Weight
In NetHack, weight is a measure of an item'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.
NetHack expresses item weight in aum, short for "arbitrary unit of measurement". Normally, the only case where the game explicitly tells you an item's weight is when you purchase a glob of pudding from a shop. In wizard mode, however, your inventory displays the weight of each carried item. Several variants allow the player to show the weights of objects in their inventory during regular (non-wizard mode) play.
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 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 |
lizard corpse | 10 |
bugle | 10 |
mirror | 13 |
flail | 15 |
empty bag | 15 |
amulet | 20 |
potion | 20 |
food ration | 20 |
lichen corpse | 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 corpse | 1450 |
dragon corpse | 4500 |
boulder | 6000 |
Special rules
If you are polymorphed into a giant, boulders in your inventory have no weight.
A bag of holding modifies the weight of its contents - an uncursed bag of holding effectively reduces the weight of its contents by 1⁄2, and a blessed one does so by 3⁄4, while a cursed one doubles the weight. The weight of the bag itself is always 15 aum.
Real world comparisons
By comparing the weights of objects in NetHack to their real world counterparts, it has been determined that one aum is roughly the equivalent of one avoirdupois ounce, or 28.349 grams.
Strategy
In a few cases, weight testing can be a way to identify objects, especially after price identification.