Heft (OpenMW)

H E F T

The weight of your armor, made manifest in body and mind.

"Ask the Buoyant Armiger why he fights in glass, the Ordinator why he prays beneath gold,

and the wise woman why she wears the wind. Each will tell you the same:

the weight you carry is the life you chose."

Description

In Morrowind, your armor's weight class is almost cosmetic. Light, medium, and heavy differ in their armor rating and how much they encumber you, but the moment-to-moment feel of wearing them is identical — a man in full ebony swings his sword exactly as fast as a man in a padded shirt, and a mage in robes is mechanically no different from one in chainmail. The choice between weight classes comes down to a stat spreadsheet, not a playstyle.

Heft makes armor weight something you feel — across three currents: the speed of your swing, the guard against the blow, and the flow of your magicka. Light armor lets you attack faster; heavy armor slows you down but earns it by shrugging off incoming damage; medium holds the steady middle. And the lighter your burden, the more freely magicka returns to you — so going unarmored is no longer nothing, but its own path: the unburdened body and mind gain their own rewards, scaling off who your character actually is. The result is a genuine set of trades rather than a no-brainer: speed, protection, or the freedom of the unarmored, and everything in between.

Crucially, none of this is flat. Every effect scales two ways. It scales with how committed your loadout is to one weight class, so a pure build feels its weight fully while a mixed loadout gets a muted, blended version that sums smoothly across the pieces you wear. And it scales with your skill — a novice in heavy plate is clumsy and barely protected, while a master moves almost freely and shrugs off blows. Training makes the upsides stronger and the downsides gentler, so mastery means you've genuinely conquered your chosen path rather than merely tolerating it.

The whole thing emerges from one continuous system — your armor's weight composition across nine slots — with no class tiers, no set bonuses, and no cliffs. Every piece you swap shifts the feel smoothly. Balance comes from the elegance of the system rather than arbitrary caps, and the one balance-sensitive lever (damage reduction) stays clamped so even a master can't trivialize combat.

Highly customizable — please refer to the settings script menu. Every peak, the mastery softening rate, the regeneration rate and its caster scaling, and the synergy strengths are exposed, and you can tune the whole feel to your taste.

Installation

Extract the archive into a folder OpenMW reads as a data directory. Add the