Turn Normal Grass and Kelp into Groundcover

Preface

Please note that this mod is no longer directly supported and has now been superseded by two tools which do what this mod does on a much broader scope, while also greatly reducing the likelihood of mod incompatibilities. These tools are Groundcoverify (OpenMW only) by Benjamin Winger, Habasi by Alvazir and Hide Grass (MWSE only) by Abot. I recommend using these mods instead of this, due to its limitations.

Hemaris pioneered the fantastic idea of turning regular static flora into groundcover. When they stepped back to take a break from modding Morrowind I offered to take over the mod page for them while developing my own tool together with my brother-in-law to do the same thing as Habasi and Groundcoverify - Alvazir, Benjamin Winger and Abot beat us to the finish line and have thankfully made three fantastic tools, making our project redundant. However, I will keep this mod page up for historic purposes. Full credit to Hemaris, Benjamin Winger, Alvazir and Abot for their work.

- MasssiveJuice

What this mod does

The base game of Morrowind has a lot of grass, ferns, and kelp by default, but they are all regular statics. By making the game engine load those plants as a grass mod instead, they get the benefits of lower CPU overhead and improved appearance (wind swaying, "stomping" when walked on). All of the other grass mods out there already account for the base game plants being where they are, so you can combine this mod with any of them without issues. Or you can run this mod by itself, with no other grass mods, if you just want to add a little bit of subtle motion to a "vanilla-plus" Morrowind install.

How it works

This mod uses one plugin (named "CONTENT") to delete every individual grass and kelp in Morrowind.esm, and then a second plugin (named "GROUNDCOVER") to put them all back in the same positions.

That lets you load the "GROUNDCOVER" plugins as grass mods, and the "CONTENT" plugins as normal mods, so that all of the original grasses and kelps appear in their usual places, but they are given a grass mod's special handling by the engine.

That makes them more performance-friendly to render, and it enables fancy visual features like OpenMW's grass stomping and swaying in the wind.

A second pair of plugins does the same thing for TR_Mainland.esm version 22. 11. You can use just the Morrowind.esm plugins, or just the TR_Mainland plugins, or all of them at the same time.

There is now also an alternate download which supports Beautiful Cities of Morrowind version 2. 7. 6. The BCOM version of this mod comprises a replacement for the core plugin Beautiful cities of morrowind.esp (stripped of its re