How to carry more in Dragon's Dogma 2 and solve Max Enc problem

More than in many other RPGs, inventory management and carry weight in Dragon's Dogma 2 is very important. Striking the right balance is hard; you need to walk around the wilderness plucking ingredients and gathering materials, but you’ll soon notice that plundering ore and picking apart ruins will weigh heavily on your back.

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Things get even worse when you’re playing a class that relies on heavy armour or weaponry to dish out and soak up damage – my Mystic Spearhand’s battle gear alone takes up a vast section of what she can carry. But there are a few ways and means of spreading the weight across your party and allowing your team to run like Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn over the hills and cliffs or Vermund and beyond – if you know what you’re doing.

Let’s break down how encumbrance in Dragon’s Dogma 2 works – and what you can do to make your long journeys a bit easier on the body.

What is Max Encumbrance in Dragon’s Dogma 2?

Max Encumbrance is a fancy word for ‘carry weight’ – the number of items you can comfortably have in your pack at any one time without it slowing you down, affecting the speed at which you move, or how much stamina you use when you run (and how quickly it comes back). The stat is broken up into five sections: Very Light, Light, Average, Heavy, and Very Heavy.

If you go over ‘Very Heavy’ and carry more than your character is capable of (a stat visible by hitting Pause and selecting ‘Status’ from the menu), you will be unable to run, and your stamina will drain at an accelerated rate. It makes combat harder, and exploration an absolute nightmare. Basically, you don’t want that to happen.

How to increase Max Encumbrance and where to find Golden Trove Beetles

There are three main ways you can increase your total carry weight in the game.

Level up

The first, as you’d expect, is to level up – not every single level will provide a bonus to your Max Encumbrance, but you’ll notice that it will go up at certain intervals.

Golden Trove Beetles

If you need a quicker – and permanent! – boost to the total weight you can load on your main character or your main pawn, you need to start looking for Golden Trove Beetles – perhaps one of the most essential finds out in the wilderness across the whole game.

These little bugs are fairly common, and can be found nesting on trees, clifffaces, stone ruins, and other places of interest throughout Vermund and Bhattal. Typically, you’ll come across these creatures when you head off the beaten path – following a road and climbing rocky outcrops, heading into forests, or exploring encampments away from major settlements tends to lead you to these creatures.

Either your main character or your pawn can consume the beetles to add a total 0.15kgs to your total carry weight, but – in the early game, especially – I would recommend you snarf all these bugs yourself: you’re going to pick up more stuff than your pawn (including quest items and rewards), and being able to carry more overall will require fewer trips to the inventory menu.

Make a bigger character

Similarly to the first Dragon’s Dogma, your character's size actually matters. The Character Creator gives you the option to adjust your height to your liking, and bigger characters – you guessed it – can carry more weight. If carrying capacity is important to you, making a larger, heavier character is a wise choice – though just be aware that this will come at a disadvantage in other areas, since lighter characters regenerate stamina at a faster rate and typically have lesser stamina usage overall. If you intend to play as a more physical class, making a beefier character is the way to go.

Tips to help manage pack weight in Dragon’s Dogma 2

Even if you eat a whole colony of Golden Trove Beetles, you’re still going to get weighed down by the spoils of your adventure – it’s the nature of the game. But there are a few things you can do to ease the burden, and (as you’d expect in a game so pawn-coded), it usually comes down to your handy, loyal pawns.

There are two main pawn Specializations you’re going to want to look out for: Hawker and Logisitician.

Hawker

One way to lighten your load is to teach your main pawn the Hawker Specialization, or hire a guest pawn with that skill.

The pawn will sell all non-essential items when you make camp or rest. This means any creature materials, foraged goods, meat, or gems in your backpack will be sold in one block. You need to be careful when you accept this offer from a pawn, since it will bulk sell the items and if you’re keeping hold of anything – say, a slate-coloured horn to upgrade your weapons or armour – the pawn will automatically sell that off. You’ve been warned.

You can earn a scroll that teaches this skill to your pawn – we’ll update this guide when we know more.

Logistician

Another way to lighten your load is to teach your main pawn the Logistician Specialization, or hire a guest pawn with that skill.

While your pawn won't have the ability to throw away anything of their own volition (with the exception of rotten perishables), this Specialization allows them to re-arrange the packs of the entire party at will, shuffling things around so that everyone's encumbrance is kept roughly even. It's a helpful solution in the medium-term if your Arisen is inclined to pick up and hoard everything that isn't nailed down.

You can gain the scroll for Logistician midway through the main story quest The Caged Magistrate, although we'll avoid saying more here to keep spoilers to a minimum.

General Tips

There are a a few other things you can do to help aid pack management, too:

• Make sure to give your pawn your camping kit - these are heavy and you can establish a camp even if it's located in a pawn's inventory.
• Make use of the storage facility at inns - vendors will draw straight from this item bank when you're upgrading items, so dump all your monster materials and ore in an inn as soon as you can.
• Don't be precious about items. Easy-to-locate items like goblin horns and beast-skin are ten-a-penny and can be harvested on a whim. If you're bogged down, sell up. Rarer items (like materials from griffons or minotaurs, for instance) should be held on to, though.

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Eager to get to grips with more of Dragon's Dogma 2's often-opaque systems? See our page explaining the Dragon's Dogma 2 save system for more important information.