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Forget all the Daedric horrors wandering the wilds of Cyrodiil, because the biggest enemy you're going to face is Encumbrance in Oblivion Remastered. Like many RPGs, encumbrance denotes when your inventory capacity has been maxed out – limiting your movement speed and restricting other abilities. This is particularly annoying in the earliest hours of adventuring, where your desire to pick up everything in sight is hampered by your relatively meager carry weight in Oblivion Remastered.
Thankfully, there are a few ways to increase your carry weight in Oblivion Remastered and stave off encumbrance. Better still, it's possible to do this without messing around with unsanctioned mods or console codes (although they are certainly an option for those of you playing on PC). So keep on reading to find how you can get on top of your carry weight and avoid encumbrance warnings in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered.
Oblivion Remastered: What is Encumbrance and how to remove it
As I'm sure you know by now, Encumbrance represents the maximum weight that you can carry. You can find your Encumbrance status in your inventory menu, and there will also be an icon visible next to your vitals whilst you're carrying too many items.
When you are over-encumbered in Oblivion Remastered, you are unable to do the following: run, sprint, jump, dodge, power attack, shield bash, or fast travel.
To remove encumbrance and perform these actions again, you'll either need to learn how to drop items in Oblivion Remastered, work out where you can store items in Oblivion Remastered, or sell the items in question until you're under the carry weight limit – but remember, you'll need to find special merchants to sell stolen items in Oblivion. You can also find a horse, or utilize a few spells which I'll get into in the next section.
Oblivion Remastered: How to increase your carry weight
There are a few ways that you can increase your carry weight and maximum Encumbrance in Oblivion Remastered. I'm going to run you through these below:
- Increase your Strength attribute
Once you've figured out how to level up in Oblivion Remastered, you'll be faced with the challenge of investing your Virtue points into specific attributes. Strength is the only attribute that will permanently increase your carry weight, allowing you to carry more items before reaching dreaded Encumbrance.
- Fortify Strength
The Potion of Fortify Strength (or the relevant spell, learned through the Mages Guild) is an Apprentice-level Restoration item which will improve your Strength attribute by (at least) five for 90 seconds. You can purchase these potions from Orag gra-Bargol in Chorrol's Great Chapel of Stendarr or craft them yourself through Alchemy. If you're investing in enchantment as a playstyle, don't forget that you can imbue these effects on your armor at an Altar of Enchanting.
- Feather:
The Potion of Feather (or the relevant spells, learned through association of the Mages Guild) is an excellent item from the Alteration school of magic. This directly decreases your Encumbrance, increasing your total carrying capacity for a limited time. Different Feather spells can be stacked, with Ease Burden, Lighten Load, Pack Mule, and Beast of Burden all purchasable from Mages Guild merchants in the major cities.
- Encumbrance Console Command:
Listen, I don't recommend this, but you can use one of these Oblivion Remastered console commands to artificially give yourself extra carry weight. This will disable all achievements in your playthrough, at least until you reload a save. The Encumbrance console command in Oblivion Remastered is: 'player.forceav encumbrance -X' – just remember to replace the X with a specific value.
If you aren't interested in learning those spells at the Mages Guild, why not learn how to join the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion Remastered instead. It won't solve your Encumbrance woes, but it is a lot of fun!
