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Tips: Portable Install

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OpenMW 0.48 added the ability for a "portable install"; that is: one where all the cfg files and related things that normally live amid your user documents instead live in a separate folder of your choosing.

This can be handy for playing with total conversion mods such as Arktwend or Starwind, where you may want to keep these files separated from your normal files for playing Morrowind.

To use this feature, create a launcher for OpenMW with a couple of specific arguments as follows: 

# Linux/macOS
openmw --replace=config --config ~/games/StarwindCfg --user-data ~/games/StarwindCfg

# Windows
openmw.exe --replace=config --config C:\games\StarwindCfg --user-data C:\games\StarwindCfg

In order for the game to launch, you need valid openmw.cfg and settings.cfg files in the folder you specify. You could copy those from the normal location and then edit them as needed.

This specific example is for Starwind, but you can name the destination folder anything you want.

Alternatively, you may just want all of OpenMW's extra files, including saves and screenshots, to be in a separate folder of your own choosing. You can choose any directory you would like, but for this example we will create a config folder inside the root directory of your OpenMW installation and tell OpenMW to use that directory instead.

In the global openmw.cfg file, that is the one which is in the root directory of your OpenMW installation, do the following:

  1. Replace "?userdata?data" with "config\data".
  2. Replace "?userdata?" with "config".
  3. Replace "?userconfig?" with "config".
  4. Copy the contents inside the default configuration folder into the config folder.

Since we are using a path that's in OpenMW's root directory we can take a shortcut and just give OpenMW the folder name itself, but for more complex paths you can instead give OpenMW an exact folder path, such as "D:\OpenMW 0.49\config".

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