If Lydia equips a pair of boots that are enchanted to give a +40 carry weight, does she receive the bonus?
Does the follower gain carry weight bonuses
the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim
Related Solutions
Short Answer
In terms of what they can carry, it's anything that's not a quest item. If you can drop it, store it, or barter it, you can give it to your follower.
In terms of how much they can carry, after some testing, I've determined that follower capacity is incredibly buggy: every time you switch followers, the weight capacity will go down.
So it starts out at 3001, and goes down from there. You can fix this by resetting your follower, either by the console (if on PC), or using the Wabbajack glitch (if on a console):
Long Answer
To test this, I tried testing with two followers: Lydia and Faendal.
Initial testing
I first took everything Lydia was carrying, which brought my carry weight up to 414. I then gave her stuff until the game refused to allow me to give her anything more, producing the error:
This item is too heavy to carry.
Once this occurred, everything on my side of the trade menu greyed out. My carry weight at this point was 180, which means Lydia maxed out at 234.
I then took everything Faendal was carrying, bringing my carry weight up to 491. Like I did with Lydia, I gave him stuff until I got the error message and my inventory grayed out.
He maxed out when my carry weight hit 207, which means his carry capacity was only 284.
Thinking this was kind of odd, I decided to try Lydia again, with my carry weight being 491 to start. Surprisingly, she maxed out when my carry weight hit 271, which means her carry weight was only 220 this time.
To ensure I covered all the bases, I cleared up my inventory so my carry weight was 414—as it was with Lydia the first time—and tested Faendal. He maxed out when I was at 144 carry weight, giving him a carry capacity of 270.
Testing a capacity scale factor
At this point, I had the idea that maybe the more stuff you have between you and your follower, the less they were willing to carry: that is, there's some negative scaling factor for follower capacity.
I decided to test Faendal's capacity, to see what that scaling factor was. To my surprise, I found it capped out at 269:
Total Weight | Faendal Capacity
---------------------------------
50 | 50
100 | 100
150 | 150
200 | 200
250 | 250
300 | 269
350 | 269
400 | 269
450 | 269
500 | 269
This contradicted my earlier findings.
Combined follower cap?
I'm then considered that there is capacity cap amongst all your followers, not just your current one.
If this is true, one of two hypotheses should be validated:
- Lydia should be able to hold as much, if not more, than 269 weight.
- Once Lydia is stripped of everything, Faendal should be able to hold more than 269 weight.
I tested the first hypothesis: having stripped Faendal of all his possessions, I traded with Lydia several times, increasing the total weight each time. She capped out at 213:
Total Weight | Lydia Capacity
------------------------------
50 | 50
100 | 100
150 | 150
200 | 200
250 | 213
300 | 213
350 | 213
400 | 213
450 | 213
500 | 213
So this hypothesis is incorrect.
That just leaves second hypothesis: if Lydia is stripped of everything, Faendal should be able to carry more than 269 weight.
Except that he didn't. He carried exactly 263 weight even after Lydia has been stripped.
What is this I don't even...
Random, or something else?
I thought maybe, just maybe, it's random. I decided to use the same set of items and same carry weight (289/300) and switch back and forth between Lydia and Faendal. This is what I found:
Round | Lydia Capacity | Faendal Capacity
-------------------------------------------
1 | 213 | 263
2 | 206 | 256
3 | 199 | 249
4 | 192 | 242
Well, that's odd: every time I switch, the follower capacity goes down by 7. Continuing on:
5 | 185 | 235
6 | 178 | 228
7 | 171 | 221
8 | 164 | 214
9 | 157 | 207
10 | 150 | 200
After 10 rounds, both Lydia and Faendal lost 63 weight capacity.
I got my programmer thinking cap on, and I wondered if it was a runtime issue: I decided to save the game, quit out, and reload.
No dice: Lydia and Faendal kept going down. Immediately after the save, it went down to 143 and 193 for Lydia and Faendal, respectively.
I then tried loading up an earlier save created before I did all these tests. Lydia shot back up to 234, and Feandal went back up to 284. These are the same as my original numbers.
One more round of follower trading, and both Lydia and Faendal went down to 227 and 277 capacity, as predicted.
Conclusion
Follower weight capacity is buggy as all get out. If you want to maximize your follower weight, do not switch between them.
Note 1: You can have your follower 'pick up' items without a weight capacity check, thus allowing your follower carry unlimited items.
Yes the bonus's stack,though during combat they do recharge just a little more slowly then when out of combat but with higher stats like your using you won't notice the slow down really. It's a very good way to have an almost limitless supply of magicka. the stacking works different for magicka regen as opposed to say weapons and such. here are a few links to other such stacking...
How does multiplying damage work in Skyrim? for damage multipliers
https://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/38363/15734 carry weight speech and such
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim_talk:Enchanting broad base
hope this helped
Best Answer
TL;DR: The answer is yes.
I could have had this tested within 10 minutes, were I not quite so particular in regards to the parameters of my test. The particularities cost me several fast travels, and a dragon encounter in Riften (my adopted home town - I could hardly ignore that). But, test this I did. In the end, it was an interesting 45 minutes.
And before any of you say I could have done something differently with the console, please remember I'm on a PS3.
This test could have been done with any follower. I had two in my Riften home: Iona, my housecarl, and Jordis, my wife. However, you specified Lydia in your question so I decided to go to Whiterun and get her.
To keep this test as clean as possible, I wanted to start us both with our inventories as empty as possible. This meant dropping everything I had, clothes included, into a chest at home.
The next step was trying to relieve Lydia of the same. Strangely, despite my level 100 Pickpocketing, this was a more difficult task than I had anticipated. The first time, she caught on to what I was doing, and darted out the nearest door to fast-travel back to Whiterun. When I got to Whiterun, I saw that she'd somehow procured her armor again and so I'd have to start over.
I took her back to my Riften home again, and this time started in the basement so that I'd have a chance to catch her before she got out the door if she chose to run. Still, she swatted away at my advances. Now I knew we needed some quality time outside for her to cool down before I could try again. So, I decided we'd take a walk about the Riften stables. That's when the dragon showed up.
I quickly ran into Riften, hoping he'd be content to stay outside. However, he was having none of that. He followed Lydia and I into the city, where he continued his rampage. Without my enchanted armor, I knew I didn't have enough power to defeat him head-on. Also, with Lydia only partially dressed, I didn't expect her to fare well in the fight either. So I dashed into my house, threw on my best Dragonscale Armor, and came out ready to fight.
The guards were already hard at work, but making little progress. Lydia was doing what she could from a distance, with that odd bow and arrow set that I can never seem to take away from her. (Sure, I can manage to pick off her armor, boots, gauntlets, and shield - but somehow the bow and arrows are off-limits.) I went in, hands aflame, and made short work of the beast myself.
After all was peaceful again, we went back inside and I dumped my inventory into the chest again. This time, perhaps not having much energy left to fight, Lydia seemed a bit more cooperative with my efforts to empty her inventory as well. I dropped all of her stuff into another chest, then retrieved her boots and one filled Grand Soul Gem I had in a cupboard.
Lydia looked on as I took these to the Enchanter, and loaded up the boots with a +37 Fortify Carry Weight. Then, we went to the master bedroom where I had my potions stored. As we came up the stairs, I saw my wife Jordis turn and walk away in disgust. Our housecarl, Iona, simply rolled her eyes and continued drinking her mead.
I threw Lydia's boots on the bed, so that I myself would start with zero effective weight on-hand. I'd chosen potions because they are small and uniform in weight, allowing for fairly accurate and granular measurement. Plus, I had an end table packed to the brim with naught but a crap-tonne (that's a metric crap-ton) of them.
In a flash, I had myself over-encumbered with 699 weight units of potions - a total of 1,398 little vials. I knew I'd hardly need all of these, but I figured it was the easiest way to start. I began with the largest batches first, and gave Lydia as much as she could carry:
I still had over 500 weight units of potions in my stock, but now I could move around a bit. Looking at Lydia's boots, I saw that they weighed 8 units. So, I took 16 of the Restore Health potions from her (at 0.5 units apiece) and handed her the boots. After she put the boots on, I chose a different potion to measure how much (if any) her carry capacity had increased. She was able to take a total of 74 Regenerate Health (+150% for 5 mins.) potions before becoming overloaded. That's 37 additional weight units, which was the exact amount of the bonus provided by the boots. She now had a total effective carry capacity of 232 units.
Of course, I couldn't let her go wandering across all of Skyrim in the buff as she was. So, once we were done with our little chemistry experiment, I graciously relived her of the potions and returned her equipment. I even allowed her to keep the newly-enchanted boots.
Iona let out a sigh of relief, while Jordis stormed off to bed. I suppose I'll have to get my rest in Whiterun tonight.