[ Delayed Dark Brotherhood Attack ] (ESSENTIAL): When Bethesda released the Tribunal expansion, they forgot to check if the player was level 30 before sending the Dark Brotherhood after them in their sleep. This often lead to people starting the game, then getting stuck because they'd be attacked right at the start with no ability to defend themselves. This mod corrects this issue, and I consider it to be one of only 2 mods that are essential.

[ Dwemer Books ]: I think this one adds cool looking books to Dwemer places? Not sure...

[ Free the Slaves ]: Adds more ways to free slaves

[ Ghostfence Writing ]: Adds weird daedric writing to the ghostfence

[ Gondolier Destinations ]: In Vivec, there are Gondoliers to take you to the various districts. But for some reason you can't pay to travel to all of them. This mod fixes that

[ Go to Jail ]: Some more interesting jail things

[ Hlaalu/Imperial/Vivec normal maps ] (openmw only): special textures, to make surfaces look more 3d than they actually are. I'm still not convinced about the vivec one, though...

[ NX9 Guards ]: Instead of every guard in town being the same, now they're all randomised: different genders, different appearances, different load outs.

[ Old Vos Tradepost ]: A cool little location near Vos

[ Redoran Founder Armor ]: A neat set of armor

[ Road to Mournhold ]: If you installed Delayed Dark Brotherhood Attack (as you should), you won't be able to get to Mournhold until level 30. This mod adds a quest that you can do at any time, to get there earlier

[ Scouts Services ]: Scouts can now take you to locations (for a fee)

[ Shrine Cancel ]: Adds a cancel button to shrines, so you don't have to choose one of the other options.

[ Silt Strider Armor ]: A cool armor made of silt striders

[ Skyrim: Home of the Nords ]: Made by the same people as Province: Cyrodiil, this adds Skyrim... but as it would have been from Morrowind lore.

[ Striderports ]: Adds some shelter and some stuff to the strider ports, so the strider pilots aren't just standing on a platform, alone and cold in the rain

[ Telvanni Lighthouse (tel branora and tel vos) ]: Adds a lighthouse

[ Tamriel Rebuilt ]: The largest mod in this list. It recreates the mainland area of Morrowind that wasn't in the main game, adding several huge areas, hundreds of quests, several new factions... it's huge

[ Weather Effects ]: Weather now has (minor) effects on your stats.

[ Wolverine Hall Directions ]: Adds some extra directions to the confusing Wolverine Hall

[ Graphic Herbalism ] (ESSENTIAL): In the vanilla game, plants are boxes that you open and take plant material out of. This sucks. Graphic Herbalism makes you automatically take whatever was inside the plant, and also makes the plants disappear once picked.Why Essential? Trust me – the game is miserable without it if you're the kind of person who likes picking plants

(there's an additional Graphic Herbalism mod for Tamriel Rebuilt too, so get that if you get TR)

I think that's everything I've got.

A lot of these are things I cherry-picked from this awesome list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pRLBvOuDOkK9odpAwOludR4FmAJ95f6IsZpvaA8iHVU/edit

I should also note: openmw is at the point where it's better than vanilla – many of morrowind's bugs and crashes aren't a problem with openmw, it's got a better mod system (with multiple Data folders!), and it supports more resolutions.

I have replaced one of the mods in this list:

Strider ports, which made the silt strider ports more interesting has been replaced with Ports of Vvardenfell, which makes all the ports (strider, gondolier, ship...) more interesting.

I've added the following mods:

[ Dagoth Ur Welcomes You ]: Adds a table and some cushioned chairs to Dagoth Ur's lair

[ Wyrmhaven ]: A tiny contested island, far to the west of Solstheim.

changing striderports for ports of vvardenfell midgame was a bad idea... the caravaneer at Sedya Neen is stuck standing on a table, and the one at Khuul seems to have completely disappeared

It turns out that you can fix stuff like this with the console command `ResetActors`

thank goodness... I was thinking I was stuck here in this useless fishing village