Base, Worn and Consumed

Every item in your gear has a gear type: Base, Worn or Consumed. It is a single segmented button on the item editor, and the most consequential field on the screen. It decides which totals an item lands in, and those totals are how the app judges your load. See Gear Items for where to set it and Pack Analytics for where the numbers appear.

Available on every tier.

The Three Types

Type	What it means
Base	Gear stored in your pack that comes home the same weight it left at
Worn	Clothing and footwear you have on, plus what is in your hands
Consumed	Food, water and fuel, used up as you go

The test for Consumed is not "is it perishable", it is does it get lighter as you walk. The test for Worn is not "could I wear it", it is is it clothing or footwear you have on, or something in your hands. Kit carried on your body without being worn is still Base.

Base: Examples

Tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, stove body, the empty gas canister, cook pot, spork, water filter, headtorch, first aid kit, repair kit, spare socks, puffy jacket in the lid, power bank, the pack itself.

The pack catches people out. The empty pack is Base, not a container that sits outside the count. It is often the third-heaviest thing you own.

Worn: Examples

Boots or trail shoes, socks, trousers or shorts, base layer, sun hat, sunglasses, watch, underwear, and trekking poles.

Consumed: Examples

Breakfasts, dinners, snacks, coffee, the litre in your bottle, the 2 litres in your bladder, the gas inside the canister, meths, sunscreen, toothpaste, and the fuel you will burn on night one.

Two habits that pay off:

A gas canister is two items, not one. The "230 g" on the label is the gas alone. The steel around it, about 130 g, never gets lighter, so it is Base. Full, the canister weighs about 380 g leaving the trailhead and about 130 g coming home.
Water is the heaviest Consumed item you own. A litre is 1 kg. A dry-section carry of 4 litres outweighs most people's tent. The bottle is Base, the water is Consumed.

Base weight counts your empty canister and your empty bottle and none of the 3 kg you will burn and drink, which is why carried is the figure to plan against.

The Awkward Ones

These are where hikers argue, and where the same item is classed three different ways in three different packing lists.

Item	Back in Pack says	Why
Trekking poles	Worn	In use they are in your hands, not in the pack. Your arms carry them, and they return some of that load to the ground on every plant. Strapped to the pack while you scramble, they are Base for that hour, but classing them Worn matches how you walk
Camera	Base	It is gear, not clothing. On a shoulder strap or in the lid, it is weight you have to haul, so it belongs in the carried figure either way
Water bottles	Base empty, with the water itself as Consumed	Otherwise your carried weight never drops as you drink
Gas canister	Base shell, with the gas as Consumed	Same split as a bottle: only the gas burns off
Phone	Base	Same reasoning as the camera. A pocket is not a garment, and moving kit into one should not flatter your base weight
Rain jacket	Base	It spends most of a trip stowed. Move it to Worn only if you are planning around a week of Scottish rain
Ice axe	Base on the approach, Worn on the ground it was brought for	Pick the state the trip is mostly in
Sit pad	Base	Even when it doubles as back padding
Sunscreen and toothpaste	Consumed	They get lighter. Small, but the principle holds

There is no universally correct answer here. The convention matters more than the choice: be consistent, so you can compare two of your own packs.

The Totals That Matter

The app derives four figures from the three types. Two of them are worth reading.

Figure	Formula
Base weight	Base alone
Consumed	Consumed alone
Carried, shown as Total: Pack-weight	Base + Consumed
Skin-out, shown as Total: Skin-out	Base + Worn + Consumed

Base weight is the number the internet competes over, and it is the least useful one on the trail. It is a gear-buying metric. It tells you what your kit list looks like on the day you set off with no food and no water, a day that does not exist.

Carried weight is what is on your back. It is what your shoulders, hips and knees are under. It is the figure the app puts in the CARRIED hero card, and the one the pack-to-body-weight ratio runs against. It also changes through a trip: heaviest the morning after resupply, lightest the evening before.

Skin-out weight is everything you haul up the mountain, boots and poles included. It is the honest total, and the only one that cannot be gamed.

A Worked Example

A three-day summer trip, weights rounded:

Type	Items	Weight
Base	Pack, tent, bag, mat, stove, empty canister, pot, filter, torch, first aid, spare socks, puffy, phone	6.0 kg
Worn	Trail shoes, socks, trousers, base layer, sun hat, watch, poles	2.4 kg
Consumed	3 days of food at 700 g, 1.5 L water, 100 g of gas	3.7 kg

Base weight: 6.0 kg
Carried: 9.7 kg
Skin-out: 12.1 kg

Move the puffy jacket to Worn and base weight reads 5.5 kg, carried reads 9.2 kg, and skin-out still reads 12.1 kg. The hill does not notice.

Why Base Weight Misleads

Base weight fails in two separate ways, and they are worth telling apart.

It moves when nothing else does. The puffy jacket above is the whole problem in one line: base weight fell 500 g, skin-out did not move a gram, and the jacket never left the house. Nothing got easier. Anything you could plausibly wear can be walked across that line the same way.

It leaves out the two heaviest variables. Worn kit and water both sit outside base weight, and both are heavier than the savings people chase. A hiker quoting 4 kg may be walking in 1.2 kg boots, holding 500 g of poles and carrying 5 litres into a dry section, and be 5 kg heavier on the hill than someone quoting 6 kg.

Shifting items from Base to Worn to make the number look better is flattering yourself for the internet. The only person fooled is you. Every gram you leave the trailhead with, worn, held or stowed, is a gram your legs and lungs move uphill all day. It shows up in how hard the day feels, how fast you fade on the last climb, and how much you need to eat to keep going. Under-record it and you under-plan your food, which is the one mistake that ends trips.

If you plan trips in the app, accuracy stops being a matter of pride. Analysis takes the carried weight of the linked pack as an input, alongside your stride and base speed, and returns estimated hiking time and calories for the section. Classify 2 kg of water as Worn, or leave the consumables off the list, and it plans the leg as though you were 2 kg lighter: the time comes back short and the calorie figure comes back low. You then carry less food than the section needs.

Two numbers, two jobs. Compare with skin-out, the one total immune to reclassification. Plan with carried, the figure Analysis runs on.

Just watch what you compare skin-out against. Water is the biggest of those variables and the one you have least say over: a desert crossing or a dry stage can put more water on your back than the rest of your pack combined, and 6 litres is not a packing failure, it is the route. Skin-out is honest about what you are lifting on the day. It is not a score.

Getting It Right in the App

Set the gear type once, in Gear Items. It travels with the item into every pack.
Enter water and gas as their own Consumed items, separate from the bottle and the canister.
Include your worn clothing. Boots and socks are the biggest chunk of Worn weight most people carry and the most commonly left off a list: 1.5 kg or more of skin-out weight.
Watch Carried against your body weight. The ratio bands in Pack Analytics run off the carried figure, not base weight.
Compare skin-out when you compare two packs, and only across similar conditions. It is the one total immune to reclassification, but a wet, cold or waterless route will raise it whatever you do.

Tip: When in doubt, Worn means clothing, footwear and trekking poles. Everything else is Base, wherever it is carried.