The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has numerous New Lands mods.

Tamriel Rebuilt is one of the most ambitious and largest modding projects in the history of RPGs; it even has its own Wikipedia page. The ongoing twenty-three-year-old project is working to make the entire continent of Tamriel accessible for the 2002 video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. This epic New Lands mod triples the number of quests in the game and more than doubles the worldspace, and just saw a massive update release on May 1st 2025. Beyond Skyrim is a similarly ambitious project working to recreate the entire province of Tamriel for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and has so far released a main mod adding much of northern Cyrodiil, including Bruma, to the world of Skyrim, with mods set in Morrowind and other provinces planned to release in the future. Yet The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the middle game which just saw a massive remaster, lacks New Lands similar projects.

It is possible to access every province on Tamriel in Oblivion through New Lands mods, however such mods are often underdeveloped, lacking quests, NPCs, or even accessible buildings. Of these mods, Iliana’s 2009 mod Elsweyr, the Deserts of Anequina, is the most complete, adding sandy deserts, coral reefs, sprawling palaces, and various quests. 

A view in the Palace District in the Anequinan city of Corinthe.

Of similar completion compared to Elsweyr, but of smaller size, is Stirk, which adds the island of Stirk to the Cyrodiil worldspace along with NPCs, dungeons and cities. Along with a branching main quest and side quests. 

The small town of Stirk sits on the island added by the eponymous mod.

Stirk was actually developed by the Tamriel Rebuilt team as part of an initiative to recreate all of Tamriel in Oblivion, and was meant to be a testing ground for the Tamriel Rebuilt team, said ‘Thingy Person,’ a member of the Beyond Skyrim development team.

“It was an easy warmup to add a small, missing part of Cyrodiil with no custom assets, before they’d go on and do the playable content for Hammerfell,” Thingy Person said when asked for comment. “Stirk is the ideal mod island, everybody has a compulsion to make it,” referring to similar projects in Tamriel Rebuilt and Beyond Skyrim. 

Lady Nerevar, a member of the Tamriel Rebuilt development team, also spoke of Stirk:

“Stirk was originally intended as the proving ground for TR’s TES4 Hammerfell effort.”

Meant as a test run, Tamriel Rebuilt planned on first recreating the province of Hammerfell after their Stirk release. However, the project became bogged down by various difficulties: Most assets for Hammerfell had to be created wholesale as opposed to reusing vanilla assets; Oblivion’s worldspace is different from Morrowind’s, meaning it was harder to figure out how to add new provinces; and Oblivion was simply harder to mod than Morrowind.

Ultimately, the Hammerfell project spun off from Tamriel Rebuilt, and Lady Nerevar focused on releasing the most complete areas of Hammerfell, resulting in Hammerfell The Eastern Grasslands. The Eastern Grasslands adds NPCs, three quests, and detailed cities, and had an elaborate art book made for its development. The DaggerfallTeam, a modding team for Oblivion, has since released two iterations of Lady Nerevar’s mod; one by the same name, and one titled Daggerblivion, which incorporates other mods as well and recreates the main quest of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. 

The Eastern Grasslands allows players to roam around the province of Hammerfell.

Nostalgia for previous games in the series is not limited to Daggerfall. Numerous modders have also found ways to add content from Morrowind into Oblivion, such as modder ‘Marina O’Keefe,’ who developed a New Lands mod for Oblivion in 2006, titled Caldera.

“I chose to make the Caldera mod because like a lot of other Elder Scrolls fans who got into the series with Morrowind, I missed Morrowind and wished I could experience it in Oblivion’s game engine,” she said via email.

O’Keefe’s mod adds the mining village of Caldera from Morrowind into Oblivion, accessible via a portal in the Cheydinhal Mages’ Guild.

O’Keefe was not the only modder who wanted to experience the world of Morrowind in Oblivion. Morroblivion is a mod that recreates the entirety of the game Morrowind in the engine for Oblivion; furthermore, The Lands of Solstheim Vvardenfell and Mournhold by the SoVvM Team is a mod adding Solstheim, Vvardenfell and Mournhold (the settings of Morrowind and its DLCs) to the world of Oblivion. Morroblivion is completed; however, SoVvM exists in a rudimentary format, with a few highly detailed NPCs and locations alongside vast, unfilled, unfinished swathes of land.

O’Keefe expressed her confusion regarding the lack of more New Lands mods:

“I am also surprised there weren’t more landmass mods for Oblivion because the procedural generation tools it came with were very powerful and easy to use.”

Marina O’Keefe designed the mod Caldera.

Prominent Morrowind modder and YouTuber ‘DarkElfGuy’ spoke to this matter:

“On the surface, Oblivion is actually arguably the better platform for building and creating landmass mods, at least compared to Morrowind… Oblivion, in terms of raw numbers, does actually have far more landmass mods than Morrowind.”

However, difficulties in bridging the technological leap between Morrowind and Oblivion stymied large-scale projects; contrariwise, there was a much smaller technological gap between Oblivion and Skyrim.

“Oblivion projects simply didn’t get enough time to breathe before the next big thing came along and sucked up all the oxygen. Morrowind’s saving grace with Oblivion was that Oblivion was such a completely different beast from Morrowind, both in terms of technology and world design,” DarkElfGuy added.

Lady Nerevar spoke similarly:

“There are also a lot of people who don’t like what TES4/TES5 did and prefer to continue playing (and modding) TES3. Morrowind has immense cult appeal.”

The biggest hurdle that most modders agreed on was voice acting.

“Dialogue needs voice acting. There’s a much higher quality bar to hit if you want any aspect of the mod to look as good as the base game” – Lady Nerevar.

“The jump from [Morrowind] to Oblivion in asset quality and writing workload was quite high, even leaving out voice acting” – Thingy Person

“[Oblivion] quests practically require voice-acting in order to blend in with the rest of the game, and this is a hurdle that modders have historically had a hard time getting past.” – DarkElfGuy.

To this day, most Oblivion mods, even large-scale ones, lack voice acting, while comparable mods for Skyrim often have some rudimentary voice artistry.

A series of large developments between Morrowind and Oblivion made making New Lands mods—and Oblivion mods in general—difficult, and many such projects were abandoned when Skyrim came out. Morrowind has a large cult appeal that Oblivion in many ways lacks, allowing Tamriel Rebuilt to live on. Meanwhile, the absence of The Elder Scrolls VI means most Skyrim fans continue to mod Skyrim, allowing projects like Beyond Skyrim to continue developing and releasing new content. 

Nevertheless, the Oblivion New Lands modding scene lives on, on a slow and micro level, as is the case with much of the Oblivion modding community. In the past few years, modders like ‘LenaWolfBravil’ have made new content for preexisting New Lands mods, such as Elsweyr Mysteries and Skyrim Alive.

Last year, modder ‘Aegishjalm’ released a New Lands mod titled Sugar Valley, adding a version of an Elsweyr town to the game. Similar New Lands mods continue to release every so often. But none of Oblivion’s projects have ever reached the scope and fame of Skyrim or Morrowind’s mods, and, likely, they never shall.