Encumbrance

From Wormhole Sci-Fi MUD Homepage

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" - Ancient Bajoran proverb.

When you're looting corpses and collecting goodies, keep your limits in mind! There are four constraints:

• 'Wear slots' - head, body, arms, legs, wielded, held, used as a light, mounted upon, etc.
• Maximum weight you can carry
• Number of items allowed on-hand (at the 'top level' of your inventory)
• 100 item playerfile inventory limit

You can only wear one item in each 'wear slot' at a time. Choose wisely! Note that worn (or held) items do not count towards maximum weight, because their mass is distributed around your body. Wearing or grabbing a container means it doesn't count against your weight limit.

Only the items in your inventory count towards maximum weight. These are the things you are dead-lifting, and your strength determines the limitation. Some players who have chosen a warrior type class and a particularly brawny race can laugh at weight limits (at level 110) performing such feats as lifting a car.

The number of items you can have on-hand, ready for instant use, is determined by your level. At the earliest levels, this is quite tightly constrained, although the limit increases quite rapidly. To work around the constraint, you will need to use containers such as a bag, box or rucksack to store extra items.

Finally, you can have a total of 100 items in your inventory, if you can stand the weight. In fact, you can carry more... but only the first hundred items will be stored by the game. There is a warning to this effect when you type SAVE. If you choose to carry 110 items, there's no easy way to be sure which ten items will disappear! So don't do it.

Another risk when going around really loaded up with stuff is that you won't be able to manipulate items properly. For example, you set up a trigger or alias that says "REMOVE BACKPACK;GET REMOTE BACKPACK;ACTIVATE REMOTE;WEAR BACKPACK"... this could leave you in a world of pain if you don't have enough space in your 'top-level' inventory. Likewise "GET ALL CORPSE;JUNK CORPSE" can be upsetting if you didn't have enough free weight to carry the items you were expecting to get. (Let's hope it wasn't something rare, because you just junked it...)

Some (very few) players have houses, offering another way to store items. Only the house owner (and invited guests) can enter. A house will store thirty items, indefinitely. The immortals don't like houses much because the presence of a rare item in a house can stop it repopping elsewhere in the game, so no other player can get the item. To get a house, do the Wormhole staff a MAJOR favour, such as something that increases the playerbase in a big way.