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SPOILER INFO
This article contains generic discussion of some gameplay aspects but no spoilers.
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In Fallout 2, I ended up spending a lot of time carrying stuff to storages I had established in various locations, and figuring out what to take with me on the next assignment and what to leave behind. It was rather tedious. In Skyrim I never bothered to store anything. I just dropped the less valuable items. (By the way, what gave the author of SkyUI the crazy idea of hiding the value/weight column by default? I spent time in forums, searching if there was a mod that would supplement the inventory with a V/W column, only to find out that it was actually there, it just needed to be activated in a menu. Who on Earth would want the V/W column hidden?)
Skyrim's carryweight limit of 300 is really crippling. In the very early stage of the game it is fine, but as time passes, you'll find more stuff you want to keep. I mean, by the time you are a really good fighter and enchanter, you will want to be able to carry different kinds of items for different purposes, such as one bow with a strong damage enchantment and another one for trapping souls. And then you find yourself stopping every now and them, going through your inventory trying to figure out what are the items you need least. It gets extremely annoying.
This is not about greed. You don't really need the loot anymore, having accumulated more money you can spend. It's about being unable to carry the bare necessities. In fact, I gave up smithing altogether, because I simply couldn't afford the weight of the pelts and the ingots, let alone the improvable items themselves. I threw away most of the food and drink I found (and ended up almost dying of thirst once). I threw away the more frequent ingredients. I even began throwing away less potent health potions. Then I realized it was just not right. I mean, yes, I don't actually need dozens of Blue Mountain Flowers, but I shouldn't have to waste so much time and effort on inventory micromanagent. (And do you have any idea what a pain in the ass it was to gather those Dwemer Cogs for that wizard guy? Those things weigh a lot, they're not weightless like unique quest items.)
The carryweight limit can be increased by 100 pounds by a perk. It's pretty adequate if you want to comfortably manage the essentials and carry a few excess items to be sold or enchanted or something. Too bad that perk had prerequisite perks which were so pointless that I couldn't bring myself to wasting perk points on them. Fortunately I found an enchanted armor which increased my carryweight by 50 pounds. That was better than nothing. Carryweight potions were also helpful in managing those final miles to the nearest shop. Nevertheless, I eventually decided that the situation was intolerable. Going through the inventory trying to figure out which items I could do without, hundreds of times, was not something I wanted to do. Realistic or not, the burden of the screamingly inadequate carryweight limit was killing my enjoyment of Skyrim.
So I eventually came up with a solution. I decided that I was entitled to buying extra carryweight for money. I don't really consider it cheating. Firstly, Skyrim is a world where you can waken the dead, become a werewolf or change your armor in the middle of a swordfight. Why then shouldn't it be plausible to have a way of permanently increasing your carryweight? Secondly, in the advanced stage of the game, money becomes virtually meaningless. When I end up running around with hundreds of thousands of septims, that is bad gamewriting. If the game doesn't provide me with uses for my money, I have the right to invent some.
So I decided that for 200 septims I can buy one pound of carryweight. I have now played hundreds of real-world hours with that ratio and it's very reasonable. When you loot everything, you still have to throw stuff away, but it happens rarely enough, so you'll be able to play the game, not the inventory.
The game does not support carryweight buying and I haven't been able to find any mods for that. There's a mod that increases your carryweight 10 times just like that, but that's blatant cheating as far as I am concerned. Therefore, carryweight buying has to be done with the console.
Let's assume you have 50 000 septims you don't know what to do with. If you were to spend that on your carryweight, you'd get 250 extra pounds. The default carryweight being 300, your new base carryweight would be 550. So you open the console and type
player.setav carryweight 550
After that, you would normally want to use the command removeitem to pay the price for what you have bought. Unfortunately, it won't be possible in this case, as console-increased carryweight isn't saved while console-decreased money is. Meaning, when you reload a savegame, you'll have 50 000 septims less all right, but your base carryweight will be reset to 300.
How to get around that? By not giving money away and adjusting your carryweight anew every time you continue your game. When you load a savegame, open the inventory and see how much money you have. Suppose you have 234 567 septims. Divide that by 200 and round down. That'll be 1172. Add 300. Then use the console to set your carryweight to 1472. That'll be your carryweight until you reload. Suppose you've spent a lot and the next time you load your savegame, you'll see you have only 189 012 septims. That divided by 200 and rounded down equals 945. So your new carryweight will be 1245.
It's the optimal solution, considering that carryweight can't be saved.
Added later: The mod Nausicaa's Tweaker allows you to adjust your base carryweight through MCM and it's saved in your game. So now you can actually buy extra carryweight properly.
[originally published 2016-11-22]
