Morrowind:Caldera
| Alignment: Imperial |
| Region: West Gash |
| Transport: |
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Services: |
 Southern City Gates of Caldera |
 The Governor's Hall |
 Ghorak Manor, home of Creeper |
Caldera is an Imperial charter just north of Balmora. It was built to service the nearby ebony mine, providing the miners with homes, entertainment and religion. The town is ruled largely from the Caldera Mining Company's fortress to the northeast. The buildings, which have Imperial and Nordic architectural influences, form an inverse "L" shape between two large guard towers. While Dunmer presence in Caldera is almost non-existent, a large contingent of Orcs (as well as their pet scamp) live in the dilapidated Ghorak Manor. Notable institutions in Caldera include an Imperial Cult altar, a Mages Guild branch, a pawn shop, a tavern and one of the only Imperial-style clothiers in Vvardenfell.
Governor's Hall
Located to the north on a hill overlooking Caldera, the Governor's Hall is the residence of a corrupt House Hlaalu quest giver, Odral Helvi. You find several Hlaalu trainers here as well as Foves Arenim selling thieves tools. Llaros Uvayn sells some interesting spells.
Main Street
Ghorak Manor houses Creeper and Duma gro-Lag, a sculptor that can help you in a quest for Boethiah. The Mages Guild offers Enchanting and Emelia Duronia is the guild guide here. Surane Leoriane offers some training to other Blades and has a bed you can sleep in, behind a locked door. The local inn, Shenk's Shovel, offers sundries and beds. The smith Hodlismod in the alley by Ghorak Manor sells quality weapons and armor, especially if you have the official Adamantium Armor plug-in. The pawnbroker Irgola has a Shadowweave Ring and the Hlormaren Propylon Index for sale. The trader Verick Gemain offers some useful enchanted items for the budding adventurer.
People
Ri'Shajirr is a master trainer in Sneak, located upstairs in Shenk's Shovel. Governor Odral Helvi is a quest giver for House Hlaalu. The mine boss Stlennius Vibato lives in the Caldera Mining Company building at the ebony mine.
For a complete list, see People in Caldera.
Getting there & around
Apart from the guild guide, there is no fast travel from Caldera. Good roads lead south to Balmora and north to Ald'ruhn, which are fairly close by. The north road has a minor path leading around the mountains to the Caldera Mine and a Y-split, with a minor road leading west to Gnaar Mok on the Bitter Coast. The Foyada Mamaea is east of town, leading to Ghostgate and Red Mountain.
Notes
- If you have the official Master Index plug-in, Caldera can be your hub for travel to the whole island.
- You can steal a full set of master alchemy apparatus in the Guild of Mages, sitting unguarded behind a wooden door. Just don't try to sell it to Ernand Thierry, because it is his.
Places of Interest around Caldera
- The Indalen Ancestral Tomb has leveled, respawning Daedra for good loot, just a few steps away from Creeper.
- The Caldera ebony mine is straight southwest over the mountains, or follow the signs exiting the north gate.
- Abaelun Mine is the only working diamond mine on Vvardenfell.
Maps
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I've been landscaping the area immediately outside of Caldera, so I think I'll claim this.
Caldera Mage's Guild so far
Some clutter, and an updated Mage's Guild:
I'm adding some new houses so that the miners will have a place to sleep:
this + new meshes = win.
The atmosphere in the Mage's Guild is fantastic! Also loving the narrow alleyways; gives it a very rustic feel. Very nice touches all around.
If I may suggest; any way to add a bit of detail to the main walkway in the city? The shot with the well exemplifies what I mean best. Adding a bit of variety like puddles or worn/destroyed bricks might do well to make the texture seem less repetitive.
I've already begun with that central area, I planned to show more of that with my next progress update, which should be soon.
Progress update:
The house with the balcony will be a hard to obtain player house, some phase II quests involving the nobles of the Governor's Hall will lead to the player purchasing property.
On that note, the somewhat corrupted rich nobles need some way to enjoy their imported Cyrod luxuries, and so there is now a hot spring bath accessible from the Governor's Hall, complete with a frigidarium (which I hope will be able to have reflected caustics from the water):
Really like the narrow alley and raised brick. Not convinced on the hot springs being there or the way it is enclosed, but I do like the bathhouse. While I like the effect, the atmosphere in the mage's guild is 30% strong IMO.
..Isn't vvardefell too much of a frontier to have wealth like this outside of the plantations and the great houses there are probably only a few exception of real wealth. Caldera is a charter town built to extract and export goods from large mine there. The wealth accumulated from this area is going elsewhere. Probably investors somewhere in cyrodiil? The mine boss lives near the mine but is merely a manager if I'm not mistaken. Attempting to insert people and places of great wealth here may be mistake. This is a mining town, no?
Since this is a Mining town the addition of a storehouse and depot/ tack area and shelter for pack guars, wagons and carts might be a better addition. People are likely to be slaves, management or middleclass. To achieve that level of wealth someone would have to arrive with it or own a share of the mine.
You could also reason that there are several wealthy people here because they all skim off the ebony that is shipped out of town. Plus the governor needs somebody to provide for his expensive tastes. Corruption isn't usually limited to one person, unfortunately.
The East Empire company relies on exports of Ebony from Caldera's mining industry, which funds some private projects due to corruption of the town's government. Hot springs are found naturally in the region due to volcanic activity from both the Caldera and Red Mountain, and the nobles are using one such hot spring for their own use, visual evidence of disparity and corruption among the governing body versus the citizens and miners (which may be a source for idle dialog topics and conversation). Caldera is an important location for imperial trade, with exports in ebony and imports of Cyrodiilic goods from Ebonheart. The Governor's hall is the only one to exist among imperial settlements on Vvardenfell, with others being more of garrison towns in comparison, which was vanilla proof of the governor's wealth and private use of such wealth sourced from the mines (you can help him use corrupt tactics in vanilla quests too, and a document mentions personal projects).
Details such as those stated are all planned, and some implemented already. I gave the miners homes on that narrow street posted above, and I have been discussing the idea of having wagons (some of them protected East Empire Company carts) make trips between Caldera and Ebonheart.
Sounds good. Only issue I see is that the miners are slaves who live in the bunkhouse near the mine manager/ slave master. Having them in town wouldn't be right. The capacity is 8, 16 if they are shared bunks and rotate shifts. There are only 6 slave NPCs in vanilla so there is room for many more without expanding worker housing. An alternative use for buildings in the alley should be easy enough to think up.
There are three to four miners who aren't slaves, and they live in the city. The slaves live within the mining facility.
Ah your right, this all looks good then! Maybe the mine can be expanded and add more slaves to fill the rest of the bunks. Someone posted really amazing pics of a mine made by another modding group with really extensive minecart tracks and a large cavern. The same group had statics for brickwork on the ground like your screen. I'd love to see Caldera mine expanded to something like that because of its importance.
Andoran? Yeah, I saw that, looking really nice. I'll take details like that into consideration once I move on to the mines. Another thing I was thinking of doing for the mines is to show evidence of volcanic activity interfering with the mining process, things like vents opening up or a geyser flooding a section. Mining in a caldera should be a very difficult process. Recently the roads in Yellowstone melted as underground activity heated the ground, so those mine buildings are in a very risky position, whether or not the miners foresee the danger.
I'm making room also for buildings related to the expanded crafting system, so there there will a pottery station at one of the buildings posted above, near the associated market stall. I'm making a bakery that makes most of it's business by bringing bread to the miners. Here's an early work in progress shot, the building design is subject to change:
There used to be a small house right there, it has not been removed, but now it is in a previously empty spot in the narrow alleyway section:
Very cool work!
Looks perfect so far! You are planning on doing the interiors for this then, right?
I'm actually looking forward to redoing the AI packages for this town.
Yes, I will be creating interiors for all of the new buildings, as well as cluttering the remaining ones.
Shaping up well, starting to feel more adaptable, layout wise for the engine.
for GODS SAKE can we please get a dependable 3d artist to create the new meshes >:(
I don't mind altering where it is needed for the new meshes, but I agree it would be nice to see what I am making, is the stone wall set also being worked on?
Some more cluttering:
Soooo, you now have the title of King-Lord-of-all-Landscaping-and-cluttering. Congrats.
It looks amazing. I hope you can do this for every unclaimed town, and have the rest of West Gash reflect it!
The tiling on that cobblestone is painful, it's a darn shame too because this progress is amazing.
I love every single screenshot! Caldera finally starts looking like a proper town. Love the athmosphere.
vrt wrote:
I must agree, the same could be said of much of the landscaping, too. Very repetitive and tiled looking textures. Is there a way to vary them up a bit, or overlay with some hand-placed 'moss' or other texture that breaks up the monotony of the tiling?
Thanks for the support, and about the texture tiling, it looks like there's a dark spot in the corner of the cobblestone texture that's making it look so repetitive. I'll try retexturing it, and adding a variant, like a mossy version.
Any way to make it look like a few stones are broken or missing? Just something to reduce the redundancy? Though I admit I didn't notice at first, too many other nice changes to the area for me to just notice the pavement.
Alright, I haven't fixed the tiling yet, I'm still working on a texture, but here's an update on that bakery:
Skywinds first living and functioning town. This is fantastic. Your clutter and detail work is even better than your landscaping!
if you make the majority of floors flat *so town height in stepped layers* we can uses meshes to simulate and break up tiling.
If there isn't one already, I can make some NPC's to live there.
Maybe we could have a quest. (I need to stop wanting to make quests, I'm already doing some for Skaal)
Looking great btw!
"A Miner Appetite" interior:
More narrow streets
That last screenshot's an entrance to the mines, a much closer shortcut between the miners' homes and the mines themselves.
Also, the texture for the stairs is temporary, I'll be doing a proper retexture when I get around to it. The mesh is a piece from the Solitude set.
I hate to be another requestor that isn't making things, but I only have a small one.
It would be nice if the Caldera Mage Guild had a teleport landing pad of some sort similar to the other mage guilds in the game, rather than that awkward deadend hallway in the original.
I imagine you are way ahead of me on that though
The narrow street now wraps around the back of Caldera, here's the end behind the bakery:
@SporkDust:
I do have plans to expand the guild a bit, I can add a teleport pad, the building to the left with the plaster walls ahead of the bakery is actually attached to the guild hall, and is an extension of it.
I always loved Caldera, but now this is town became really AWESOME!
Amazing work iceflame542 !
In one of the screenshots you see;
- Multiple crates on a building
- A stair bigger then a building
- Crates clipping with the ground and roof
You did some strange scaling and item placement.
https://tesrenewal.com/files/iceflame542/images/2014-07-25_0...
> narrow streets
> cave dwellings
> street slope
= that is just awesome! i hope will be many new NPC to dilute guardians and miners.
> teleport pad
= also good idea. Maybe it even possible to add some pylon on every point of teleportation - even divine-propelled. Devices always look more truthful, than blatant magic
Wow Ice, adding a bit of verticality to Caldera like you just did adds a whole other dimension to the city and makes it feel that much more believable. This is looking less and less like an artificial quest-cell for gaming reasons and more like a settlement where people have established themselves to make a living. Your attention to detail is fantastic and I'm all the more excited to see the end result.
Sjors Boomschors wrote:
I'll fix the clipping, but that's all the normal sizes for those objects. The crates are resting on a wooden ledge extending from the roof, and the old morrowind mesh houses had weird scaling, where the second floor is smaller than the first on the exterior.
EDIT: Alright, no more clipping crates. And now that I look back at it in the CK, the building is much larger than the stairs, just a wierd screenshot angle.
Looks really good! Couple things. Don't forget .de shackhook or an alternate hanger for the plates. Also consider adding a couple clothing lines for alley. Main objection is the house built into the rock, it looks a bit off.
Starting work on the mine shortcut tunnel:
This will open into the main part of the Caldera mine tunnels. I plan on making the mine feel dangerous to work in, being in a caldera, with things like volcanic activity opening geysers that would flood sections, sulfuric gas, acidic water, and fissures causing scaffolding to collapse and break apart the ground. The mine could be comparible to Kawah Ijen, which is a real-world example of volcanic mining conditions. The crater will combine ideas suggested earlier with photo references of sulfur mines. The Khajiit and Argonian slave miners would likely face much more difficulty than the hired Dunmer miners, due to the toxic sulfuric air that would be breathed in while mining and natural Dunmeri resistance to volcanic air and ash.
And lukkar's concept:
Ice, this looks absolutely fantastic! Caldera was always one of my favourite in-game locations and your reimagining is spot-on. I love how cramped and busy it now feels.
I'm part of the music team and I wrote the day theme for Caldera a while ago, you can hear it here: https://soundcloud.com/matthawken/caldera-1. A night theme will be in the works soon.
This town is coming together!
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