More Artifacts

[atomic1fire]

Artifact ideas

Tomes - handheld artifiacts with a more magical approach instead of just being guns, beakers, or batteries. They can only be read a limited number of times. Reading a tome grants the effect

Tome of Paranoia - Causes you to hallucinate for a period of time - Applies the same effects as the serious paranoia pathogen
Tome of Reversal - Similar to space madness - rotates your entire world, controls and sprites are effected
Tome of Energy - Causes you to shoot out arcs of electricity indiscriminately for a period of time. Standing on a wire will amplify the effect like power gloves
Tome of Honk - Spawns a number of friendly pet clown/cluwne spiders that will defend you if attacked within their line of sight
Tome of WOORGHHH - one of your arms is replaced with that of a space bear - also it spawn a hostile one armed space bear. Defend your prize!
Tome of Molly Mirrions - *banshee screaming*

Tome of Macguffin: A high value object of great value or power. Could bestow powers upon people, could just give them a huge wad of cash or minerals. Who knows.

[Embolism]

Honestly ArtLab would be a lot more interesting if the current distribution of artifacts is tweaked without needing to add new ones. There's too many artifacts, especially the big ones, that may be interesting but don't do anything useful for its discoverer.

Currently we have:

Watering Can - not bad, especially if it contains rare chemicals; but otherwise not particularly artifact-y.
Elemental Caster - great, although many of them have prohibitive cooldowns.
Force Wall Caster - very good.
Ranged Weapon - variable. Some are great, but just as many are worthless.
Teleporter - very good, though many seem to do terrible things to the caster like lethal radiation poisoning.
Power Cell - ridiculously common compared to the others. Only good thing about them is they don't need to be researched so they don't waste your time.
Activator - vanishingly rare.
Melee Weapon - like ranged weapons, very variable. A lot of them are worse than a toolbox.
Container - I like these, although they can only give owl bombs, bee larvae, light grenades or *groan* power cells. Of these only owl bombs and maybe light grenades are of particular interest.
Injector - one of the better large artifacts. Can occasionally inject hilarious things like vampire serum.
Turret - interesting but largely useless. Targets everything, takes forever to aim and ones I've found all have pathetic shot damage. If it were a lot stronger and doesn't target the activator then it would be useful.
Plant Grower - never really tried it since I'm not that into Botany, but seems uninteresting.
Music Maker - distressingly common. I rather like most of their music though.
Air Conditioner - aside from heaters searing everyone's lungs after a few minutes, largely pointless. Give it an on-off and make its effects a lot, and I mean a lot, faster, then it would be fun.
Mutator - the other interesting large artifact alongside the injector. Mutation's temporary but can be regained on touch.
Lamp - like the music maker, distressingly common and doesn't even give off that much light. At least make them give enough light for you to turn the lights down in ArtLab!
Healer - common but at least it's quite useful.
Healing Field Generator - rare. Pretty nice but as long as you're conscious the healer is adequate.
Harmer - never seems to do that much damage to matter. Minor annoyance. Give it a switch and make the effect a lot stronger, or give it secondary effects like intermittent paralysis or something.
Black Hole Bomb - uncommon. I guess it could be used for devious purposes.
Bomb - more straight-forward version of black hole bombs. Again maybe for traitoring? But if you're a scientist bombs are already easily within reach.
Force Wall Projector - rather niche. Not that great for defence as it covers a reasonable area and has a cooldown after it dissipates. Perhaps better for trapping people with you, or if you also have a teleporter handy.
Borger - kind of loses its charm after you've found it half a dozen times or so.
Recaller - impractical due to the uncertain timeframe. Trying to use it as a lifeline either sends you back prematurely or repositions your corpse, which I guess could be useful to ensure your body gets found? If it can be programmed or triggered in some way...
Imprisoner - would be nice if it protected you from environmental effects. Sadly it doesn't. It totally should.
Darkness Generator - actually find this better for defence than force wall projectors. Not bad.
Gravity Warper - pointless and annoying. If it can be turned on and off, and maybe if it's a bit stronger (enough to significantly impede movement), then it might see niche use.

If we can have less Power Cells, Music Makers and Lamps, and have more togglable +/- stronger effects, then ArtLab would be pretty sweet.

[Dr Zoidcrab]

I found a turret artifact that didn't immediately start shooting at me once. Didnt test it on other people cause I was a non-antag miner. I don't think i've ever seen an artifact seed, unless they're those strange seeds, which are mostly undewhelming.

Bulky
Augment: Installs a random limb based on the tech type. Also deals some brute damage.
Synth: Converts borgs or humans into synths.
Fabricator: Creates small artifacts/rare items/critters when fed raw materials
Cocoon: Prison artifact. Changes the user to a random mutant race when it spits them out (monkeys, lizards, martian etc). Can be used as a reverse-borger.
Teleporter: Activates and teleports the user to other existing teleporter artifacts. Fails if none exist.

Handheld
Recycler: Mechanics style deconstructor, can be used on existing deconstructible machinery and objects, Leaves behind the components (such as drives and network cards for computers)
Staff/Wand: Wizard/Martian/Eldritch/Precursor. Casts projectile spells/psychic pulses based on the tech. More emphasis on auxiliary effects than damage compared to gun artifacts. Also counts as a wizard staff.
Parasite: Martian/Eldritch. Attaches itself to the user's arm. Pretty robust as a weapon, but demands to be fed (like a certain removed traitor item) and starts devouring the host if not satisfied.
Tool: Advanced tools that increase construction/deconstruction speed
Surgical tool: Advanced surgical tools with a lower failure rate.
Grimoire: Gives the user a random combination of a spell, superpower and space madness as long as they hold it. May be haunted.

Tiny
Grenade: Grenade with random effects based on the tech type.

Critter
Robuddy: An inactive robot. Can be plugged into a robuddy port and have scripts uploaded to it. Module depends on tech type. For example the cyborg tech version could be one of those floating robots that shock you.

[NateTheSquid]

i have no ideas but the only time i've seen a turret artifact do anything more than shoot monkeys pretty well, very slowly, was when I (as an antag scientist) put it in the medbay lobby with the label 'healing' and it happened to do a decent amount of damage. from memory at some point i stood inside medbay and beat anyone who'd been hit to death and hid the corpse, just cause it was entertaining. someone finally figured it out and lived though

[MaRcuSTheDAWG]

Maybe have a style of artifact themed upon Syndicate technology?

Possibly unique artifacts such as a strangelet cannon, or some kind of plasma grenade?

[Rocket]

Critter pod - ancient cloning device, when activated starts to "clone" a random (depending on rarity) heavily mutated critter with different abilities, maybe it even becomes a pet for the person who activated.
Gas canister - when activated starts releasing a fixed amount of gas, the most common being oxygen. Rarer versions with CO2, Plasma, N2O.
Crazy mutator - depending on rarity will inject x amount of bad and good genes.

[Embolism]

Generally speaking, artifacts need to be more useful for the "owner". Handheld artifacts automatically do this but large artifacts are quite indiscriminate.

A way to fix this would be to make activating large artifacts reveal an on/off button, rather than having them turn on immediately. Could even make them only respond to the first person that touches them post activation. This would also apply to artifacts that automatically turn off after some time, so that they can always be reactivated by touch rather than having to use the original stimuli.

Also I seem to remember that some chemicals used to be usable in place of certain stimuli (radium for radiation, cryostylane for cold), but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I might be remember this wrong though, maybe it only ever worked for heat chemicals.

Oh and to reiterate: the pitcher and impact pad needs to be a lot more impactful.

[Frank_Stein]

Artifacts that trigger round events like the magnetic charges and rad storms

[Rocket]

Artifacts that trigger round events like the magnetic charges and rad storms

And even better, meteor storms.

[medsal15]

Artifacts that trigger round events like the magnetic charges and rad storms

And even better, meteor storms.

I hope these get long cooldowns for balance reasons.

[Rocket]

Artifacts that trigger round events like the magnetic charges and rad storms

And even better, meteor storms.

I hope these get long cooldowns for balance reasons.

One time thing like artifact black holes and bombs.

[atomic1fire]

Body Swapper: on first touch it does nothing, but when a different person touches it swaps bodies.

The process could probably either be temporary (You eventually go back to your old body), or require an extra two people to switch the bodies back to their originals.

[poland spring]

Alien Jukebox: Like the Noise artifact except it plays spooky tunes, and you can pick which one! It's all in Martian, though.

[poland spring]

Alien hashish/hash pipe: a tiny or handheld artifact that you can smoke herbs and crushed cigarettes out of. Tiny version is basically alien hash which is like smoking an artbeaker

[medsal15]

Alien computer: Just like a computer, but can't be disassembled, starts with random programs and has a different font. Just hope you don't get a font like Wingdings.