Weight

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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 12, and a blessed one does so by 34, 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.