Removing Quest Entries: A Spoiler-free Guide

[PierreBeauregard]

The issue of "unwanted quests" or "quests that don't go away" appears often on this forum.

 

There have been numerous posts on this issue, and the solutions provided can be quite confusing to a newbie.

 

First, there are a preventative measures to avoid unfinishable quest issues.

 

Obviously, you want the lastest Morrowind patch which will fix several issues right off the bat.

 

The first method involves memorizing quest issues in advance, with the unfortunate side-effect of being a spoiler guide at the same time. Do not open the link unless you plan on reading spoilers!

Here is that post

 

The second way to prevent unfinishable quests is to download a set of questfix plugins. The most thorough one that I have found is:

http://www.strong-family.net/morrowind/

This questfix is patched fairly often, and can work with or without tribunal/bloodmoon expansions.

 

The only drawback to this, is that certain exploits that can be folowed, such as joining multiple houses through a dialogue glitch *may not work*. If you purposely try to use these quest exploits, you may not want this plugin--however if you have already started these "unaccessable" quests, you will be able to finish them.

 

I've done some research, and there is only *ONE* way to remove unfinishable quests once they have begun. It involves downloading TESAME, also know as "The Elder Scrolls Advanced Mod Editor". Any major morrowind site will have it, or you may do a search on google.

 

TESAME can be unpacked into any directory you desire. Open TESAME, and choose Mods->open. Go into the Saves directory of your morrowind installation. Choose *.* from "files of type", and all your save files will appear. Now, the name of the save file does not neccessarily correspond to the name you gave to the save while in the game. I recommend that you edit your most recent save file. To do this, right click on the whitespace in the area where your saves are listed, and select "Arrange Icons By"->"Modified". Your most recent save will now appear as the last file in the list.

 

Click "open" after selection your most recent file. It will take TESAME a minute or so to parse through the file, so be patient. Once all the data is loaded, click on the "ID" column header to sort the data in alphabetical order. Then click on the "Type" column header to group all the data types together.

 

Now scroll through until "QUES" appears under the "Type" column. QUES means that these are quest entries. Now search through until you see the troublesome quest(s) you want to delete. Right-clicking on an item will "highlight" it (a dark bar should appear on the item).

 

Now, before you hit Items->delete, you have to understand what this does to your save file. The quest will be permanently removed from the save file: it will no longer appear in neither the "All quests" area of your journal, nor the "Active Quests" area of your journal. Your "Topics" section and your regular journal will not be changed. So you must be 100% certain that you have fulfilled the objectes of the quest, and the quest is removed because there is a problem with the game. EXAMPLE: you're given a quest to kill someone, you can confirm that person is killed, you've gone to the NPC for the reward, you have received your reward, you obtained a new quest, but the quest topic will not go away.

 

Now, after highliting all the troublesome quests, select Items->delete from the menu. The highlighted items should dissapear from the list. Select Mods->save as and save it.

 

It's not quite over yet. The editor saved a clean copy of your save file, but the old save is still there.

 

Go into your Saves File directory. You may have to right-click and select "Sort By->Modified" again to find the most recent save file. You will see your save file name, and something like "Clean [yoursavefile].ess.esp". Backup your save file by either zipping it, copying it to another directory, or changing the extension from .ess to .bak. Then rename "Clean [yoursavefile].ess.esp" to "yoursavefile.ess" (NOTE: you will not be able to change the name of the cleaned save file if the old save file hasn't been moved or renamed!).

 

I hope this ends the "Unwanted Quests" issue once and for all!

[Arsisis]

I thought you could remove journal entries with the console? I know you can add ones to finish quests that couldn't be done (see Robot Arena in the tribunal forums for what i mean).