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.
NetHack in its normal mode almost never directly tells you the weight of an item, or even gives a name to its unit of weight. In wizard mode, however, your inventory displays the weight of each item in aum, short for "arbitrary unit of measurement".
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 an invariant 15 aum.
A glob of Pudding may list its weight in aum when buying at a store.
Strategy
In a few cases, weight testing can be a way to identify objects, especially after price identification.
