There are random spawns, sometimes in crators, but also at the end of dungeons i’m pretty sure (i.e mines or temples). I found my first in a pile of Breathers. There was lots of lighting.[/quote]
Someone call for an Advanced Guide?
[spoiler=Mini-Guide: Artifacts In Brief]Artifacts can extremely rarely spawn on the surface, such as with Aggrons_shell’s Breather/Lighting (clarify: lit up, or electricity?) artifact. Those are the “Anomaly” micro-spawn. Generally the artifact has something to do with the anomaly’s effect, but I’ve seen that drift a bit in the later builds. These are called “natural” artifacts.
If you get (un?)lucky in a Mine or make it to the end of a Strange Temple, you can find gear-based artifacts. Theoretically they can be better than ordinary gear, along with the artifact powers. In practice, though, they tend to be a bit heavier/slower/otherwise worse than mundane gear. It took quite a bit of farming the Amigara Fault to find a Helmet that was more protective than the Army Helmet I was wearing. (And its equip-effects weren’t worth it.)
But don’t let that stop you–sometimes the special powers are worth schlepping a heavy-ass Sword around just to invoke it
every so often.
For the record: a natural artifact’s adjective should have some bearing on its effects, but that’s as unreliable as the anomaly-linkage. Gear-artifacts’ names are procedurally generated and need not have any relation to their effects.
[/spoiler]