The yoke of weight watching

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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]

Do quest items weigh?

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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article explains a minor bug that, judging by forum articles, is creating a lot of confusion.
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You have surely noticed how one or another item you carry in your inventory is not listed when you go to trading mode (meaning, you can't sell it), and when you try to drop it, you are informed you can't because it's a quest item.

Now, it's a good thing the game prevents you from mistakenly losing your valuable quest items, but what about the ones belonging to quests you are not interested in completing? Weight is a huge problem in Skyrim. One can't afford to just permanently carry dead weight.

Now, I eventually found that the console command removeitem  fixes that problem (help on syntax is easy to find online), but while looking for it, it was hard to miss several forum discussions that went like:
"Quest items don't weigh, you stupid moron."
"Of course they weigh, you fucking prick!"
or
"Although your inventory shows as if quest items have a weight, in reality they don't weigh anything lol."
"Tell that to my weight limit, smartass!"

The thing is: there are two kinds of quest items. It's most unfortunate that it isn't clearly explained anywhere.

When you are told to find a specific item, such as Roggi's Ancestral Shield , it's called a unique quest item.
Unique quest items really don't weigh anything. Your inventory suggests they do, but actually their weight is 0. You can verify that. Next time before you pick up a unique quest item, open your inventory and note your total weight. Then pick the quest item up. You will see that your total weight has remained the same.

When you are told to find a certain number of certain items, such as 10 Dwemer Cogs , those are called generic quest items.
Generic quest items do weigh all right, but they can also be sold and dropped.

So the game bug that makes the inventory lie to you that unique quest items weigh is merely confusing you. It's not actually screwing you with dead weight. You can rest assured that when you aren't allowed to drop an item, it isn't adding to your weight either.



[originally published 2017-02-08]

The Leather weight error strangely overlooked

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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]