Does anyone know what these are ‘for’. I’ve found two so far and I’m curious. I set one off to test it but I’m not much wiser.
I think you just found a artifact. Try activating it and see what kind of weird anomaly you’ll unleash!
Wait, the SCPs/Altered Items are actually artifacts? I thought they were just flavor, to give a SCP/Control vibe to the labs. Huh, I’ll have to try it next time…
Well they do have slight elements of artifactness about them 
. Perhaps being in the labs has made then absorb interstellar multidimensional weirdness via osmosis. Or maybe the creepy lab scientists had a sense of humour “Hello? Planet Oxcetionglubsvart? It’s Earth on the line, would you like some more letters?”.
Anyway the first phone had 4 charges the second one 2. I activated one and there was a sort of small explosion centered on me and not much else that I could see.
I was really just curious as to their purpose. Like those cyro pods. Those things bug the heck out of me; surely they should do something cool?!
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I haven’t seen any of the new artifacts yet, I’m still pretty salty about the change because at the time I very inconveniently had a really sweet artifact dagger that gave me clairvoyance in exchange for giving me a -2 strength debuff. Playing around with that was so busted and fun, but broke and disappeared from the game once I went to a new version.
What has happened to artifacts? Have they been removed? When?
They were replaced with the relict system, which is about the same as the artifacts (from a player perspective), but changed quite a bit behind the scene.
Those in older saves can disappear if they are loaded into a newer version because of the change, so yes.
The system was reworked over a few different pull requests if I remember right, but I’ll say around August 2020?
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Thank you Valase. Informative and on point as always 
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You didn’t really miss much. Artifacts like those are super duper rare and only really obtainable from raiding special otherworldly locations like strange temples or finales at the bottom of a mine. I got mine at the bottom of a mine after fighting a amigara horror, which is the most dangerous but most rewarding. There are different finales to the mines so beware!
In any case the old artifacts/relics were randomly generated but could come with a few effects, the best of which are clairvoyance and complete invisibility. Ideally they’d come on daggers or something portable like a ring, but other times they’d come packed with a pair of boots or a cloak. The old artifacts always had a drawback, however. A passive good effect, a passive bad, an active good and an active bad. But to be honest, if it was clairvoyance or invisibility that was it was almost always worth it, especially if it was portable like a ring or dagger, since you can equip and unequip it as needed.
I didn’t really care if they were useless; I like collecting strange things. Spiral stones, carved skulls, relics and other things added to the strangeness of the world. Funny artifacts that occasionally rattled were just as interesting to me. And every now and then (about twice), I found something that was vaguely useful.
Yeah my guy Rob Keys had a huge collection, mostly identified, and all gone now sadly.