Morrowind:Water Breathing

	Water Breathing
School	Alteration
Type	Defensive
Base Cost	3.0
Availability (Click on any item for details)
Spells Built-In Potions Scrolls

Water Breathing for D seconds

Allows the target to breathe underwater. This allows them to stay submerged indefinitely (or at least until the spell wears off) without drowning.

Notes

• There is one quest (Pilgrimages of the Seven Graces for the Temple) where it is required for you to drown yourself. Thus, you should arrange not to make any permanent Water Breathing effects on yourself (either by alchemy exploits or other glitches) until after you have done that quest. In case such a constant Water Breathing effect would be acquired before doing the quest manually damaging your health to a certain point will do the trick.
  • Another approach would be to enchant a constant effect water breathing item (this takes 15 enchant points) and simply remove the item when you don't want the effect.
• It can be useful to have an "on Touch/Target" version of this spell for use during escort missions, as the AI of the escort characters is rather deficient for characters when swimming. (They will often drown themselves while following you through water, and are too dumb to come up for air sometimes.)
• All creatures can breathe underwater by default. Only NPCs can drown. Thus, you don't have to worry about your pet Guar or Pack Rat following along behind you in the water. They will happily walk along the bottom (they can't actually swim) without needing to come up for air.
• When a water breathing effect expires, your breath meter will return at full capacity, even if you were drowning when you cast the spell. Therefore, a very short duration of this effect will, in effect, completely replenish your air meter, so even if you are not very skilled at spellcasting, you can create an easy-to-cast short duration version of the spell and just continually re-cast it when your meter gets low to continue swimming longer. This works with potions and ingredients as well. If you take a supply of Luminous Russula with you on a dive, you can just eat one of them every time your meter gets low to allow for long dives without any Alteration skill at all.

Related Effects

• Water Walking

Alchemy Ingredients

The following ingredients can be used to create a potion of Water Breathing:

• Hackle-Lo Leaf
• Kwama Cuttle
• Luminous Russula*
• Pearl

* This is a first-effect ingredient, so you can get a short duration effect by eating them raw.