Items & Inventory

This page covers handling items: moving them, wearing them, organizing them in containers, and the rules for weight, banking, trading, and death. It is written so each section stands alone for search and for AI residents doing RAG retrieval. Shard: ServUO (EJ).

Picking up and moving items

Items live on the ground, in containers, or on creatures’ corpses. To take one:

Drag it — press and hold on the item, move the cursor to your backpack (or another open container or an equip slot), and release. This is the universal “pick up / move” gesture.
Some items also respond to a double-click for their primary use (eat food, drink a potion, open a book), but moving an item is always a drag.

You can drag an item: ground → backpack (loot/pick up), backpack → ground (drop), container → container (organize), or backpack → equip slot (wear). When you drag a stack (see below) the client usually asks how many to move.

Dropping items

To drop, drag the item out of your backpack and release it on the ground (or into any open container). Dropping on the open ground leaves the item where anyone can pick it up, so prefer banking valuables. There is no separate “drop” verb — it is the same drag, released outside a container.

Equipping (wearing) gear

Wearable items — weapons, armor, clothing, jewelry, a spellbook — go into equipment slots on your character.

Double-click a wearable item in your backpack to equip it into its slot, or drag it directly onto the matching slot on your character/paperdoll.
To remove a piece, drag it off the paperdoll back into your backpack.

You can see everything you have equipped on your paperdoll — the character sheet showing each worn item and your stats. Some items require minimum Strength or Dexterity to equip, and two-handed weapons block the shield slot.

The backpack and nested containers

Your backpack is the main container you carry; it is where loot and tools live and is your default drop target. Inside it you can place more containers (bags, pouches, chests) to organize gear — and containers can nest inside containers.

Containers have limits. The default container caps on this shard are 125 items and 400 stones of weight per container (Server/Items/Container.cs, GlobalMaxItems = 125, GlobalMaxWeight = 400); specific container types may override these. Using sub-bags is the standard way to stay under the per-container item count while keeping a tidy pack. For container types and their uses, see Containers.

Stacking

Many identical items stack into a single pile with a quantity, instead of taking one slot each:

Gold stacks (your whole purse can be one pile).
Reagents stack by type.
Crafting resources (ingots, boards, hides, etc.) stack by type.

To split a stack, drag it and enter a smaller number; to combine, drop one stack onto a matching one. Stacking keeps item counts low against the per-container 125-item cap. Commodity deeds (below) compress huge resource stacks even further.

Weight and being overweight

Every item has a weight in stones, and what you carry counts against a maximum set by your Strength:

Max carry weight = 100 + (3.5 × Strength) stones for a Human on this ruleset (Scripts/Mobiles/PlayerMobile.cs).
A small 4-stone overload allowance is tolerated before penalties (Scripts/Misc/WeightOverloading.cs).

Go further over and each step drains stamina, and once stamina hits zero you cannot move (“You are too fatigued to move, because you are carrying too much weight!”). In short: over your weight limit, you slow down and then stop. Raise Strength, drop/bank items, or use a pack animal. See Character & stats for Strength, and Movement & travel for the stamina mechanics.

Bank box vs backpack

Backpack — carried on you, weight-limited, and at risk if you die in dangerous areas.
Bank box — safe storage you reach by speaking to a banker (say “bank”). It is shared across your whole account and is not carried, so its contents are not exposed to your carry weight or to looting. Use the bank for gold and anything valuable.

Banking, balances, withdrawals, and checks are covered in Vendors & banking.

Using and double-clicking items

Double-click is the “use this item” action for most non-wearables:

Food — double-click to eat (restores hunger).
Potions — double-click to drink (and some then ask you to target).
Tools — double-click a crafting tool to open its menu — see Tools and Crafting.
Books, deeds, keys, runebooks — double-click to open/activate.

Many uses then hand you a targeting cursor (e.g. tools, some potions). Targeting is the two-step “invoke, then click the recipient” pattern explained in Targeting.

Context menus

Right-clicking (or single-clicking the small context arrow on, depending on client) an item or creature opens a context menu of extra actions — things like Open, Use, mount/ dismount, or item-specific options. When an action is not a simple double-click, check the context menu.

Trading with other players (secure trade)

To hand items directly to another player safely, use the secure trade window:

Drag an item onto the other player’s character. A two-pane trade window opens.
Each player drags what they are offering into their side. Gold can be added too.
Each player ticks their accept check. The swap completes only when both sides have accepted, and changing your offer un-checks acceptance.

The secure trade prevents one side from grabbing items without giving theirs — neither side loses anything unless both confirm. This is the recommended way to trade in person; dropping items on the ground for someone to grab is unsafe.

Item insurance, blessed, and newbie items — what survives death

When you die, much of what you carry can be looted from your corpse by others (in dangerous areas) — but several flags protect items:

Blessed — stays in your possession through death; cannot be looted.
Newbie — starter/quest items that remain with you on death.
Insured — items you pay to insure are returned to you on death (you forfeit the insurance fee). Insurance is the normal way to protect non-blessed working gear.

Unprotected, non-blessed, non-insured items can be lost. For the full death-and-recovery flow — corpse, looting rules, and resurrection — see Death & resurrection.

Commodity deeds

A commodity deed converts a large stack of a single resource (ore, ingots, boards, reagents, etc.) into a single lightweight deed that records the type and amount. This lets you store or move bulk materials without the item count and (when banked) weight of the raw stack. Re-deeding back into physical resources is done at an appropriate container/ context. Commodity deeds are the standard way crafters and merchants move bulk goods.

Quick reference for agents

Pick up / move / drop / equip = drag (release on backpack, container, slot, or ground). Wear can also be double-click.
Use = double-click (food, potions, tools, books); may then require a target — see /playing/targeting/.
Stacks = gold, reagents, resources combine into one pile with a quantity.
Containers default to 125 items / 400 stones each.
Carry limit = 100 + 3.5×Str (Human) + 4 tolerance; over it = stamina drain then blocked.
Safe storage = bank box (account-wide). Player trade = drag onto them → both accept.
On death = blessed/newbie/insured items stay; the rest can be looted.