As has been stated, you don't need a bottle. If you have low Alchemy and want to make potions, you can improve your Alchemy temporarily by using Fortify Intelligence, Luck, or Alchemy effects. One second is long enough here. (Fortify Attribute is easy to get; Fortify Skill is found in the expansions, so it's not so easy to get until you can kill the assassin.)

You can use potions to boost your Intelligence or Luck; doing so allows you to improve your potion making ability exponentially without any cap. Needless to say, this can easily break the game (both by ruining game balance and by going so fast that the game doesn't know what to do and crashes), and there's also the possibility of stat overflow if you raise a stat over 2 billion.. (The fact that a stat that high is achievable in a reasonable amount of time (though it does take a while) when the normal limit is 100 should be a sign that something ridiculous is going on.) It's worth noting that, if you do this, your Alchemy skill will increase very quickly, so if it's a class skill, you might level up faster than you want to.

Stats can also be boosted by another glitch that makes spell effects permanent (and which the Code Patch does not appear to offer a fix for); if one of the effects of a spell hits an area at range, but there is nothing in the area of that spell, other effects may become permanent. (This means that if you combine Restore Health on self and Fire Damage at range, a missed shot may make the Restore Health permanent, which will make things too easy and make one quest impossible to complete.)

I strongly suggest to either play without Tribunal and Bloodmoon initially, or to use a plug-in to prevent the assassins from appearing. At least don't take or sell their armour when you defeat them.
That said, I don't know what would happen if you simply unticked the two expansions or installed and activated such a plug-in without starting a new game - it might be worth trying (but keeping a savegame from before doing so).
There are 2 reasons:
- The assassins are a nuisance and a pain in some part of the body. They are supposed to "motivate" you to go to Ebonheart and travel to Tribunal, but don't have any real purpose for the main Morrowind game, its world and its plot.
So to diasble or not activate them gives you a better Morrowind game experience.
- If you manage to kill them (which is not such a big deal with certain characters), you can obtain their armour, and worse, you can do so as often as you like, as the assassins will attack you on a regular basis.
These armours break the game balance terribly: Either you can wear them and become overpowered on your low level, or you can get a huge amount of money early in the game by selling them, which you can use to buy a lot of stuff, skill improvements and whatever is to your liking. This is great if you want to make character development quicker or fighting easier, but Morrowind will become boring very soon for most people, I guess.

It is possible (and probably interesting for many players) to play the game without resting, but then you are also not able to level up. That is, if you want to become stronger, you have to find other ways, spells, potions, etc.
I do suggest not to level up beyond the range of 20-25 for the base game, because the fights become too easy then (unless you want to play a "god-like" character). The expansions can be enjoyed with a higher level character.
By the way, not resting may make more sense in Oblivion with its leveled monsters. For example, level up to a threshold before the monster level increases (every 5 levels or so), then save your level-ups until you are able to jump to the next threshold. Or do the contrary: Stay on a character level threshold where the monster level increases, if you want harder fights.

Finally, I agree with fragonard that we may be able to help you win against the assassins, if you tell us what kind of character you are playing. I myself have killed them at level 1 from the beginning without any special tricks or tweaks, both as a fighter and as a mage character.
Initially I thought you are playing a non-fighting character (which also works well in Morrowind without the assassins), but then you were mentioning that your character is fighting indeed, if only for the purpose of increasing your skills.

I again thank all of you for replying.

I didn't mention this before because I didn't think it important, but because I've been very unclear above (something I'm always guilty of with this medium, don't seem to have the problem in real life face to face conversations but ALWAYS have the problem on internet forums. Obviously my fault, and I apologize). Anyway, because I was unclear above, there seems to be this feeling that I need help.

I've played the game before. I've beaten the assassins at level one before (well, actually, IIRC, I beat them when I was resting to raise to level 2 because you have to rest to increase level, so technically maybe it was level 2 when I beat them)

Anyway, I do know it's possible. In fact, I'm quite sure if I tried I could with this character. It's just that it can be tough, and it's just a PITA. Plus, IMO, I don't think it should happen at such a low level, for many of the reasons the above poster so clearly and pointedly laid out. It "breaks" the game balance.

IMO, the assassins shouldn't start to strike until level 10 or so. And IMO, it would be a much more fun game if it happened that way. So that's how I wish to play it.

And thanks to the info from an above poster, I now know how to do this. I will simply rest every time at the Seyda Neen "safe" bunk in the that first building you enter. This to me is the best of both worlds. No need to install yet another mod, AND I can manually make the attacks not occur until level 10. IMO this is GREAT.

Anyway, just wanted to clear that up. I think one reason my character died in one hit was because I hadn't yet bought any armor. It was very, very early in the game, and I had used up my magicka and night time came (in fact it may even have been the very first night, or at most the second). Anyway, that's why I suppose I died in one hit. No armor. Since I have light armor as a major skill, I'm sure if I were totally equipped with some light armor and since I have a long blade skill of 45 if I were also equipped with a long blade that I could probably survive the assassin. But then, like the game I played years ago, I would have some darn strong armor at the beginning of the game that I really don't think the creators of the game had in mind originally. So i'm just going to play this game and always rest in Seyda Neen until I'm level 10, and by then having that armor probably won't be such an "upgrade" that it breaks the balance.

Anyway, very sorry for the length (ANOTHER big problem of mine) and the lack of clarity. My bad totally. And THANK YOU ALL very, very much for your inputs and comments. I love this forum. And I love this game!

And now I'm back to it!

You were clear enough. It's more that people ASSUME that posters ask for help, interpret posts and reply to them accordingly.
And you are certainly not the only one who writes long posts. :-)

That Morrowind supports such a huge variety of playing styles is one of its biggest strengths, in my mind.
Have fun!

Yep, that's definitely me then! I don't know how well it will work, but I guess I was thinking about trying to only rest upon level ups and that way it would only be 10 trips to the Excise Office.... but depending on where I'm at you're right that may be a PITA too. Guess I didn't think it through.

I really had so much trouble getting this thing to act the way I wanted it to that i don't want to add any more mods, so I guess if it turns out to be too much of a PITA then I'll just kill the assassins, loot them, and store the loot somewhere until I reach level 10.

Or I'll figure something else out.

Not going to worry too much about it either way. I'm into it now with my first ever try as a Breton character. I made a Breton fighter, LOL, which should be very.... interesting. Because he's a Breton, his combat skills will start lower than almost any other character, but because he's a Breton, he'll have a nice head start on things like Alchemy, Restoration, Destruction, and Enchant, all of which I usually use a good bit when playing a fighter anyway. Plus I'm having fun role playing it (he's a Breton who wants to be "different" not just another Breton mage. He's seen all of the mages come and go but has heard stories of great Redguard and Orc warriors and that's what he wants to be).

And having fun is what it's all about anyway. Back at it!!

I managed to kill the assassin near the beginning of the game after he handed my ass to me many times. I took his armor which is the best I have found so far (Redguard). Although later I use some magical now and then. Why would you be told not to take it? I am playing as an Orc archer. I am best with blunt weapons in spite of being an archer, until I get the skill higher.

Because we think that it doesn't make any sense for you to get the armor at that time in that way. Exactly, it's the best armor you have found: You could just as much have used a cheat.
What matters to me is that what makes sense is for the quest to start later (Bethesda must have assumed that we'd keep the add-on deactivated until the mid or late game, because they did not let the attack happen that early on the XBOX).
Others also think that it makes the game to easy at that point, which is tied to the first point and may not be true depending on your character or preferences.

Oh, I see. I got the game with the expansions added on. First time playing. I figured it was supposed to be that way. I was wondering why the armor was so much better than you could buy.

It's historical, I guess. Tribunal was released some time after Morrowind. At the time many Morrowind players had completed the Morrowind main quest and were asking for more. These players simply activated Tribunal, took their main character and went straight to Tribunal, some possibly even without being "motivated" to do so by the assassins. I remember that I didn't find the fights against the assassins so difficult at the time (only annoying - and worse than the cliff racers who at least were native to the world of Morrowind :-)), and their armour was definitely not better than the one I had or could afford to buy.
The possibility that new players would go to Tribunal straight away (or doing this with a new character) probably didn't occur to the game designers. I still wonder why the option to switch off the attacks of the assassins wasn't implemented by Bethesda by a later patch (and I have no scruples to use a delay mod when I don't want to go to Tribunal).

While we're at it: Is Tribunal playable for level 1 character at all? You can get there, sure, but can you survive? I myself have never been in the sewers of Tribunal with a low-level character, and found it pretty tough in the level range of 30 or so. Are Tribunal opponents leveled?

In my opinion, traveling to Mournhold is a very inelegant solution but good that you mentioned it. There's a quest mod that allows you to go to Mournhold even without having been attacked, btw (the road to mournhold). I haven't tried the mod out, though.
I can't really answer your question.

If you can reach Mournhold, you can get the Fortify Skill spell effect, which is one of the most powerful effects in the game, for spellmaking. This, in turn, allows you to fortify a skill 800 points for 1 second, and if your Restoration isn't high enough, you can create a spell to fortify it to a more reasonable amount.

Fortify Alchemy 800 points, in turn, allows you to make powerful Fortify Luck potions. Drink a few of them, and now suddenly your character is much more powerful in pretty much every respect. Enemies will have trouble hitting you, and you can easily hit enemies. In addition, you can make even stronger potions this way (much faster than doing this without Fortify Alchemy, as the growth is exponential).

There are other nice uses of Fortify Skill. High mercantile, for example, allows you to make arbitrary deals with merchants; for example, you can sell a Racer Plume to the Balmora alchemist, ask for all her money (I believe 4000 gold), and she will actually accept the deal.

In other words, the game gives you probably the best spell effect right away in Mournhold, and with that even a level 1 character can handle powerful opponents. (The main quest can be beaten at level 3, and the only reason level 3 is required is that the game arbitrarily checks your level at one point.)

(Then again, this *can* be done without Fortify Skill; you just need to spend a long time making Fortify Intelligence/Luck potions to reach the point where your Luck becomes insane.)

How does one find where an interior cell is in TES editor? I'm trying to find specific locations for NPCs in Morag Tong Extended, as some of the directions they give in the mod itself are pathetically bad. "A city in the north with boats... east of it."
I've found what ruin the people are in... just no idea where that ruin is.

In the Construction Set find a doormarker (it looks like a big pink arrow) and double click on it. Under "Load Cell" you will be able to see the name of the cell beyond that particular door and you can move to that cell, in the editor, by clicking "Select Door" just below the cell name. If there is more than one doormarker, just make sure to find one that brings you to an external cell, i.e. a cell which name ends with a couple of numbers in round brackets.

The physical game came with a map of the island, which had all the major landmarks including ruins noted, and it was the main way to navigate the wilderness for locations not marked on the ingame map. Unfortunately it does not seem like that map is part of the GOG goodies, but you can find a map on the unofficial wiki.