Encumbrance always sucks and I won’t hear any different. I don’t care about realism, I want my little loincloth man to be able to carry 99 washing machines in an invisible back pocket while sprinting up a mountain. I hate having to stop and sift through my inventory to junk all the things I don’t need. Encumbrance in videogames: just say no.

Flavour-of-the-moment Palworld is, despite its Pokémon with guns tagline, more of a survival game at heart, and boy are survival games just the sort to slap you with all sorts of nonsense about encumbrance. Palworld has an interface and systems pretty typical of the genre, with things like item-stacking to manage, inventory chests, personal inventory and, of course, encumbrance penalties. You may well want to build a glorious stone fortress, but you’re gonna have to schlep a lot of stone back to base to get started.

Well, Palworld player BeyondSmash has changed the game (first spotted by GamesRadar+). They noticed that, when fooling around with inventories, it is possible to place stacks of items in a suspended state. Items in this menu limbo remain accessible but are weightless, like you’re transporting everything in a little pocket dimension (which is how it should be). No encumbrance penalty, no problem carrying everything you need to where you need it in one go. 

The glitch is activated by opening a chest, dragging an item / stack out of it, and then closing the chest menu with the tab button. The item stays on-screen and linked to your character, but with no weight attached to it, as can be seen in the demonstration below.

How to transfer any weight resources without being encumbered from r/Palworld

There are limits, such as being unable to fast-travel (this sends the limbo items back to their original chest), and only moving one stack at a time (though a stack can contain 9,999 items). But PCG has just tested this with Palworld’s most recent patch, which lets you shuffle around while encumbered (you used to be rooted to the spot), and it still works.

As for the applications, of course the big one is just hoarding a bunch of resources where you want them with a bit less hassle. One of the main gripes Palworld players have is that, not unreasonably, they’d like to see the encumbrance mechanic removed within bases, just to make the planning and ferrying-around of resources less of a hassle. That seems a decent idea but, until that happens, life has once again found a way.

Elsewhere in Palworld, the game’s stonking sales success continues, while players have begun discovering hidden secrets that were probably too actionable even for Palworld. The game’s similarities to Pokémon are also a major theme, with the Pokémon Company keeping an eye on things, which has led to some amusing outcomes: such as this “legally distinct” mod thumbing its nose at Pokémon with characters such as yellow rat and fire fox. The bewildered developers behind it, meanwhile, are now desperately trying to keep up with a success none of them saw coming: Pocketpair’s founder says how the studio got here was “the antithesis of proper game development.”