Encumbrance

Know you’re overloaded before the roundtime tells you — the level, the color, and the game’s own explanation of it, parked on screen.

What it’s for

Encumbrance is the stat you notice by its consequences. You loot a suit of plate, your swings get slower, and you spend a command and a screenful of text working out why. Meanwhile the game has been publishing your encumbrance level the whole time.

This window parks that reading on screen: a bar that fills as you load up, colored by how bad it has got, with the level name written across it and the game’s own description underneath. It changes the moment you pick something up, so “should I sell this before the next room?” becomes a glance instead of a check.

It is one of the few GemStone-flavored windows that works in both games — DragonRealms characters get it too.

Set it up

Common setups

A carry-weight corner next to what you’re carrying

Encumbrance is only actionable next to the thing causing it, so put it where you already look when you’re deciding what to drop.

1. Add Encumbrance from the catalog’s Character group and inventory from the same group.
2. Send both to the same zone — the Right Bar works well — with encumbrance directly above the inventory list.
3. Right-click the encumbrance window ▸ Encumbrance ▸ untick Help text. Once you know what “Moderate” means, the sentence explaining it is spent space, and the window shrinks to the bar alone.

You’ll see: a single colored bar above your carried list, shifting from green through orange as you loot, with the exact list of what did it directly underneath.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ The dedicated widget and a plain bar bound to encumlevel are both real, and they are not the same thing. The game publishes one encumlevel reading and everything that wants it gets it, so you can run both at once. Choose by what you want on screen:

• This widget — the level name on the fill, color bands that change as you load up, and the game’s description line. The most information, in a 4-row window.
• A progress bar with Bar id encumlevel — one flat-colored fill, no bands, no description, in a window as small as you like. Right for a header strip where everything else is a bar too.
• A bar inside Mini Vitals — desktop GUI only, where Encumbrance is one of the selectable bars, so it rides alongside health and mana in a single window.

⚠️ The color bands differ between frontends, and only the terminal lets you set them. The terminal uses four bands — 0–20, 21–50, 51–80, 81–100 — with Light, Moderate, Heavy and Critical colors you choose. The desktop GUI uses three fixed bands — 0–33, 34–66, 67 and up — in green, orange and red, and reads none of the four color fields. Setting them changes your terminal and leaves the GUI alone.

⚠️ Each frontend offers one toggle the other doesn’t. The GUI has Level bar and Help text; the terminal has Show Label (the description) and no way to hide the bar. A layout with show_bar = false renders bar-less in the GUI and with a bar in the terminal.

The two frontends word the bar differently. The GUI always prefixes it — Encumbrance: Light — while the terminal centers the bare level name on the fill. Content alignment is a terminal setting; the GUI ignores it here.

An empty window means the game hasn’t sent a reading yet. The terminal says so out loud with (No encumbrance data). It fills in on the next update.

This widget works in both games. Unlike its neighbours in the Character group, it carries no game gate, so it appears in the catalog and the .addwindow picker for DragonRealms characters as well as GemStone IV ones.

The window is capped at 4 rows and floors at 3, so growing it is a matter of width rather than height. With Help text off, 3 rows is the whole window.

See also

• Progress Bars — the plain encumlevel bar, and every other feed
• Mini Vitals — encumbrance as one bar in a shared strip (desktop GUI)
• Inventory — what you’re carrying, which is what moved this number
• Containers — a window per bag, for finding the heavy thing
• Experience (GemStone IV) — the other resident dialog with its own widget
• Creating Layouts — placing and saving these windows

[[windows]]
name = "encum"
widget_type = "encum"
title = "Encumbrance"
row = 0
col = 0
rows = 4
cols = 25
show_border = true
align = "left"
show_label = true
show_bar = true