Summary:
Short summary for people who don't like to read and want to play:
- You need an Armorer level of min. 25 to upgrade armor. 50, 75 and 100 for next upgrades after the 1.
- You need Schematics. Those can be bought, you can find them or are given after Quests. Locations are in a doc. when you download the mod.
- You need materials. The materials you need and the quantity is written in the Schematics. Materials can either be bought or you have to find them. The locations of Merchants selling those materials can be found in a doc. when you download the mod.
- To upgrade an armor piece from base to max you need to craft everything in between first. So Basic -> Apprentice -> Journeyman -> Master -> Grandmaster
- I did not include enchanted armor or armor from other Mods in here. Those can't be upgraded, but feel free to add those yourself if you like. There is a guide in a doc. when you download the mod.

Foreword:
You are playing an Imperial Soldier are sent to defeat Dagoth Ur, but the armor given to you just not have it, or you are sent to the frozen, cold island Solstheim and you struggle to keep yourself alive. The Plaza Brindisi Dorom is under attack by mechanical creatures who deal too much damage. If this sounds alot like your character, then this mod is the right one for you.


Introduction:
This mods adds a way to upgrade your armor, alike what you might be used to in Skyrim. Smithies are added in every city in Morrowind, where you can upgrade specific armors appropriate for the city and its surroundings.  While the mod is generally for every player, I think it suits roleplaying types of players more than the common  Morrowind player or those who hunt for the best armor in each game. That said it could also be used greatly for those min-max kind of players, as each armor is upgradeable, the weaker ones, aswell as the high tier armors. The point about roleplaying in Morrowind is, that you are usually set to certain set of armors and maybe weaponry. In my example given above you play as an Imperial soldier. You are given the Imperial armor sets to play with. Imperial Steel, Imperial Chain, Templar, Dragonscale, Newtscale, Imperial Leather and Silver Armor. If you finish the Imperial Legion Quests you also get the Lord's Mail. Besides the Lord's Mail none of those are actually really  good, stat wise. At higher levels you might find yourself struggling with many types of enemies and challenges, especially in Tribunal and Bloodmoon. But you still want to stay in character, as that is what makes a roleplaying character a roleplaying character. 
This is where this mod comes into play. It gives you way to upgrade your armor, so you can still play as that  character in higher levels of the game. It might sound like cheating, as you don't use the actual armors given to you by the game. But I went thru alot to make this mod as balanced as possible and (what many of those role playing people like) as lore friendly as possible. I tried my hardest to do that and as I am not a hard core, lore savy player, might got some things wrong or are not accuratly. I'll be talking about the balance aspect a bit later on. First on, are the basics of the game.


Basics:
Like I said befor does this mod add smithies to every city and village to the game. You can't upgrade every armor where ever you like. Each armor can be upgraded in places where you would think you can upgrade them. For example can you upgrade Bonemold armor in every city from every Great House of Morrowind, like Balmora, Ald'ruhn, Sadrith Mora etc. Altho there are still regional differences for Bonemold, as certain Bonemold armor is worn exclusively by a fixed Great House. The common Bonemold armor worn by everyone, can obviously upgrade in every of those cities.  This is done with every armor, Imperial armor can be upgraded in every Legion Fort, Chitin can be upgraded in every Ashland Camp etc. Daedric, Dwemer, Riekling, Goblin and Dark Brotherhood are the only exceptions as they are found  in ruins and caves and not cities. Technically Stalhrim aswell, as you can find the smithy for it next to the guy  who gives it to you in exchange for Stalhrim.

When you find a smithy within a town you will notice that there are armors of the type you can upgrade in it, hang on walls or are put on planks and so on. Those are the smithy stencils and are used to upgrade your armor. You click on the part you want to upgrade, eg. a Steel helmet and upgrades it to your max level? Actually no. You need some stuff first to get it to work. For every armor piece you want to upgrade, you need materials to upgrade it. More Steel or alchemical materials which strengthen the armor's properties. The amount and what materials you need are listed in "Schematics". Those schematics are needed to upgrade each armor, as they give you the knowledge on how to upgrade your armor and so on. 
So in order to make the smithy work you need the materials, schematics and ofcourse the armor you want to upgrade. If you have all three you are ready to upgrade the armor, right? No again.  The other reason I created this mod is because I think that the Armorer skill is a bit weak and you usually never take it as a mayor or minor skill as you can repair it in every city and it is rare to actually need to repair your armor while in a dungeon (again this how I see it, may differ for others). That is why you need a certain rank for you upgrade armor or even use the smithy in the first place. Just like in Skyrim where you can upgrade armor at different skill levels. It is not as wide a range as it is in Skyrim, we are still playing Morrowind. It's more Morrowind esq. you can upgrade any common, non-enchanted armor from its basic level to Apprentice, Journeyman, Master and Grandmaster. To use the smithy in the first place, you need an Armorer skill level of 25 to upgrade armor to the apprentice level. Then you need 50 to upgrade it to Journeyman level, 75 for Master and 100 for Grandmaster. Every basic armor you can find in here can be upgraded: 
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Base_Armor
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tribunal:Base_Armor (excluding Dwemer Battle Shield, for reasons)
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:Base_Armor

Each upgrade gives you better stats and costs more materials to upgrade. The costs for the armors are set into 3 different brackets for what they cost to upagrade them. You could call it rarity. The first rarity is those of the most common kind of armors, like Iron, Netch Leather, Bonemold etc. To upgrade each of those armor pieces you need 25 of their respective materials, from 2 for apprentice, 5 for journeyman, 8 for master and 10 for Grandmaster. The next rarity is the more uncommon types of armor, or their material, like Dreugh or Orcish armor. You need 10 pieces of materials for each piece of armor you want to upgrade, in a 1, 2, 3 and 4 pattern for the needed materials. The last type of armors, are those with really rare kind of materials with many of them having a set amount of materials you can find or are hard to come by, like Ebony, Glas and Adamantium. To upgrade them you need 5 of their material, in a 1,1,1 and 2 pattern.

Now with armor, materials, schematics and skill level you can finally upgrade your armors. You simply click on the armor you want to upgrade and you are asked what kind of armor level you want to upgrade. You can't skip any of the levels, so you have to upgrade each level at least once befor you can upgrade it to Grandmaster. Means you have to upgrade your basic morrowind level armor to apprentice first, then to journeyman, to master and last to grandmaster. I'm not a master scripter and this is best kind of workarround I could manage. Maybe I am going to adress that later on in the far future but for the moment it remains that way. 


Schematics:
For the schematics I did something really nice for those who like to read lore or like to read in games in general.  Instead of: "Here have your Schematic and off you go"- kind of thing I gave every Schematic a fitting kind of knowledge to it. Some of them I wrote myself and I hope I added as little spelling mistakes as possible, as I am not a native english speaker, but for some I gathered alot of infos online for different sites. Every info I found online and where I took something from is listed in the an extra textfile when you download the mod, if you ever want to read the originals I tempered with some of those texts to fit in more with the Morrowind world in general. Every Schematic has a theme to it, to fit the armor style. Eg. the Iron Schematic has detailed insturctions on how to make iron armor in the middle ages or for the Wolf and Bear armor you have a guide of how to skin a bear/wolf in the right manner etc. If you really like to read, you can do it here. And if you like to read a bit more, take a look at the original sources. While looking for infos about real armors I learnt alot and so can you.
At the bottom of each schematic you can see in detail what materials you need and what amounts, as I already said above. And you need the schematic in your inventory to use the smithy for its armor type.  Most Schematics can be bought from merchants in cities where you can upgrade them aswell. Just look arround at different merchants or smith and you are bound to find them. They are rather costly, mostly for balance reasons. Others can be found within the world of Morrowind. If you can't find them anywhere or can't buy them it means you get them via quests or from factions. For example you are given Bonemold Schematics by every Great House when you enter them, as a token. Or you can only get Imperial Legion armor schematics from ranking up within the Imperial Legion. There is no great merchant I added you can sell you every schematic found in the mod. This was made to make the mod as lore friendly as possible and you will be able to find every schematic where you would suspect it. 


Materials:
The materials needed for the armors are a mix of alchemical ingredients found in the game, some new ones I made off of already existing ones or I created entire new kind of metarials. Most materials can be bought within the game, from merchants and smith near the smithy of that armor. Many can be looted from enemies or in caves as they are ingredients from monsters, like Firesalt, Bonemeal, Netch Leather etc. Most of the more specifc materials can only be bought, as I did not temper with any of the random lists. 
In general, the more rare the material, the better the armor and therefor more expensive it is to upgrade the armor.  Again, this was made to balance the mod a bit. To the point where the really good armors, those you usually end up with if you don't use artifacts and enchanted armor, are actually limit in the amount of materials you can find for them. Creating a scenario where you can have 2 full sets of one of those armors. This is true for Glas, Adamantium, Ebony,  Dwemer and Daedric. All of them have specially created materials, which most of them can't even be found befor you read the schematics. Glas, Adamantium and Ebony have special ore nodes which are only visible for the player when the schematics are written. All of those special nodes are at places where you can find the ores naturally and the reason for this is written in the schematics aswell. Daedric and Dwemer materials can be found befor you read their schematics but the hard part for them is to find the smithy in the first place. You can find their materials in Daedric and Dwemer ruins. Each ruin in the game has some, so you have to visit alot for you to upgrade their armor parts.


Balance:
Lets talk a bit about the balance of this mod. As I said befor, I think the mod isn't a cheat tool. Yes your armor is going to be a lot better, in both armor rating, aswell as enchanting abilities, but you have to put alot effort to come to a level where your armor is actually better, than the best in game already and for those armors, which are already really good you have to put even more effort in it. But lets talk stats.
At the start of development I thought about a %ish stat increase for armors but later on I came to the conclusion that this would just make the already strong armors even stronger, while the weaker armors won't get any stronger at all. This isn't what I wanted to do with the mod at all, as I intend to buff weaker armors with this mod and make them more viable while playing at higher levels. Thus I made the stat increase a flat value for each armor, no matter which one.
The increases are the following:

Apprentice 
Armor rating - 5 extra armor rating
Enchanting rating-50 extra enchanting rating (this is a CS value, ingame it gives you 5 more rating)
Value-25% increase in value of the armor piece
Health -50 extra health

Journeyman
Armor rating - 10 extra armor rating
Enchanting rating-100 extra enchanting rating (this is a CS value, ingame it gives you 10 more rating)
Value-50% increase in value of the armor piece
Health -100 extra health

Master
Armor rating - 25 extra armor rating
Enchanting rating-250 extra enchanting rating (this is a CS value, ingame it gives you 25 more rating)
Value-75% increase in value of the armor piece
Health -250 extra health

Grandmaster
Armor rating - 50 extra armor rating
Enchanting rating-500 extra enchanting rating (this is a CS value, ingame it gives you 50 more rating)
Value-100% increase in value of the armor piece
Health -500 extra health

Those armor ratings for master and grandmaster might seem high, but in reality they are not. Lets take Netchleather and Glass as an example. Base armor rating of Glass armor is 50 and Netchleather has an AR of 5. With this extra 50 AR you get for upgrading the armor with this mod you bring Netch Leather on the same level as Glass, a bit higher maybe. And yes, the AR of Glass is then doubled from 50 to 100, but let me explain a bit how AR works in Morrowind. The way the damage reduction from AR works is that each additional AR you add lessens the actual damage reduction you get from those additional AR. This means that the increase from 5 to 55 is worth much more than the increase from 50 to 100. The weaker armors gain more from this and double the AR does not mean double the effectiveness.  I always thought that the enchanting rating of armors were pretty wonky and made little sense to me. Why would greaves and pauldron have this little ER at all, while shields and cuirass have that much more. While it does not actually uniform them, adding everywhere a fix value gives you the option to use them for enchantmens more effectively, while not rising it up to a level where you can make far to strong enchantments. Another example here Daedric armor. Nearly each armor piece, besides pauldron, boots and greaves have an ER of 600 (60 ingame) or higher. Most low level armors have something between 5 and 200. Even with the ER increases you are still below most Daedric armor parts. But what about those armors with high ER, wouldn't they be too strong? Why yes, they are going to be way stronger, no doubt. But most armors with an exceptional ER are pretty weak on the AR side, like the Telvanni Cephalopod Helm. The already strong armors like Glass, Ebony and so on a gated behind their materials. You can craft 2 sets, as long as you find every piece of material for it thus preventing you from crafting armors for each type of situation. And you have their high prices for their schematics too. Each schematic for those cost 50k which isn't something you just have on you at all times and if you could afford it on the whim you wouldn't have any problem with anything in the game anyway, as high level enchantments cost really much as well. Other good armors have hard to find schematics to come up with it or need to have certain quest finished to get them. Health and value of the armor are just a bit extra. The price is %ish thus the value increase isn't that higher for most  armors and those who are already pricey can give you some extra cash but on the other hand they would already do that as their base price is that high to begin with. Some low level armors have pretty low health, the added health makes yet again more viable. In the beginning I thought about increasing the weight aswell in another atempt to balance the mod, but then I realised that increasing the weight of light armor makes them a medium armor, as the weight of armors defines wether they are light, medium or heavy armor to begin with.
Yet another reason the mod is rather balanced, besides materials is, that you need armorer skill level. Aside from training it is rather hard to level armorer, if you don't intend to offer some time doing it. The increase in AR and ER aren't liniar aswell, thus having 75 Armorer skill and a Master level armor and its ratings is a whole other level than having a Grandmaster level armor. But again, this is my interpretation of the mod and its values. Maybe you think different.


Compatibility:
Merchants
Every mod that changes merchants in anyway might not be compatible with this mod, as it relies on those to give you cretain materials you can't get without them. So if you have some mods that changes the economy in anyway it might not be playable with this mod.

Terrain
I tried to touch the terrain as little as possible. Except for a few changes I left it as it is. But still, it could  meddle with some mods in Balmora or Seyda Neen. Keep that in mind.

Towns/Villages
Mods that alter towns and villages, might not be compatible with this mod, as moth smithies are outside and might conflict with your overhaul. 

Quests/Rewards
Some of schematics rely on quest rewards. Any mod that might change those, can conflict with this mod as you can not get those schematics in any other way without cheating.

Armor mods
This mod is compatible with any armor mod you want. I did not change stats of existing armors, but if you have some remember that the added AR, ER, Value etc is based of stats from the original armors.  This mod does not give you a way to upgrade armors which are added via other mods. If you really want to upgrade your favourite armor you added with other mods I added instructions how you can add a smithy for those armors yourself, as I am not going to include other armors in the mod, nor will I ever do that. If you have permissions from other authors to add their mod in like an add-on of this mod, you are free to publish them. Remember you can only upgrade non-enchanted armors, wether you enchanted them yourself or are already enchanted makes no difference. Including them would have been either impossible for me or would have added that much more work I am not willing to invest. 

OpenMW
This mod is more or less compatible with openMW. The mod works as intended, but at some places openMW has gras which you can not interact thru, thus blocking you from interacting with some armor stencils. But other than that you can use this mod with openMW. My testers found no problems besides the one named above.


Future plans:
This is the first part of my planned Armorer overhaul. Next I plan to have my way with clothing, to make any clothing viable without a higher ceilling in terms of stats. At last an overhaul for weapons. For those I have only vague plans and nothing is set in stone yet. 


Last words:
I really hope you like this mod as much as I do. I am not going to play without it myself. I think it is balanced and not a cheat tool at all, but like I said, you might think differently about that. Same for lore friendliness. I tried to find as many bugs as possible, but my tester pool was rather limited. So if you encounter any bug feel free to post it and I might be able to fix it. 

The mod includes the following:
- Armorer Skill Expanded Part 1.eps
- README
- A list of the locations of all schematics and how to get them
- A list of all merchants selling new materials
- A list of sources I used for the schematics
- A guide on how to include your armors into this mod

Soul-O-Eater