Vvardenfell Adventures

Denina · Site Admin Joined: 10 Feb 2008 Posts: 17

I wrote this guide quite a while ago and posted it on various forums, but the information is still relevant and there might be someone who may find it useful.

For those of you who might not be aware, the way Morrowind manages thieves is grossly unfair and disadvantageous for the player. What happens is that if you steal something in the game, every item with that same ID is marked as stolen. So, if you steal an item, sell it off and say later you buy or acquire another of the same item legally, that item is still marked as stolen, and the guards will take it away if you get caught committing a crime.

Toccatta explained a way to work around this, but I don't know if it's very common knowledge so this can be used as a cheat or helpful tip, depending on your characters' activities. This can be useful for those who are basically upstanding characters because even if you’re a good character, you will eventually acquire items that are/were originally owned by someone else. So, here is a step by step guide to removing stolen tags by using the construction set.

Before proceeding, make a backup copy of your save game incase A. You run Windows XP and the OS decides that it thinks you don't know what you're doing and changes things it shouldn't and B. you make a mistake.

1. Go to your Morrowind directory and find the folder marked “Saves.”

2. Find the save game that you want to remove stolen tags from.

3. Right click on the save and choose rename. change the .ess portion of the file name to .esp. You will get a prompt asking if you really want to do this. Yes you do.

4. Once the save game becomes an .esp file, move it to the Data Files directory of your Morrowind folder.

5. Open up the construction set, but do not load up any .esm or .esp files.

6. Click on open to get a list of .esm and .esp files. Find your save game plug in file. Left click on it once. To the bottom right will be a button called "Details". Click that.

7. The details menu is a list of all changes made in your save game. You want to look for the 4 letter code on the left hand side that is marked STLN. They should all be grouped together. When you find the first one, left click on it, hold shift and then click on the very last one marked STLN. This should highlight all STLN tags.

8. Once the STLN tags are highlighted, press the Delete key on your keyboard. You should get a prompt saying that you have chosen to toggle the "Ignore" feature, etc. You want to click "Yes" you want to do that. Double check that only STLN tags are being ignored before you hit the delete key. You don't want to mess something else up.

9. Once you have marked them as ignore, just close that window and hit "Cancel" on the loading up of .esm and .esp files. You're done. There’s nothing to save since you've already toggled the ignore. Just cancel out of it and close the construction set if you're done with it.

10. Change the .esp file back into an .ess file by renaming it as you changed it before.

11. Make sure to move the .ess file back into the Saves folder.

12. Play your game as normal.

Removing stolen tags is something you may want to do fairly often depending on how often you acquire items belonging to someone else whether or not you got them by legal salvage (killing Foryn Gilnith and taking all the stuff in his house is but one example. Dura Gra-Bol's house is another if you do that Fighters Guild quest). Just rinse and repeat for all save games that you want to clean of STLN tags. Now, if you're caught committing a crime, the stolen items are no longer marked as such and the guards won't take them.

Please post if you find any discrepancies in this though I tried my best to be accurate. I hope this helps.
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Denina

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