Introduction and Background

Quests, to me, are the heart and soul of any good game, expansion, or mod. I really enjoy making quests in TESCS because it encompasses just about every aspect of modding in one package: item creation, possibly interior building or landscaping, NPC creation, dialogue, and scripting. Unfortunately, that means while you can find separate tutorials on each of those things, a good comprehensive quest-making tutorial is hard to find. I’m going to attempt to put it all together here. The main purpose of this isn’t to cover every single dialogue function, but rather to give you a feel for the process needed to put a quest together.

I know there are a lot of great tutorials out there, but many of them are, quite frankly, hard to understand for the true newbie to TES Construction Set. What this tutorial attempts to do is fill the gap that exists for a good, basic tutorial on using dialogue, NPC’s and the journal to make a quest in Morrowind. It also includes a small bit on making a unique “copy” of an item and adding a simple script. That being said, I will include screenshots of the construction set and describe what to do in excruciating detail, so many of the questions I see repeated on the forums will be answered. This is a “learn-by-doing” tutorial, so I’ve come up with two simple quests that you can make by following along. It doesn’t cover scripting in any detail, except for a simple script on an item to add a journal entry. The best scripting documentation out there is Ghan Buri Ghan’s Morrowind Scripting For Dummies. You’ll need that for AFTER you finish this tutorial and want to start building more complex quests.

What this tutorial doesn’t cover is the most basic stuff about using the CS. I’m talking about loading data files, placing an item in the world using the render window, etc. Hopefully you’ve played around in it some before trying to jump into making quests. If you haven’t, I would recommend Dragonsong’s tutorials as a good place to start. Also, I skim over some of the functions and conditions on dialogue. For more detailed explanations of what these do, see either Scripting for Dummies or Srikandi’s Dialogue tutorial. All of the Tutorials I mentioned can be found by reading the Tutorials and Links thread in the TES Construction Set Forum on the Elder Scrolls Forums.

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