Weight management in Fallout 76 / How to manage you Inventory and Stash

By Denis Marasan ☆ 29/Dec/2018

Tired of being overencumbered? Have no idea of how to reduce your weight in Fallout 76? Here's a guide on how to manage your Inventory and Stash weight, starting from easy and obvious things for beginners and then moving to complex solutions for expert post-apocalypse survivors.

The idea of weight management is in having a character that carries and stores all the stuff he needs for playing the game and getting rid of useless stuff. Unfortunately, weight management isn’t just a couple of easy solutions that will solve the problem just like that. The problem is kind of complex, though it's easy to solve if following these simple steps.

First things first

Let’s start with obvious things.

The more Strength you have the more stuff you can carry. Invest into Strength when leveling up.
Scrap all junk you find on Workbenches. Raw materials weight much less than junk items.
Scrap all weapons and armor you find on Workbenches. Any weapon or armor you’re not planning to use right away (or on the next level) should be scrapped for the sake of carrying weight reduction, new mods, and raw materials.
In Fallout 76 you should use and carry up to 3 weapon items: melee, long-range and close-range guns. Take some light melee weapon if you're not planning to use it often to save weight, like Combat Knife. Or carry only one gun if you're playing with a melee build.
Some food, e.g. Grilled Radstag, increases your carrying capacity for a while. Kill more Radstag!
Wearing Power Armor boosts your strength up to 11 points, so it’s particularly useful for new players. Find a Power Armor at the early stages of game, remove all high-level Power Armor parts from it and wear the Power Armor Chassis to boost your strength.
After you start using Power Armor there's no need in conventional armor, don't carry it. You may put spare conventional armor pieces in your Stash just in case.
You should get the Excavator Power Armor after you reach level 25; coz wearing the full suite of Excavator Power Armor gives you a bonus of 100 pounds to carrying capacity.

Such armor mods as Pocketed and Deep Pocketed increase your carrying capacity. And Ultra-Light Build mod decreases the armor weight. Though a Deep Pocketed mod is obviously better in terms of carrying capacity, an Ultra-Light Build mod boosts AP and stealth (coz the stealth formula takes armor weight into account). There’s a chance you will learn those mods when scrapping armor or you can buy Plans from vendors. Though there's no sense in using modded conventional armor coz you will probably wear a Power Armor suite.
Select Perk Cards that use to reduce the weight of your stuff, e.g. Pack Rat (reduces the weight of junk), Travelling Pharmacy (reduces the weight of chems), Thru-Hiker (reduces the weight of food and drink), etc. You may also opt for Strong Back (gain +10 to carrying weight for each level of the perk).

Fundamentals of weight loss trading

The idea of weight management is greatly based on taking rid of stuff you don't need. We had already considered a problem of surplus weapons and armor that you should scrap on Workbenches as soon as possible. But what about other stuff? E.g. do you really think you need those several thousand units of steel you have? Perhaps not. Which means that you've to get rid of those items, decreasing their amount to sensible values. Selling surplus junk, chems and food is a great way to get rid of stuff you don't really need and raise caps.

Another reason to trade junk, chems, and food is that when you use Pack Rat, Travelling Pharmacy and Thru-Hiker perk cards, those items are rather lightweight and you can accumulate and sell even more of these items. This is handy.

Here are some tips:

Sell raw materials. Not all raw materials are equally accessible. E.g. screws and springs are obviously rarer than wood and steel. Which means you will always have surplus raw materials. Don't pile 'em up! You can make bulk materials at any Tinker's Workbench and sell bulked materials to vendors.
Sell more chems. Don't pile up chems either! Even with level 3 Travelling Pharmacy perk card 100 Stimpacks weigh 10 pounds. Ask yourself, do you really that much Stimpacks? The same applies to every chem you've got. Just leave a couple of each just in case and sell the rest.
Sell more food. You don't need much food and drink, coz you can always find food in Fallout 76. Always cook food, coz thus you increase its value.
Never sell weapons and armor, unless you run out of raw materials, chems, and food to sell. Though you may sell useless Legendary items coz they are unscrappable.

Dark matter aka hidden mass in Fallout 76

Though the hidden mass term originates from cosmology, it may constitute a problem of galactic scale even in Fallout 76. Now after we've got rid of useless stuff we'd found, it's reasonable to search for useless stuff we missed.

WEAPONS: get rid of explosives. Use or sell to vendors.
WEAPONS and ARMOR: you can't scrap Legendary items on Workbenches, thus they are not shown when you scrap weapons and armor. High-level players should occasionally check for useless Legendary stuff they may have forgotten about.
AID: sort items by value (the tip for doing this is in the lower part of the screen) and check for Disease Cure, coz it costs zero caps and it's heavy. You really need just a couple of those magic potions, drop surplus items, they are worthless. When selling items to vendor sell heavy stuff (let us say, heavier than 0.1 pound) first, and cheap stuff second. If something costs only 1 cap, it's probably worthless.
NOTES: sort items by weight. All Plans and Recipes should be learned (select a Plan/Recipe and press the Learn button). If a Plan/Recipe can't be learned, this means you'd already learned it. Get rid of that weighty useless note.
MISC: sort items by weight. Get rid of those useless Bobby Pins, Burned Books (btw, you can sell them to vendors for 1 cap each), Ore, etc. I personally recommend leaving some Gold Ore coz its rare. You may also leave some Black Titanium and Coal, though smelting ore consumes too much Acid, Black titanium is dropped from Mole Miners and the application of Coal in game is rather limited.
AMMO: get rid of Missiles and Mini Nukes (if you don't use Launchers). Get rid of surplus Fusion Cores, you don't need 20 Fusion Cores to power your armor and you can always find Fusion Cores while playing. Get rid of AMMO you don't use. Make ammo out of Gunpowder, coz Gunpowder and raw materials are heavier than ammo, so by making ammo you effectively reduce weight. Store surplus Gunpowder in your Stash.

Fundamentals of storing items in the Stash box

Don't use your Stash box as a dump. Coz it's not.

Don't store weapons and armor you're not going to use in the nearest future. All those items should be scrapped as soon as possible. Don't store chems or food in your Stash if you've got Travelling Pharmacy and Thru-Hiker perk cards equipped. The perk cards you have don't affect your Stash in any way, so your junk, chems, and food will be 10 times heavier than in your inventory.

Speaking of junk, don't store easily accessible raw materials like Wood, Steel, Ceramics, etc. On the other hand storing excess Adhesive, Screws, Springs, etc. is a good idea, coz those items are rare and you can lose them in the case of your untimely decease (you lose all your junk when you die, though you may try to pick it up after the respawn).

And for god's sake, don't store junk items. Scrap them first.

Things to store in your Stash box:

Weapons and armor you’re going to use when leveling up. Meaning that if this happens today or tomorrow, you may store those items. Otherwise, scrap them. Never store explosives in your Stash, use them or sell as appropriate.
Legendary weapons and armor you want to trade with other players. Otherwise, sell those items to vendors.
Some useful chems like Disease Cure / Addictol and water. For just in case.
Rare raw materials for the sake of safety.
Speaking of ammo, all you need is Gunpowder, some Fusion Cores for just in case situations and endgame ammo (EM, Shells, .308, .45, 5.56, some others).
Mods you may use in the future. Just don’t forget they weigh 1 pound each.
You may hold bulked materials you’d prepared for sale at Railway stations, coz you can always take them from your Stash at any station. This way you will not lose your junk in the case you get killed.

That’s basically it. Scrap and sell all other useless stuff you have in your Stash box.

Selected video guides on weight management:

The only complex guide on weight management I've found on YouTube is this, enjoy!