More Dangerous Small Artifacts

[Dhaidburt]

Material transporter sounds neat, but I feel like just dumping chems on the floor isn't super interesting. Could maybe have varying effects based on originIe, eldritch ones steal your blood and dump it out, precursor ones can take reagents from things at range, martian ones replace reagents with synthflesh, etc etc (very rough ideas).

I really like the idea of taking reagents from things at range, since my brain instantly went "My sandwich now" as you just yoink food out of someones hand. To keep with the theme of a more dangerous artifact though, I feel like martian ones could reuse biomass (aka your organs or blood, synthflesh if its in your system) to create a piece of martian something. My mind might be focused alot on blood, but if there was a wizard variant it could crystalize the stuff, depleting you of blood but giving you wizard blood pills, or maybe just make gore golems.

Drone sounds good and relatively easy to implement; just needs a mob with some simple AI that shoots things. Alternately, just give artguns a 50-ish% chance to spawn as drones that shoot the gun at you, and make them turn into a standard gun when you kill the drone.

Egg sounds fun, but difficult to code (needs custom mob sprites/behavior for each origin. Could use existing mob types, but that's not super interesting).

I honestly thought these two up with a more simplistic idea in mind, especially the artgun drone, though some robotic abomination spewing out of a cryptic dark egg is way cooler than a space bear!

Also, why don't we got handheld grenades? They can do stuff like spewing out gltter-smoke or create a mob-portal. Give them an examine warning so people that toroughly analyse them dont get unexpectantly spaced/smoked.

Thinking on it, that may be because grenades are more 'one and done', and you generally don't know whats in a grenade unless it's labeled. I don't think it'd be a good idea for them to be reusable either, since if your foe dodges the blast, they can now counterattack unless the cooldown is sufficiently long.

There is no handle with care and in fact I know some players that go antagonist (including myself), tend to look for handheld artifact as soon as possible to maybe get that one lucky one, the worst is an instrument or beaker.

Exactly! Nobody touches the large artifacts blindly unless they're looking for consequences, whereas small artifacts are basically 'oh sick free toy' despite the fact that several human-made handheld items are quite dangerous when used improperly! All the types of artifacts should have that same semi-dangerous feeling, that's what makes exploring the unknown so enjoyable!