So I’m sure there’s those of you who have stumbled across a few bad Artifacts. So bad that they’re nuclear, literaly.
Radiation, Lighting, fire and straight up excrucuating pain. Is there a secret benifit to them? Nope. But alls fair in regards to the rare occasion you stumble upon a good artifact. So good, it’s god tier.
But the one problem this leaves us with’ is what do you do with the bad artifacts?
You could leave them where you found them, despite your troubles trying to find them in the first place. Have them around as a fancy paper weight to cluster up your inventory. Yet in the end there’s nothing to do with them, other than suffer their effects, you Masochists.
So I wanted to run ideas on this. Something to clear the clutter you’ll accumilate long enough into the game. Maybe to experiment on them, mad science. Trade them to other-worldly beings for other-worldly goods. Or just crush them and snort them, for a high that will most surely be deadly, and bad, very bad, really really BAD. DON’T DO ELDRICH DRUGS KIDS.
Right now, they go in a bin in a closet in case I ever need to have a terrible time.
Otherwise, I’d imagine that some of the scientifically inclined factions would be interested in them. The Hub and the Exodii would both have the technical knowledge, and possibly the equipment to try and glean some insight off how they work. I wouldn’t expect the player to ever be able to do the same or get any real benefit out of them, just a lore friendly trading option for goods.
System to refine bad artifacts into something useful would be really appreciated. Now player just got punished most of the time for trying to get artifacts and to know their effects.
Even paying to scienceman to just reveal artifact’s effects would be nice, because i always think artifact can has some good effect which i can’t see on my status screen.
Yeah adsolutly. Considering some artifacts are a literal death sentance to the unprepared. Like this one I had that shot out lighting AND fire.
I would like to see some use of the equipment you find in the labs artifact room. Maybe to tell you the amount of resonance its giving off or vague suggestions of negative or positive traits.
It really depends on what artifacts are per lore.
If artifacts are basically magical rocks its one thing, you could wrap them in foil and get infinite battery or something.
If artifacts are complex alien-made things, that’s another thing. That means they have an internal state and they may wildly change their behavior if you interact with them. Perhaps you just need to find the button on an artifact that will turn it from a flame and lighting spewing cube into a self powered pressure cooker.
There are other games that have dealt with random generated artifacts for a long time, like ss13 and the like. Common themes include: analyzing artifacts by interacting with them in various ways - heating, shocking, hitting, freezing, shaking, sacrificing humans near them etc. Trading artifacts too complex to use away. Using useful artifacts as magical tools that solve problems too hard to solve for a single human in reasonable time. For example an artifact that disappears things could be used as a place to dump sewer and trash to since there’s no easy way to build and maintain sewage in your autismfort during an apocalypse, and while currently you use water only for drinking and cooking realistically you also wash hands and dishes and take showers and stuff and all that gotta go somewhere, if it ever gets implemented.
Analysing the artifacts would be an intresting rework, an seeing as how the artifacts are under going changes. Such as these new lab brand artifacts and new effects ingame now.
Still, I’d imagine regardless of future changes, Artifacts will intentionally generate as unusable sometimes. As part of that risk/reward factor.
Like my recent aquired artifact. Gives me 3/4 more health, which is awsome! Yet, I need to first ‘recover’ this newly expanded health cap to make any use of it. Only problem with this is its insane amount of resonance makes it impossible to spend any time to gain any of this new health. Since within tbe first half hour I start experiancing the negitive effects of teleglow. Which only gets worse the longer I keep it on me.
An honestly, as bad as that seams. Its brilliant. To be so close to attaining enough health to practicaly survive any threat I’d face. Yet, suffer horribly before I even gain a margin of that to actualy see any benifit from it. DIVINE. Comedy.
The Arcana mod has recipes that allow you to turn some artifacts into essence (an Arcana-specific resource used in many of that mod’s recipes, as well as fuel/ammo for certain Arcana-specific things).
Go full SCP and convert a prison into an artifact containment site. Document your collection. “Capture” npc’s and make them hang out with the collection in orange jumpsuits.
I Like to label em, Get a bag/box and Write what they do. And then yea just kinda sit on em. Some are kinda cool, not useful but cool. My teapot found in that lab really made teatime a party! Could even make tea with it too!
Collect em, name em, and start your own traveling museum!
An artifact is an item with an internal state machine that’s like a tree that you traverse by applying correct stimuli, though some stimuli produce effects without jumping between nodes. Each working trigger produces some effect, the deeper the stronger. Some effects are harmful (e.g. violent explosion when you play music near it), some are very useful (e.g. mass healing of everyone in vicinity), some are benign and useless (e.g. spawning a banana), some are weird (artifact becomes sentient and can talk to you and trigger some effects at will).
This is quite a good list of effects for an artifact to have. It would certainly give some interesting twists to their mechanics. Be it mundane, useful or harmful.
Heck, even the need to try new ‘stimulus’ to activate an artifact would certainly be interesting. As well more insane reactions with the right stimulus. Such as experiencing being electrocuted to activate being set on fire, healing, rain, quote or musical prompts to finally just random objects being summoned.
Could definitely deserve some Indepth consideration.