having trouble with money/water/weight

[Tom Trustworthy]

Can anybody explain to me how I should be playing the game as far as money/water/weight goes?

I've gone through a ton of characters so far and finally I am on one that hasn't died right away. I keep finding loot and selling it which makes me have more water which I need but it weights too much so what do i do?

Should I be buying stuff to carry water, filling them up and leaving them on the floor in some town I frequent? That just breaks me out of the game really.

[glass zebra]

You can buy things that are lightweight and worth a lot and carry those around instead. Water is essentially pennies and nobody carries around giant bags of pennies.

If you Ego is not so high that buying random valuable things is a good option, you can buy metal nuggets/gems, which like water have a static value. Copper nuggets should be available from time to time on the first Dromad Trader already.

[Excellion]

Water can be considered some form of baseline currency, but it's not particularly efficient in terms of the weight-to-value ratio. You naturally want to keep enough on you not to die of dehydration but anything in excess of that limit should preferably be swapped out for items with a higher value.

The best items for this purpose are stable-value trade goods such as copper nuggets, copper bars and gems. You can recognise these items as having a yellow (instead of blue) price tag in the trading window. What makes these good is that they have a stable value across all traders, so you don't have to worry about trading items at a loss. If you can find one, a jeweller NPC is ideal for this as they sell high-value, low weight gems.

It also helps to keep valuable items that are weightless (such as tonics) on you until you actually need to use them to make a trade. As these items weigh nothing it's pretty much "Cash that doesn't take capacity".

Finally, consider what's valuable enough to pick up and lug around. And always consider if a piece of equipment offers enough benefits to warrant its weight cost. A Fullerite plate mail offers very decent protection, but it's base weight of 160 tends to make it undesirable to use without mods.

[Tom Trustworthy]

Ok yeah thats what ive been doing is buying the trade goods that are yellow. I'll keep doing that.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Excellion:

It also helps to keep valuable items that are weightless (such as tonics) on you until you actually need to use them to make a trade. As these items weigh nothing it's pretty much "Cash that doesn't take capacity".

There are also various low weight items that are pretty decent to keep for trading. In early game that is mostly daggers, but as of tier ~3 a lot of melee weapons have pretty decent trade values for their weight.

[Detective Costeau]

One of my common procedures for managing weight is to just keep a stash of stuff near where one of my recoilers will take me- usually Joppa early game.

As far as I can tell you can just leave a huge pile of stuff on the floor and nothing happens to it.

You can pick up a few chests/baskets and such and put them down in the area to help organize it, if you want.

[Pixel Peeper]

Water is financially near-worthless. It's basically pennies. A waterskin full of water is a sack full of pennies, and you don't want to be carrying those around or leaving a bunch of them in a pile somewhere.

The only thing you really need to be concerned about is the value-per-weight of item. For example, if something is worth 100 and weighs 25 (4 per pound), it's not as good as something that is worth 50 and weighs 10 (5 per pound).

Although, you lose some value every time you trade (a lot of value if your Ego is low), so you might want to prioritize trade goods with static values, like nuggets and gems.

[Rubinstein]

The most important thing you need to keep in mind is always keep enough water for the current journey, more so of course for estimated longer trips. Because otherwise your survival would depend on the pure luck to find a traveling trader or hermit somewhere in a random place. Otherwise your game will be over, as the game deals quite strictly with dehydration.

That said, my current favorite tool is a camel bladder, filled up with 32 drams of fresh water, equipped and sealed Not sure if the latter is necessary but certainly can't hurt.

"When worn, liquid in this item doesn't count toward your encumbrance"