How to increase your inventory size in Dragon’s Dogma 2

How much you can carry in your inventory — your max encumbrance — determines how much stuff you can pick up in Dragon’s Dogma 2. And there’s a lot of stuff to pick up, thanks to a never-ending stream of monster parts and fruits and ores and healing items.

Frustratingly, your character’s carrying capacity isn’t great, and you’re quickly going to fill up your inventory and become overburdened, which decreases your movement speed and makes your stamina drain faster. This is a problem since your gear — your weapons and armor — eat up a lot of that encumbrance before you even pick anything up.

Our Dragon’s Dogma 2 guide will explain how to increase your inventory size, and additionally break down how the max encumbrance system works.

How to increase your inventory size in Dragon’s Dogma 2

We’ll go into more detail below, but to get the highest carrying capacity in Dragon’s Dogma 2, you’ll need to:

• Make the largest character you can in the character creator.
• Choose the Fighter vocation.
• Eat a lot of bugs — namely, Golden Trove Beetles.
• Equip a Ring of Accrual (or two).
• Unlock the Thew augment from the Fighter vocation.

Let’s break down why each of these increases your max encumbrance and, therefore, your inventory size.

Make yourself jacked in the character creator

Your character’s starting max encumbrance is actually determined during character creation. A character’s (the same math applies to both the Arisen and pawns) body weight determines carrying capacity. If you’re looking to max out your carrying capacity right away, make yourself the biggest character you can.

The character creator sliders that control things like height, muscles, and upper and lower body size are the biggest contributors here. Make your character tall (the slider maxes out at 215 cm) and generally big with the upper and lower body size sliders. Muscles don’t change your carrying capacity directly, but you can add a few kilograms to your body weight by maxing them out. There’s a little rounding involved in the math, so you’ve got some wiggle room for aesthetics if you want it.

Muscles don’t increase your max encumbrance on their own, but they do increase your body weight. According to our testing, race (whether you play as a human versus beastren), gender presentation, and age don’t seem to have any effect on your carrying capacity.

Body weight also determines how quickly your stamina recharges (higher body weight equals slower recharge), so it’s a bit of a tradeoff between carrying more and getting winded easier. Meanwhile, how close your inventory weight is to your max encumbrance affects how fast your stamina drains.

All told, you can get your starting max encumbrance up to about 33 kg. And then you can get a little more (or less) depending on your vocation.

Choose the Fighter vocation

Your vocation also contributes (a little) to your max encumbrance. Of the starting vocations, Fighters can carry the most, Rangers and Thieves come second, and Mages can carry the least. This only adds (or subtracts) a few kilograms, but that can be a big difference.

This actually changes your max encumbrance when you change vocations at any point. If you head to a Vocation Guild, even many hours in, and change vocations from Mage to Fighter, your max encumbrance will increase. If you switch from Fighter to Thief, it will decrease.

You can only switch vocations at a Vocation Guild or some inns. If you want to increase your max encumbrance without changing vocations, you’ll have to try something else, like…

Eat Golden Trove Beetles

As you explore the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2, you might spot (or your pawns might spot) oversized, glowing beetles — you’ll usually see them on tree trunks. These Golden Trove Beetles are a consumable item.

Image: Capcom via Polygon

If you choose one in your inventory and eat it, your max encumbrance will increase by 0.15 kg. That’s not much, but you’ll find dozens of the beetles as you progress, and that adds up.

Equip a Ring of Accrual (or two)

Image: Capcom via Polygon

You’ll get a bigger boost to your max encumbrance from a piece of equipment called a Ring of Accrual. Equipping one of these rings will increase your max encumbrance by a flat 5 kg. And you can equip one on both your right and left hands to get a 10 kg bump.

Rings of Accrual can be bought from some vendors — the traveling merchant in Melve has one, as does the armorer in Vernworth — for 6,500 gold. A much cheaper way to get one early is to complete the “Ornate Box” quest. That one only costs you 800 gold and some of your time.

Unlock and enable the Thew augment

Augments are vocation skills you’ll unlock as you gain ranks in each vocation. Unlike weapon skills, augments can be used with other vocations.

Image: Capcom via Polygon

The rank 6 Fighter augment, Thew, increases your max encumbrance. Once you unlock it in the Fighter vocation, you can apply it to your character regardless of which vocation you’re playing as.

For more Dragon’s Dogma 2 guides, check out our beginners guides to combat and the pawn system, or peruse our list of all vocations. We also have explainers on how to change time of day, how to change your appearance, and how to change vocations.