How to Carry More in Fallout 4 – Guide

Weigh Up Your Strength

First and foremost: your Strength stat determines how much you can carry (as well as how hard you can hit). If you’re not going for a melee build Strength isn’t a key factor, so weigh up what kind of character you like playing vs. how much of the wasteland you want to hoard. High Strength characters can carry much more around with them, and even with relatively low Strength you can get access to perks like Strong Back, but will have to initially sacrifice those points from other stats.

Remember that you can always chuck points into new areas when you level up, but that also means you miss out on a new Perk until the next time you ding a level. Sometimes it’s best to accept your limitations and realise that your sneaky charismatic rifleman just wasn’t meant to carry loads of stuff.

Armour Counts

We already mentioned in our crafting guide that pocketed armour is useful, but if you’re playing low Strength you should also consider lighter build modifications or leather, cloth, and plastic pieces. A pocketed metal arm, for example, will increase your carry threshold by five, but can take up seven on its own. If you’re a more stealthy or lighter build character try and stick with the Railroad long enough that they give you their unique perk, a mod which drastically increases the defence of light armours without adding loads of weight.

Don’t Hoard Weapons

This is pretty obvious, but you don’t need to carry around one of everything, even if it is quite tempting. Ask yourself when you last used every weapon in your inventory and if it wasn’t the last time you played the game then either sell it, scrap it, or store it. If you’ve specialised in pistols then you don’t need to carry a bunch of automatic weapons or melee knuckles, no matter how special and unique they are. Likewise you don’t need to pick up every weapon an enemy drops to sell it on; they’re usually low level and not worth much for either parts or caps.

Use Your Power Armour

If you’re going out specifically on a crafting run, or you’re expecting some big loot from a mission, think about taking your power armour along for the ride. It increases your carry capacity by a lot in one go, and without using addictive chems to do it, plus you get the extra protection afforded by it at the same time. Fusion cores run down after a while, but they’re also pretty easy to find, so don’t feel too precious about suiting up.

Dump Your Mods

Remember how you can remove mods from guns as you upgrade? Once they’ve been taken off, and if you don’t reuse them, they stay in your inventory. The trouble is that they stack up to weighing quite a bit, but they’re also useful and you might not want to drop them in the wilderness or sell them all. One solution is to build a little box in your main settlement that you can dump them all in. That way you always know where they are if you want to indulge in some more crafting or sell them for a quick buck, but you don’t need to haul that extra poundage everywhere you go.

Keep an Eye on Your Aid

It may not immediately register, but all the chems have a weight too, and you can be carrying a surprising amount of weight in them alone. Stimpaks, luckily, don’t have any weight, but RadAway, Psycho, Jet, and all the rest add up, so think about what you’re carrying and why you carry it. You can even build a chems box specifically for them, similar to boxing all your mods up.

This applies to other things in the Aid category like food and drink. Nuka Cola bottles in particular can be taking up quite a lot of room, and you’ll pick up a bunch of food that you either can’t cook or will only give you minimal benefits once you eat it. Cook up what you can and sell on what you don’t need.

Use Your Companion

Your companion can carry a bunch of junk for you, but they can also carry your biggest weapons as well. Provided you’re staying with one companion for a while you can stick them with absurdly heavy things like the Fat Man mini-nuke launcher and the mini gun. That way they’re ready to pick up again when you’re heading into a big fight, but you don’t have to sacrifice valuable salvage the rest of the time. This also applies if you’ve scavenged up a bunch of unique or valuable kit that you don’t want to leave behind. They do have their own limits to what they can carry, but Paladin Danse in particular makes a good pack horse.

You can also invest in the Lone Wanderer Perk, which is Charisma based and grants you 50 extra carry space when you’re on your own. For some reason this Perk still counts if you have Dogmeat with you, so you can load him up with extra inventory as well.