Mainland Mercs, The READ ME
An unofficial addon to the unofficial addon: Tamriel Rebuilt
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What this is:
This is a plugin file ( aka mod ) for the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
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   ***  *** For the May Morrowind Modathon *** ***

I am making this for myself really but I figured I'd share a working work in progress
for this modathon thing.

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Requirements:
Morrowind ( Obviously ) and its official expansions: Tribunal and Bloodmoon
AND Tamriel Rebuilt. ( which requires the above^ anyway :-P  )
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Does this work with OpenMW?
I don't know. It works in Vanilla
TES3 is a cobbled together game and was never designed to handle NPC companions.
Therefore all features and functions are cobbled together workarounds for said cobbled
together game engine and may or may not work as intended on a third party app.
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Installation:
If you managed to install Tamriel Rebuilt you will have no trouble intalling this
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What this does:
Adds NPC's for hire on the mainland of Morrowind
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WHY??????
I wanted to make 'NPCs for hire' that are self suffecient and easy to use without having
to micromanage everything about them, and level and gear up the more you work them.
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Why require Tamriel Rebuilt?
Well honestly Vvardenfell has been modded to death. I can't place a fart on that island
without conflicting with some mod somewhere and I'm bored with it for the moment.
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About the NPCs:

At this time there are 4 NPCs.

Common features include:
-Grumpy's warp following scripts
-stay, follow, and stand aside commands
-Greeting shows current and max health and current magicka
-Auto sheath when combat finished
-NPCs earn their own XP ( expeirence points ) each day they work for you
-NPCs auto level stats on hire and rest.
-Stats level calculated by player level and NPC XP level
-Level, heal, repair, and resupply on rest ( when AiFollowing )
-Water breathing so they won't drown.
-remote greeting even during combat
-teleport to safety when injured too badly
-recall teleport to player when player is outside.
-auto sneak, water walk, and levitate with player
-Gear upgrades available when they earn enough gold from you.
-I did not add companion share, they are npc's for hire, not pack mules
 ( but i did add a pack guar with companion share :-P )

So without further ado, allow me to introduce them:
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Erindra, a female Bosmer archer located in Bosmora ( where else? lol )
-uses light armor, bow, and spear.
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Davia, a female Redguard warrior located in the Helnim Guild of Fighters
-Uses heavy armor, sword, and shield
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Walks-with-Shoes, a male Argonian sorcerer located in Firewatch Palace, Guild of Mages
-Uses bound dagger, damage, and shield spells
-slowly regenerates magicka, speed increases with level
-can cast light on self if enough magicka
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Fons, a male Dunmer monk with a pack guar located in Sailen ( near the silt strider )
-uses no weapons, hand to hand only
-no remote greeting or recall outside ( i felt teleport was a bit of a cheat )
-no teleport away when hurt
-no levitate but can water walk
-stays outside

Kagiliim, a pack guar
-companion share
-no levitate but can water walk
-stays outside
-avoids battle
-increases in size and carrying capacity the more he is used
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Who made this?
I did
my discord ID is @Stripes#1829 ping me if you need to
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Modder permission and credt:
It's mostly just garbage scripts and dialogue, if you can make sense of any of it and
use it somehow credit this mod for inspiration although its not exactly groundbreaking
The good parts of my scripts are derived ( cut n paste and butchered ) from:
Grumpy's Companion Project Resource
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Technical Notes of what I did and didn't do and why. ( the TLDR section )

Like I said MW is cobbled together and this mod a big mess of overlapping cobbled
functions and features and workarounds, made even worse when I'd change my mind and
add, change, or delete stuff. But it all works as intended ( unless i broke something
doing the said add, change, or deleting of stuff )  within the limited parameters of
the MW game engine/world.

Companion Share vs Gearing Up

I didnt use companion share as these arent supposed to be 'friends' that you would
just give a full set daedric armor to. They are independent Non Player Characters
that have their own talents and like/dislikes. They have their own abilities and
equipment.

The monk has no gear. The guar grows in size, encumbrance, and health.
 
Only the warrior and the archer gear up. Each time you hire them they earn money,
when they have enough money they will tell you in dialogue to go to a certain merchant
( convienently at their point of origin ). Once in that cell you trigger the upgrade
by dialogue topic on the merc. You don't talk to the merchant. Time stops in dialogue
and doesn't make sense that you'd do the shopping for them. And its for the best
that I don't touch dialogue on other NPC's ( especially not TR NPC's!!!! )
Without script extenders or a shitload of activators you can't take them shopping
just anywhere so I made them loyal to their vendors, which is believable enough to me.

Unfortunately I don't ( yet ) give a notice of when the next upgrade is availble
you'll just have to keep checking with the dialogue.

The sorcerer gains new spells instaed of gear and buys a spellbook from his merchant.

I disabled pickpocketing to shut down possible exploits of the repair script.

The upgrades for each merc are as follows, the number is the total earned income

warrior
0 iron armor, shield, and flameblade
100 steel shield  -2 weeks
200 steel flamesword -4 weeks
500 steel armor -10 weeks
10000 ebony armor  -200 weeks

archer
0 netch leather, chitin bow, arrows, and spear
100 iron shardskewer -2 weeks
150 short bow -3 weeks
200 iron arrows -4 weeks
250 long bow -5 weeks
400 chitin armor -8 weeks
500 steel vipercleaver -10 weeks
1000 viper arrows -20 weeks
10000 glass armor -200 weeks

sorcerer
0 spirit knife
100 shield -2 weeks
200 wild weaping wound -4 weeks
300 bound dagger -6 weeks
500 summon scamp -10 weeks
1000 daedric bite -20 weeks



Teleportaion

The monk and his guar don't teleport. I felt this would be too much a cheat and
less immersive. ( in my not so humble opinion in this matter )
They also don't teleport away when hurt and can die in combat so you'll have
to be extra careful with them

The other 3 mercs will teleport away when they get too damaged, but you can recall
them to you if you are outside.
They each give you a contract and a spell. The contract has a script on
it to detect use of that spell so you should always keep that contract in your
inventory, don't worry it has no weight. When you use the spell it triggers a
force greeting of the merc. so you can contact them if they are out of range,
in combat, or in an entirely different cell.
I used the script on the inventory item instead of a global script so if you decide
to not use the merc you can stash the contract somewhere so the script stops running.
In the dialoge you can tell them to teleport to you, if you are outside. So once you
have the contract even if its expired you can contact them to hire them again and have
them teleport to you.


Leveling


For stats I used grumpy's style of auto leveling but with an added twist. Where his
script leveled npc stats to player level mine levels to half of the players level
plus the NPC's xp level with a level cap at 100.

I tried to balance the math for both high level and starting players.

Each day they work for you they gain an experience point.  When they reach the required
xp points they level up. The level script runs whenever you hire them or rest while they
are following. The level requirements increase by a factor of 1.1 for each level so they
will level up slower at higher xp levels.

I used a global variable to set the base requirement. It defaults at 6. So that's xp which
is days for the first level up.

You can change this in the console, the lower the number the quicker they level, the higher
the number the longer it takes to level up, but may get outrageous at high levels if you set
it too high. Type in the console:   set 0_merc_rate to X   where X is the number you want
If you change this you should do it before you hire them, because afterwards the math is
already set in motion and will not work as intended. They all share the same base global.

Also, you should sleep with them at least once a day, you will waste xp if don't level up
right away. sorry my bad, sloppy scripting :P
Through dialogue choice they display their current level, total earnings, experience, and
defense and attack ratings.

The archer also displays the number of arrows she has.


Healing, repairing, and resupply

I didn't use DinkumThinkum's potion saver because Morrowind Code Patch fixes NPCs from
chugging all their potions at once, which dont matter anyway because of the following reasons:
 
I didnt add companion share and they only have a maximum of one healing potion at all times.
They will teleport away if below 20% health.
They have a healing spell, but AI isn't reliable and they can run out of magicka.
The potion is merely an extra failsafe to try keep them alive but it is still possible they can die.

Whenever you rest with them following they start their level script and heal to max health and
magicka, repair all armor and weapons, and resupply their one healing potion.

The archer will also resupply arrows, the more hours you rest the more arrows are supplied.


Voices

I made some ID filtered hellos to each NPC using the vanilla ones that made sense.
I may later add some more but theres not much to pick from


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Other mods

I use Westley's pluginless head replacer so if you want your mercs to look like the way
I see them then use that.

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Future plans

I plan to refine the dialogue and whatnot to make them each "in character" and lore the
best I can, right now dialgue is mostly a placeholder for the functions.
And playtest more thoroughly to balance the leveling and make sure there are no bugs
and maybe think of stuff I want to change, add, or delete lol.
Also I am developing more NPC's with other unique features.
And of course keep up with changes made by TR ;)