Nightingale: How to upgrade your carrying capacity

Nightingale Guide

If you’ve been diligently following our Nightingale Beginner’s guide, chances are you’ve found yourself over-encumbered a few times. And that’s frustrating, so Into Indie Games is here to help you upgrade your carrying capacity in Nightingale, so you can lug about a few more rocks, sticks and hunks of meat before having to break stuff down into Essence.

What are the carrying capacity rules?

Like most survival games, there’s a limit to what you carry. To begin with, that’s a paltry allowance of 50kg of items spread across 75 slots.

If you pick up enough items that you tip over that limit by 1kg, you will become over-encumbered. At first, you might be able to live with this. In the early stages of carrying too much, you are unable to use the dodge button or jump.

But beyond that, you still move at a normal speed, so putting up with it isn’t too bad. Carry too much more than your capacity, though, and your movement will slow to a tiresome crawl.

Upgrading your carrying capacity in Nightingale

To carry more items around, you will need to upgrade your pack. Doing so isn’t overly difficult, but it requires some leg work to bring everything together.

The first upgrade for your carrying capacity in Nightingale is the Simple Pack. To make one, you will need two Leather and Six Plant Fibre while using a Simple Sewing Bench for the crafting process. Sounds straightforward, right? Well, there are a few steps before you get there.

Firstly, you will need to craft some Leather using a Simple Tanning Station, which requires six Sticks and 10 Plant Fibre to build, so make that first. Then you will need four Hide in total since each Leather requires two.

And where do you find Hide? By killing animals, of course. So head out and take on some wolves. Once dealt with, use a knife on their body to snag some Hide. Rinse and repeat until you have four pieces.

Don’t forget to gather materials for a Simple Sewing Machine

While you’re out and about in the wilderness, take the time to collect 10 Wood Bundle, 21 Plant Fibre and one Bone. Why? Because six of those Plant Fibre will be used on your Simple Pack while the rest of the material is for the aforementioned Simple Sewing Machine.

As a quick refresher, Wood Bundles are obtained by chopping down trees and plant Fibre from hacking away at Plants, while you’ll likely pick up a Bone while skinning animals to gather Hide.

With everything in hand, travel back to your estate and head to your Simple Tanning Station. In the menu there, find the option to craft Leather using Hide. While that’s busy doing its thing, you might as well build your Simple Sewing Machine.

Once the Leather is ready, collect it at the Tanning Station by pressing ‘E’ and then go to your Simple Sewing Machine. Scroll down the list of options, select Simple Pack, autofill the materials and click Craft.

Step out in the wilderness with a whole new Pack

Congratulations, you’ve now doubled your starting carrying capacity. Sometimes Nightingale is a little janky, so if it doesn’t automatically equip the pack, tap ‘I’ to open your inventory and drag it over to the Back option in your Gear set-up.

And that’s everything you need to know about upgrading your carrying capacity in Nightingale. You will likely still find it a little underwhelming but it’s much better than what you start with. As you progress through the game, you will be able to craft bigger and better packs, but early on, this is your best option alongside having a companion to use as a pack mule.