Weight
In NetHack, weight is a measure of an object's heaviness. Carrying too much weight will increase your encumbrance, rendering you burdened, stressed or possibly worse depending on the size of your load - fighting while significantly encumbered is not advised, as excessive weight lowers you speed.
List of item weights
The following table below lists the weights of a few common items and a couple of monsters from lightest to heaviest, with all weights given in arbitrary units of measurement, or aum. Monsters have no specific weight while alive (they are instead classified by size), but their corpses do.
Item | Weight (aum) |
---|---|
100 gold pieces | 1 |
gem | 1 |
ring | 3 |
scroll | 5 |
wand | 7 |
luckstone | 10 |
tripe ration | 10 |
bugle | 10 |
mirror | 13 |
flail | 15 |
empty bag | 15 |
amulet | 20 |
potion | 20 |
food ration | 20 |
unicorn horn | 20 |
mace | 30 |
dragon scale mail | 40 |
long sword | 40 |
spellbook | 50 |
fauchard | 60 |
pick-axe | 100 |
plate mail | 450 |
iron ball | 480 |
loadstone | 500 |
human | 1450 |
dragon | 4500 |
boulder | 6000 |
Special rules
If you are polymorphed into a giant, boulders in your inventory have no weight.
Using a noncursed bag of holding reduces the weight of its contents - a cursed one will make the items twice as heavy. An uncursed bag of holding effectively reduces the weight of its contents by 1⁄2, and a blessed one does so by 3⁄4.
Strategy
In a few cases, weight testing can be a way to identify objects, especially after price identification.