Fallout 4 player found an 80-pound barbell bar and thought it was the heaviest item in the game – then someone showed them a 160-pound dumbbell

In the wasteland, the value of an item rarely matches its weight. The skeleton of pre-war civilization gets stripped for screws, glue, and copper wire, and the most unwieldy trophy around turns out to be not power armor or a nuclear warhead, but plain gym equipment.

In Fallout 4 from Bethesda Game Studios, released back in 2015, that rule works literally. One player showed off a find from a supply cache bunker in the Glowing Sea: a curl bar weighing 80 pounds. The player declared it the heaviest junk in the game and learned almost immediately that the claim was premature. Fallout 4 has a 160-pound dumbbell, twice as heavy as the bar, and it is stashed in three places. Among them are the Atom Cats Garage and Vault 118 from the Far Harbor DLC.

The funniest part is that the game makes no allowances for realism. A survivor's backpack treats a gym the same as anywhere else, and a dumbbell weighs exactly what it says on the label. One player admitted as much:

1st time I found weights in fo4 I couldn't understand why I hit my carry limit. then I looked at the item weight of the weight and much to my surprise, it in fact weighed what said it weighed. big duh moment.

Hauling such a load is worth it. Broken down for parts, gym equipment yields plenty of lead, which is needed to craft ammo. As a result, the downtown Boston gym, the Atom Cats Garage, and the gym in the General Atomics Galleria have long served as lead mines for players early in a run. Hopes for the Junk Jet fell flat, though. Its damage is fixed, so a 160-pound dumbbell hits an enemy exactly as hard as a teddy bear or a pencil.

A whole other level of challenge begins in Survival mode, where being overencumbered not only slows the hero down but also damages health, and fast travel is disabled. Without a leveled-up Strong Back perk, high Endurance, and gear that boosts carry weight, dragging dumbbells across the wasteland becomes an expensive hobby. Pairing it with the Moving Target perk helps too, since it saves action points while sprinting. Survival fans also turned out to consider the weight limit one of the best parts of the mode, since every trip becomes a negotiation with yourself over what is really worth carrying home.

The wasteland may have taken civilization, but it left the laws of physics for dumbbells fully intact.