Revamp Artifacts a bit?

[Sam Guivene]

I've noticed that, with many new changes, artifacts have been neglected a bit as older content. This should be revamped a bit in a few creative ways.

Examples for large artifacts includepod artifacts, segway artifacts (Its not a boulder, its a rock!), possibly even borg artifacts
The borg artifact- upon activation the artifact functions similar to a borg body, with hidden options for module selection (hello shit security module, artist module (has auto refilling spraypaint and stuff), chemistry module, alium module (acid spit and dangerous weapons), and maybe a few other weird, pointless, or otherwise interesting modules, possibly bizarre (and maybe dangerous law sets that would make it a bad and risky idea to activate these), and other weird features, such as bizarre/random health, tolerance, and battery mechanisms (for example, one may have a crazy heat tolerance but if it goes near freezing it becomes frozen, or it explodes under heat).

Now, for handheld artifacts we should have a few new things, such as boomerang artifacts, magical staff artifacts (when activated allow casting of some random spell ability in a direction), prosthetic artifacts (replaces a limb, possibly has some sort of benefit or drawback, possibly dangerous), clothing artifacts (provides random bonuses/drawbacks, possibly dangerous), living artifacts (suddenly artifact spiders!), organ artifacts (note: Brain artifacts could be used as one of those terrible idea items that can draw a ghost into it and possible function as intended, or alternatively may result in a lich like AI taking over and rampaging in whats likely a monkey, corpse, or weak borg body). Also, one could go exotic and get heart artifacts that give them increased heart fortitude, fail miserably, invoke bizarre statuses such as paranoia or other oddities, or get flat out rejected. In addition, it should be possible to get tool artifacts that are small handheld artifacts that function identical to one or more tools on a toolbelt, leading to confusion.

While were at it, a few novel and possibly dangerous/valuable plant ideas would be interesting also, especially if one of these alien plants, if mixed with blood/someones brain, acted as a secondary method of cloning that created a person who was normal in every way except possibly bleeding green blood and maybe moving slower in darkness.

[BaneOfGiygas]

Artifact research can be rather dull, and in most servers, all you tend to get for your starting artifacts are a forcefield artifact, an artifact containing space eggs, maybe a void artifact if you're lucky...once the artifacts have been discovered, no one tends to use them because they're dull.

These are alien frickin' artifacts. Alien artifacts should not be dull, and especially not in the vast majority of cases. I heartily encourage the addition of new artifact types, and would also like to suggest that the starting artifacts have a bit more variety to them. I'm getting really sick of always finding forcefield artifacts and space bees. It was cool the first few times, but as someone who always makes a beeline (hurr) to artlab, only to find these types of artifacts, it makes the whole line of work rather disappointing.

[atomic1fire]

I don't really know all of the artifacts out there, but I feel like a few should do cool stuff for the sake of doing cool stuff.

For instance, maybe some genetics things could be triggered by artifacts, and at admins discretion some artifacts could trigger totally new mutations. Like an artifact that causes you to speak gibberish, or maybe an extra set of limbs. Some of the weirder mutations e.g horns could be moved to artifact only.

artifact triggered diseases. Maybe some of the new pathology diseases could be accidentally released when an artifact is activated. It would give scientist a pretty good reason to wear biohoods when dealing with artifacts because you don't know what they have in them.

Living artifacts. Artifacts that come alive and can either be benign or hostile. "Hey that's not an artifact, that's an alien you woke up."

[Sundance]

Artifacts need more functions thats for sure.

But the actual artlab side of things needs to be looked at a little deeper, the code expanded somewhat.
Currently artlab is:
-->Fiddle with artifact
-->Find out what activates artifact
-->Pocket artifact or throw it in the pile
-->(optional) Fiddle with it on the artlab stuff to see what values it spits out.

What would be far superior form of artlab and would add a much deeper form of "study" is that if artifacts had ON/OFF functionality and strengths
So lets take an example :

You find an large artifact. You study it and find it reacts to both heat and electricity. If you did some further study instead of throwing a welder/baton at it, you'd find it can activated via electric impulse and reacts to stimuli between XXX-->YYY kelvin. Upon activation you find it is a forcefield artifact.
By tweaking the heat values you can increase/decrease the range of the forcefield within the artlab. By hitting it with a bolt of electricity you can turn it on/off.

This changes artlab entirely. Firstly you could potentially mix up what activates it or what changes the value of the strength which means if you did not do study you could of potentially set a fuze on an artbomb to 1 second. This is a good thing. Secondly it means someone who has studied the artifacts know how to work them. Touch activation would still be a thing, but would you know how to access its full potential?
Thirdly this allows artifacts to have secondary functions. That artifact thing you thought was a gun? Nope, you had the setting wrong, it's actually a portal.
Fourthly and mostly importantly, artifacts would be tinkered and studied alot more.

[Sam Guivene]

Artifacts need more functions thats for sure.

But the actual artlab side of things needs to be looked at a little deeper, the code expanded somewhat.
Currently artlab is:
-->Fiddle with artifact
-->Find out what activates artifact
-->Pocket artifact or throw it in the pile
-->(optional) Fiddle with it on the artlab stuff to see what values it spits out.

What would be far superior form of artlab and would add a much deeper form of "study" is that if artifacts had ON/OFF functionality and strengths
So lets take an example :

You find an large artifact. You study it and find it reacts to both heat and electricity. If you did some further study instead of throwing a welder/baton at it, you'd find it can activated via electric impulse and reacts to stimuli between XXX-->YYY kelvin. Upon activation you find it is a forcefield artifact.
By tweaking the heat values you can increase/decrease the range of the forcefield within the artlab. By hitting it with a bolt of electricity you can turn it on/off.

This changes artlab entirely. Firstly you could potentially mix up what activates it or what changes the value of the strength which means if you did not do study you could of potentially set a fuze on an artbomb to 1 second. This is a good thing. Secondly it means someone who has studied the artifacts know how to work them. Touch activation would still be a thing, but would you know how to access its full potential?
Thirdly this allows artifacts to have secondary functions. That artifact thing you thought was a gun? Nope, you had the setting wrong, it's actually a portal.
Fourthly and mostly importantly, artifacts would be tinkered and studied alot more.

Being able to alter, stabilize, destabilize, or partially modify artifacts would be quite interesting, especially if it allowed you to have some way to deconstruct artifacts to get random alien salvage components, which, in theory, could have properties of there own and/or be used to create a different artifact.

[atomic1fire]

Being able to build artifacts after you've broken them apart could be cool, like a gun that creates forcefields wherever you shoot it.

[Cogwerks]

Artifact salvaging / deconstruction could tie in VERY well with workbench stuff.

[Sam Guivene]

Artifact salvaging / deconstruction could tie in VERY well with workbench stuff.

And it would also give more incentive to go out and explore the salvage z level, as well as to actually identify which artifacts are and are not worth keeping.

[Frank_Stein]

What if you could build some kind of artifact detector, and use other artifacts to tune it properly?

[Sam Guivene]

What if you could build some kind of artifact detector, and use other artifacts to tune it properly?

Artifacts already spawn quite consistantly in specific areas on the salvage Z level, the big dampener on collecting them is the hostile drones, which, with a small monetary investment in a laser coil array, ballistics array, and/or a hillariously overkill rocketpod array, could be utilized to get many artifacts

[Iatots]

What if you could build some kind of artifact detector, and use other artifacts to tune it properly?

Artifacts already spawn quite consistantly in specific areas on the salvage Z level, the big dampener on collecting them is the hostile drones, which, with a small monetary investment in a laser coil array, ballistics array, and/or a hillariously overkill rocketpod array, could be utilized to get many artifacts

I don't see how you need anything more than a normal pod/miniputt with phasers.
pod->faint signal->3 artifacts
pod->faint signal-> asteroid above doc, 2 artifacts
pod->diner->beeship->martians 2-3 artifacts(and those inside, but that requires lasers), to the right of the ship is an extra one, no drones in the way
pod->diner->mining outpost->south to salvage ship like 3 artifacts

and that sets you up for the usual 40 minutes round.
Not a single shot fired.

[Sundance]

An idea, i'll throw it out:

What if Large artifacts were made up of Small artifacts? And the addition of small artifacts to large artifacts changed how the acted? And small artifacts could be given to electronics to be put in some form of manufactured product via the workbench?

You'd have to add an Artlab Manufacturer. Drag/place a large/small artifact into the manufacturer to break down large artifacts into smaller ones, or add small artifacts to large ones to change their effects.

An example would be a battery artifact slapped onto a large one would amplify its effects, while a gun may change the artifact's functions to deadly. Basically more open ended artifacts.

[Klayboxx]

It also wouldn't hurt to add even more sprite variety. It was great fun when the community came together to make artifact sprites, it couldn't hurt to have more.

[Klayboxx]

it couldn't/wouldn't hurt