A Skyrim player radically solved the overload problem – he transports extra items in a cart inside an enemy's corpse

Overloaded inventory is one of the oldest and most hated mechanics in role-playing games. Sooner or later every player ends up standing over a pile of loot, agonizing over what to drop. But sometimes, instead of dropping anything, a player starts stuffing items into corpses and hauling them down the imperial road on a cart.

That is exactly what one player did in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, posting a short clip on Reddit. The hero inventory was stuffed to the brim, so the player transferred the extra loot into a dead enemy inventory instead. Then he loaded the body onto one of those carts that have been sitting along Skyrim roads for years and pushed the whole rig toward town.

Plenty of people, even after fifteen years with the game, had no idea those carts could actually move. The cherry on top was a Thalmor patrol crossing paths with him – the elves calmly walk right past a guy hauling a corpse and drop their usual "this doesn't concern you, citizen." It plays out like both sides silently agreed not to ask each other any questions. One commenter pointed out that the Thalmor should probably approve of seeing a dead Nord getting carted off anyway.

One longtime player summed up the reaction like this:

Part of my brain says "that's just silly". Part of my brain says "hey, when you have thousands of hours in the game, find something you haven't done before". The second part wins.

The trick works because every NPC in Skyrim has its own separate inventory, and the weight of a physical object being dragged around never gets counted against the hero carry capacity. The community, though, has built up a whole arsenal of ways to dodge overload over the years, and some of them are a lot more elegant than a cart:

• Stuff the loot into a body, reanimate it with a necromancy spell, then fast travel. The spell wears off, leaving a pile of ash next to the hero packed with loot

• Hop on a horse. Fast travel works while mounted even when overloaded

• Summon Arvak, the ghostly horse from the Dawnguard expansion, whose skull can be found in the Soul Cairn

• Move items into a dead fox. Carrying a dead wolf or human forces a slow walk, but a fox corpse lets the hero run

One detail in this whole saga deserves its own mention – the horse Frost, obtainable in Riften. His fate has basically become a running joke at this point. Frost supposedly always dies at some random moment hours before his owner even notices he is gone, and one player says a frost dragon straight up one-shot him.

The cart topic also came up thanks to YouTuber Any Austin, who tried hauling crops from Battle-Born Farm to Whiterun in one of his Skyrim living-in-the-world videos. The whole thing was so painful to watch that people wanted to try it themselves. There is some irony in the fact that the game opens with the hero riding in a cart, yet never actually gives the player one of their own.

Dragons, daedra, and the ancient gods of Skyrim have all been picked apart for years, and somehow a roadside cart still manages to surprise people.