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SPOILER INFO
Hardly a spoiler. This article discusses an illogicality in the game which is so obviously a mistake that it doesn't even deserve to be called a bug.
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You have surely noticed that when you convert animal pelts to leather with the tanning rack, your overall weight increases. This means that leather weighs more than the pelts it's being made of. It doesn't make sense, does it?
In order to understand what is going on, let us look at the figures first.
As you can see here:
1 pound of hide can be transformed into 1 (1 Goat Hide to 0.5 Leather) to 4 (2 Fox Pelts to 2 Leather) pounds of leather.
1 unit of Leather (weighing 2 lbs) can be transformed into 4 units of Leather Strips (weighing 4 x 0.1 lbs).
So, hide-to-leather weight conversion ratio is 100–400%, leather-to strips weight conversion ratio is 20%. In simpler words, when you process hide into leather, it gets up to 4 times heavier, and when you cut leather into strips, it gets 5 times lighter.
Now, can you tell me by which laws of physics or magic can hide get four times heavier when processed into leather and then losing all that added substance again when processed into leather strips? I can't. Rather, when you look at the figures above, it is impossible to not get the impression that someone at Bethesda simply set the weight of Leather accidentally at 2 lbs when it should have been 0.4 or 0.5 lbs. I mean, if a student of yours had written a program with such conversion ratios, you would have automatically assumed he had made a mistake and pointed it out to him, wouldn't you? After all, Leather's weight of 0.5 lbs would put everything in its place: 1 pound to 0.25..1 pounds when converting hide into leather and 1 pound to 0.8 pounds when converting leather into strips.
(Actually, the most logical weight of Leather would be 0.447, but the Inventory screen won't display more than 1 decimal point. Whether 0.5 would be more logical than 0.4, or vice versa, is for you to decide.)
This is not even a real bug. At some point in the game developing process, someone just wrote down a wrong number. Can happen to anybody. What is mind-boggling is that this blatantly obvious human error hasn't been corrected in any of the updates or patches and that the authors of the UESP wiki act like such implausible hide-to-leather matter gain and subsequent implausible leather-to-strips waste ratio are perfectly normal. I understand that Skyrim is a magical world, but there is a difference between magic and nonsense.
What to do, then?
Firstly, there is the mod Less Annoying Items that sets the weight of Leather to 0.5, along with changing a dozen more parameters, such as increasing the screamingly inadequate duration of blacksmith potions.
Secondly, there is a mod specifically meant to fix the Leather weight. Unfortunately it decreases it to 1 which is still twice as much as it should be.
Thirdly, there is a smithing overhaul mod which (along with many other changes) tries to solve the contradiction by increasing the weight of the pelts. That does, however, not account for the waste of 80% of the material when creating Leather Strips. What's worse, weight management is cumbersome enough already. The last thing I need is the weight of pelts increased, realistic as it may be. When realism kills the game's enjoyability, it's no longer good.
Fourthly, if you have a mod that has a record for Leather (such as SEO), you can use TES5Edit to manually change the weight of Leather to 0.5 (or 0.4 if that suits you'd better). This is the simplest method and it's the one I use.
[originally published 2017-02-27]
