N.B. I'm new at this modding thing, and am a little nervous about criticising other peoples modding styles. The time has come, however, where I'm frankly just too damn tired of having to fix other peoples mods to get them to play nice. If you're going to go to the trouble of making a mod which has all sorts of good stuff in it, why the hell wouldn't you go that extra yard and make sure it won't break anything? Gah! Perplexed be the Arkenor, and so I shall pronounce here at length, generally angrily, somewhat randomly, and probably incoherently, on things I am ill-qualified to comment on!

My short list of clean mods

The list is now maintained on the Dragonsight.com forum, so drop by, and take a peek!

With the permission of the original authors I have also posted clean (I hope. Certainly cleaner. It's hard to tell with someone else's mod exactly what is necessary.) versions of the Dreadful Caves, and Balmora Adds at Dragonsight. I've tested them, and they should work exactly the same as the originals. Good mods, else I wouldn't have bothered cleaning them for release, so give 'em a try!

Clean!

There are those who believe the cleanliness is next to godliness. When it comes to the creation of plugins that is balderdash, for cleanliness be King. TESAME gives us the power to survey our work, and see what it is we have altered, and it is this tool which I use to form my opinions.

There are, of course, various degrees of clean. For the highest level of clean (as I judge such things) the following must be true:

• There must be NO original objects, scripts, globals, NPC's or ANYTHING ELSE altered (ie. Appearing in TESame's list of changes.) unless it is the specific intention of the modder to alter them globally, and for all other mods. (Dialogue is a bit weird, and I have yet to quite figure out how to tell if it's dirty just by looking at it).

How then do we achieve this, and still make a mod that does anything? Search me, but I'm trying... This stuff will help though.

1. Try not to move, change, or delete original things. Adding new things is fine.
2. Keep content and rules changes seperate unless absolutely necessary. You may think it's neat to regenerate health, and add it to your most excellent dungeon mod. Well don't! Make a seperate mini-mod and bundle it with it, and give folk the choice.
3. If you wish to add something to an existing merchant, rather than creating a new merchant, then do not add the items to the NPC's inventory. Instead create a new container, place the items to be sold inside, place the container near the merchant, and ascribe him ownership over it.
4. My pet hate of all is when I see an esp called "Clean" something or other, and it's not. It is not enough to just load something up in TESame and save it out, expecting it to have magically whisked away all your troubles. You have to actually use it. Go down the list, mark everything you didn't mean to change, and delete it out of your mod. Then do it again, but this time look properly! Do this every time you update, before you upload.
5. Morrowind is not terribly good at merging mod changes. The oldest mod is loaded first, followed successively by later ones. Each time an item is present, it will write over the previous version. This goes for levelled creature tables, container and NPC inventories, terrain data and almost everything else. Know this, and ask yourself as you make your mod whether each change is necessary. If it is, so be it, for sometimes a change is unavoidable, but minimise it, for you will surely overwrite changes some other mod-author thought equally vital.
6. If you are going to bother to make your own copies of items (which you should) then use a decent naming system. Just sticking a 2 on the end of an ID will bring you woe in the long run, and makes the job of folk trying to clean up your mod much harder. Dragonsong's naming system suggests you start with an underscore, then a few letters distinct to yourself. For instance I have a container called _ark_orangebarrel1, and an NPC called _ark_evilorangethief. Easy. Folk can see instantly that they're new, and that I'm responsible for any oranges going missing.

Balance!

If Cleanliness be King, then Balance be his Queen. But it's far more a matter of opinion what constitutes a balanced mod.

That which is gained without effort is not valued. More to the point, if a mod gives you gear significantly above your level, then anything else you find becomes trash rather than treasure.

Morrowind PC's are already not short of cash. The game needs money sinks, not further sources of income.

Making groovy items and then just sticking it in the open for free is not helpful. If you are one of those modders who excels at the artistic side of things (moddeling and textures), but doesn't fancy making a quest or whatnot to earn your creation, please at least give it an appropriate price and give it to a merchant (in a new container as described above).