically live anywhere? I mean, this article can be helpful, but really you could go into any house, taunt the owner and kill them or even just keep your things there while they are alive. Really it should also include Ancestral Tombs and Smuggler Caves. This seems either very incomplete or unnecessary. --Archer7 17:35, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Well, this is probably just a list of more convenient or popular ones. It is not meant to be all-inclusive. Also, I would not want to use a cave or tomb where monsters might respawn. --Brf 15:25, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

True. Although smugglers caves would be relatively safe from monsters and such. Perhaps we should add a list of large smugglers caves that are conveniently close to cities with lots of storage...? --Archer7 16:46, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

While I agree that a completely exhaustive list of all possible dwelling places would be inconvenient and of not much help, I am also bothered by the fact that the houses/dwellings included here (and in the sub-pages) are based on completely subjective qualities such as convenience, popularity, desirability, legibility (sic, I'll assume this means legality), cozy-ness, storage capacity, display space and/or storage safety. In the spirit of guidelines for NPC relevance and taking submission guideline suggestion(s) into consideration, I would like to propose the following criteria for a noteworthy home:

1. Contains at least one sleeping furniture that is not within line of sight of any entity in its default position
   • Sleeping furniture denotes a bed, hammock or any other construct that may be used for resting in-game
     • This disqualifies bed-like or bed-shaped structures such as those found in Dwemer Ruins
   • Entity means either an occupant, a respawning creature/NPC or a roaming creature/NPC
     • In the case of NPCs, it is alright if they do not protest the use of the aforementioned sleeping furniture (eg. Blade Trainers)
   • Default position means the assigned position/wander range of the aforementioned entity
     • The area is considered ineligible if it is necessary to move/remove the entity by combat, spells (eg. Command, Demoralize, Frenzy) or console commands ( SetPos, Position/PositionCell)
     • If a quest, however, removes, or necessitates the removal of, the occupant, the area is considered eligible; see Rule #3
2. Contains at least one form of storage that is not within line of sight of any entity in its default position
   • Storage includes but is not limited to barrels, baskets, chests, cloth sacks, crates, desks, drawers, permanent corpses, sacks and urns.
3. The first two conditions are achieved only by the following means:
   • An occupant willingly allows it (eg. Ahnassi)
   • An occupant leaves of their own volition (e.g. Caius Cosades, Ienas Sarandas, "Fast Eddie")
   • An occupant is killed and the death is required by a quest (e.g. Balyn Omavel, Foryn Gilnith, Dro'Sakhar)
   • Illegal access gained by lockpicking/ Open is permitted (e.g. Eldafire's House, Vori's House, Dralas Gilu's House)
4. Is an interior cell with at least one portal leading outside
   • Portal refers to any door, hatch door, ladder or trap door that triggers cell transition
   • Outside refers to either an exterior cell or a canton level (for Vivec and Molag Mar dwellings)
     • This disqualifies open boats, prisons and/or dungeons
5. Is in close proximity to at least one trader service
   • Close proximity encompasses all areas that an NPC can reach within two non-teleporting/intervention interior-exterior/exterior-interior transitions
     • Exterior-exterior cell transitions do not count, however, they must be within reasonable limits (I know this is a subjective condition but, without this, Arrille's Tradehouse in Seyda Neen will be considered in "close proximity" to the Dunmer stronghold of Marandus in Molag Amur)

Thus, all other dwelling places that do not meet these criteria will no longer be included.

And now, lemme rationalize why some guidelines were not included:

• Transport service is not a necessity. After all, a player may comfortably live in Pelagiad as it has its own share of services, even more than that "damp little squat", Seyda Neen
• As it seems to still be a debatable issue, "container safety" is ignored
• Also ignored is the presence of display areas as not all players engage in "dollhouse play" (or museum-play, if that seems offensive)
• There is no mention that the house must be completely devoid of occupants. Indeed, Balmora visitors may safely take residence in Ralen Hlaalo's Manor as it has a bed and storage spaces well out of sight of its sole occupant, Uryne Nirith. Likewise, they may even choose to retain the services of the Balmora Council Club publican, Banor Seran after slaughtering his Camonna Tong companions.
• There is also no mention of the trader's hostility. This one, though, I'd like to get your feedback on.
• There is even no mention that the dwelling place should be a house. I have just started playing Morrowind last year so I'm not sure if there are any smugglers' caves or Dunmer strongholds that meet the above conditions.

Now I'm, personally, not sure whether this page needs to exist at all, nonetheless, I'm pretty sure the proposed criteria could very well apply to the sub-pages as well. What do you guys think? I know the proposals really lengthy and TLDR but I tried to make it as unambiguous as possible and I'd really appreciate feedback :) Salamangkero 12:32, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Article does not mention stolen tags

Another problem with this article is that it does not mention the stolen tags you will get on your items if you store them in containers that are owned by another person (even if that person is already dead). For instance, if you store your items in the containers in Foryn Gilnith's shack in Seyda Neen, they will be marked stolen when you take them out. This could come as a shock to someone if they happened to be arrested by the guards while carrying a bunch of stuff they had stored there. — Unsigned comment by Acerac (talk • contribs) at 19:45 on 14 November 2012

Voiced Support

I happened to find this article really useful, not entirely as much information as I would have liked sometimes; I also wanted to know if I could sleep in a shipwreck but it isn't mentioned... All well, time to go swimming. — Unsigned comment by 98.255.36.16 (talk) at 08:50 on 29 December 2012

Not useless

Make it simple. All houses provided to the players by the game where your stuff will not be marked as stolen. Then a list of all dead bodys located in town after all they do make the best storage if you dont mind clutter. An i believe body's do not add this tag but i could be wrong.

Rewrites needed?

After reading through these articles, I am of the opinion that they could all use an across-the-board rewriting, with my main complaints being:

1. Rather than encouraging the random killing of NPCs, I think these articles could be condensed and better serve the reader by showing houses where the occupant wanders in a different location and won't know you're there, or showing houses that are guaranteed to be unoccupied following a quest, rather than saying "if you off this random person, you can live here". I feel like there should not be any encouragement to eliminate and move into buildings occupied by service providers of any sort, be that merchants, cornerclubs/taverns, or guilds of any kind.

2. The general tone and presentation of each of these articles makes a rather bad read with the fake real estate sales pitch, the "City's Finest Homes" title, and it's not up to the same standards of other articles.

3. The grids instead of a table of contents isn't bad, but it's also not the most efficient use of space, and I feel like with the right-aligned images like this, a regular table of contents wouldn't hurt anything, and we just keep in the level two headers, redone as "Small Houses", "Medium Houses", and "Large Houses", with the actual houses under a level three header.

I am willing to work up a proof of concept for one of the random cities in the next couple of days to put forward for what I think would look better and allow feedback on my ideas. The Raconteur (talk) 00:43, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Inaccuracies, false information and lack of a clear objective

Hi,

This is one of the more persistent wrong articles in UESP wiki. Since 2006 is stated here that "In Morrowind you cannot own your own house", with diverse variants, which is clearly false.

I supose that the main purpose of this article is to provide information about players houses/homes, as Oblivion:Houses or Skyrim:Houses, but from the the first editions, the article mix info about NPC's houses, tips for occupying houses, info (mostly inaccurate) about containers or re-spawn, and only in late editions the the 4 possible legally own houses in Morrowind (and Bloodmoon). With that last addition as in the current form, the article is totally contradictory, because the false first statement is deny by the info about the Morrowind legally owned houses.

My proposal for article re-write and expansion:

1. I think the first sentence must be removed, because simply it's false. In Morrowind you CAN own your own house.

2. The purpose of this article must be the player houses only, the npc's houses must have their own article or at least not to be mixed in this one, so the last last section with links to the cities must disappear too.

3. The info about the 3 Great Houses manors and Solstheim Estate must be improved and expanded greatly: Not only links to its own articles, but a brief info about the owning process, the main features, style, NPCs, or location, some image, etc. The 4 player houses specific articles could be expanded also.

4. Info about accomodations, beds or storing in legal way (guilds mostly and minor other houses as Caius osades example) and maybe some tips about resting and storing in first gameplay stages, could be added to the article also but only briefly and secondarily.

5. The tips about killing NPCs and take their houses must be removed.

So summarizing, the article must include the same type of information than Oblivion or Skyrim ones, a simple, objective description of the different possibilities of legally owning houses. In the case of Morrowind, paying, questing and "building" it. And only secondarily some other accomodation info.

P.S. I don't understand the naming convention in all UESP articles about houses, calling simply "houses" without mention the player, to the ownable houses pages and "homes" and not "npc's homes/houses/residences" for Npc's owned houses.--Tamrié (talk) 21:23, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Page re-written to address common criticisms above

I have spent the last week completely re-writing the page from the ground up. I am adding some details here for future reference because this page has had a few substantial revisions over its history and it is important to propose some sort of schema for future edits.

As at least two users noted above, previous versions of this page did not differentiate 'player houses' from 'houses the player can inhabit'. The latter category can include virtually any house in the game, while the former category is unclear because Morrowind does not have any homes that can be conventionally purchased.

I chose to define it by way of design: the Great House strongholds and Raven Rock are clearly designed to be player homes first and foremost. They have features that are useful only for players and are built through questlines that mark them as special dwellings. However, there is a second category of homes that are somewhere in between; that is, they are given to the player as quest rewards and/or designated for player use by NPCs, but they may not have anything special about them aside from faction-friendly containers. I've so far included Caius Cosades house, Ahnassi's house, the Blodskaal's house and the Thisk Mead Hall in this second category. Caius Cosades house is a bit different from the other three in that it has NPC-owned containers and could just as easily be classified a 'vacant home'; nevertheless, I've included it here because Caius does specifically say it is for the player's use in his quest dialogue.

A few more notes worth mentioning:

1. The tables I've created to summarise the contents and features of the strongholds should be reserved only for the 4 strongholds in the 'Player Houses' section. There are several reasons for this (one of which is keeping the page tidy), but chief among them is the fact that these dwellings are built by questlines that players have to choose between, and the storage and services these strongholds uniquely offer may be important factors to consider when making this choice. Thus UESP users should be able to compare the strongholds at a glance to make their decision without navigating to separate pages.

2. As Tamrie noted above, the UESP's convention of titling this page 'houses' vs. 'homes' (which is used for NPC dwellings) is a bit confusing. However, this convention is regular across the UESP for all the games and there is no sensible reason to change this. Therefore, I will add a redirect on Morrowind:Homes to clarify that player homes are categorised as 'Houses'.

3. I disagree that any of the descriptions for the Strongholds or the Raven Rock Factor's Estate should include details about the quest experience to build them. That's what the associated quest pages are for. The descriptions should merely comment on: 1) location and faction affiliation of the house; 2) brief comment on size and storage (which the table supplements); 3) furnishing options, as this is for organisation and display and is not in the associated tables; 4) travel to and from the house, i.e. how useful the home is as a travel hub and home base.

4. The suggestion of adding another section for legal dwellings that are not houses (e.g. guild rooms) could be helpful, but I am not sure this page is the place for it. Likewise, I do think new players could benefit from a guide that includes details on where to set up camp as you progress through the main quest, but, again, this page is not really the place for a walkthrough such as that. As it is, the page links included under the 'Other Dwellings' section include some information that would make such a guide redundant.

In all, I think this re-write covers most of the bases. Hope it helps! --Thalass (talk) 17:17, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi Thalass,

Have to ask again the reason for your editing, according to your last feedback I wrote in the wrong place (notes), no walkthrough and no personal interpretation. So what went wrong this time?

The information I'm editing is not included on this page and I think it s useful to other users.

I want to dare asking: have you already played as a Telvanni?

CyD (talk) 19:05, 19 April 2022 (UTC)