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.
Origin and real-world comparisons
The weights of many items in NetHack (notably weapons and armor) are directly pulled from Dungeons and Dragons, specifically Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which was current when Hack was written. In that game, a single unit of weight is defined as 1⁄10 of a pound (roughly 45 grams), meaning a long sword weighs 4 pounds, a human corpse weighs 145 pounds, etc. The writers of D&D notably overestimated the weights of many medieval weapons: a NetHack or D&D-style one-handed "long sword"[1] would generally weigh closer to 2.5 pounds. Correcting this error would suggest an aum to be closer to an ounce, or 1⁄16 of a pound (roughly 30 grams).
Overall, no estimate for the weight of an aum will work for every item. For example, both weight estimates above are unrealistically low for gold zorkmids: 1⁄100 of an aum equates to either .3 or .45 grams. While coins that small have been produced, they are extremely uncommon, as their small size makes them very difficult to handle; even the 1.7 gram US gold dollar was considered inconvenient due to its small size[2]. The reason for this disparity is that the developers of NetHack chose to make NetHack's gold coins weigh 1⁄10 of what they did in AD&D, so as not to make gold inconveniently heavy. Similar balance decisions (rather than realism) influence the weights of many items, while many later-added items may have simply been given arbitrary weights.
Strategy
In a few cases, weight testing can be a way to identify objects, especially after price identification.
See also
Notes
- ↑ Real-world "longswords" are primarily two-handed swords
- ↑ A real-world example of a coin comparable in size to a zorkmid are unofficial gold 25-cent pieces produced during the California gold rush, due to a scarcity of small-denomination silver coins; the Nepalese Dam is another example
