A guide to how artifacts work

Want to know how exactly artifacts are acquired in Beyond Earth: Rising Tide and how their reward is determined? I dug through the code to find out.

How artifacts are acquired

Old Earth Artifacts
Are acquired when you:

1. Collect a resource pod
2. Excavate a derelict settlement or derelict ocean settlement
3. Excavate a wrecked ocean colonial lander

Crashed satellites will never provide artifacts. You have a 20% chance to get an Old Earth artifact. Every time you don’t your chance of getting one goes up by 10%. Every time you get an Old Earth artifact your acquisition rate goes back down to 20%.

Alien Artifacts
Are acquired when you:

1. Pillage an alien nest
2. Excavate an alien skeleton or alien ocean skeleton

You have a 38% chance to get an Alien Artifact. Every time you don’t your chance of getting one goes up by 7%. Every time you get an Alien artifact your acquisition rate goes back down to 38%.

Progenitor Artifacts
Are acquired when you:

1. Excavate a progenitor ruin or progenitor ocean ruin
2. Excavate an ocean progenitor device

You have a 55% chance to get an Progenitor Artifact. Every time you don’t your chance of getting one goes up by 3%. Every time you get a Progenitor artifact your acquisition rate goes back down to 55%.

Maximum Artifacts
There are 24 artifacts in each category (old earth, alien, progenitor). Each artifact can only be given out once, you can not get artifacts other players have found. Once there are no more artifacts left in category you won’t get more artifacts from that category.

Preferred Reward
Each artifact has a “preferred reward”. If you get an artifact it will be drawn from a pool. Artifacts (of the specific category) will be put into the pool if they don’t share a preferred reward with an artifact you already have. If an artifact shares a preferred reward with one other artifact you already have then the chance it will be put into the pool is 50%. The chance is 33% if two, 25% if three and 20% if four.

If nothing is added to the pool you will not get an artifact and you do not get the +10%/+7%/+3% bonus to finding future artifacts.

How artifact rewards are determined

The three artifacts you combine will determine the pool of possible rewards. The actual reward will be drawn from that pool. Changing the order of the artifacts has no effect. Removing and then placing the same artifacts in will not change the reward. The pool will not contain any reward you’ve already earned. Multiple players can earn the same reward. There are 6 rewards for each category and 6 mixed rewards, totaling 24 possible rewards.

If you are breaking down three artifacts of the same category (Old Earth, Alien, Progenitor) the pool will be all the prefer rewards of those artifacts. If all of those rewards have already been acquired than the pool is all rewards for that category. If still no rewards are in the pool than the pool is all available rewards.

If you are breaking down three artifacts that do not all have the same category then the pool is the preferred rewards for those artifacts plus all the mixed rewards. In the unlikely event that these rewards have all been acquired the game will add all the rewards for the categories of the Artifacts. And if those are all taken, all rewards will be added to the pool.

Strategic Ramifications

Grabbing as many resource pods early is the best way to acquire Old Earth artifacts. It is much faster than doing excavations. Crashed satellite excavations will never provide an artifact.

When trying to get a specific reward you need an artifact with that as its preferred reward. Having other artifacts of the same category lets you form more unique combinations, each one providing at worst a 1-out-of-3 chance of giving you the reward you want. If trying to get a specific reward with a mixed set the odds are much lower because the 6 mixed rewards will clog the pool. Resulting in a 1-out-of-9 chance.

The Alien rewards are relatively weak compared to the extremely powerful Progenitor and Old Earth rewards. Some of the mixed rewards may be considered more useful than the Alien rewards.

Notable rewards
Old Earth

• Warp Spire: +50% yield from internal trade routes
• Drone Command: +2 tiles worked for free

Alien

• Sky Chitin: +50% Strength, +3 Range for Air Units
• Tidal Navigation: Naval Units gain +100% Defense against Ranged Attacks

Progenitor

• Machine Assisted Free Will: Technologies cost -30% less Science
• Quantum Politics: +100% Virtue speed
• Dimension Folding Complex: -50% unhealth from population in all cities

Mixed

• Slumber Slaughter Extract: +50% Worker improvement speed
• Soul Discerner Training: Covert Ops take -25% less time

Add 20% artifact chance to the Mixed notables. Its extremely good, you will gain far more artifacts after getting it as it seems to be a straight additive modifier effectively doubling the chance for OE.

Originally I thought the +20% artifact chance was good, but I've grown more skeptical. It takes 15 more attempts at finding an artifacts for the extra 20% to earn back the 3 artifacts spent getting it. And when trying to get a specific reward saving those 3 artifacts so you have more combinations to try to get your progenitor artifact reward or Old Earth reward seems more useful. Since every mixed pool has roughly a 1/9 chance of producing the preferred reward of a specific artifact within that set.

Thanks for the post!

The first reward I acquired was the +20% to find artifacts. I took it because I'm playing on a massive map and it was pretty early. After stocking up 3 more Old Earth artifacts, I stopped getting more, and couldn't figure out why...

Now that I read your post, I understand why! Make sure you spend them when you get to 3 in a given category, or you are wasting attempts at getting rewards!

Thank you for the post and the information has already help me understand more. I would like to ask if there are any artifacts when excavating either the Sunken Vehicle or Sunken Spacecraft?

Excavate an ocean sounding bell (aka alien structure)

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I am not sure what the Ocean Sounding Bell is? In my current game, my plant type is Frigid Terran and I see two types of Ancient Alien Structure, one is huge taking up 3 hexs and the other Ancient Alien Structure takes up only 1 hex, which is part of the Ice and Conquest Quest. I wonder if this is what you are referring to?

Ganraeln said:

After stocking up 3 more Old Earth artifacts, I stopped getting more, and couldn't figure out why...

Now that I read your post, I understand why! Make sure you spend them when you get to 3 in a given category, or you are wasting attempts at getting rewards!

Click to expand...

I think you stopped getting more because the pool of artifacts is finite. There are a total of 24 Old Earth artifacts, and the AIs are also taking artifacts out of this pool. On a massive map with more AIs active, you're looking at more pods being taken and hence the Old Earth artifacts will be exhausted much quicker than say a small map with less AI players.

You should save your artifacts until they combine to something you desire, up to a reasonable time, of course (because as explained above, the more turns you play into the game, the less artifacts will remain in the pool).

The first post makes it sound like every player has their own pool of artifacts, which is not the case - all Players share the pool of 24 Artifacts per Category.

The code doesn't exactly tell and there's a comment that seems to suggest the opposite, but if you actually give artifacts to all players via that function only a total of 24 per category will be given out, spread around all players.

gilbertlew said:

I am not sure what the Ocean Sounding Bell is? In my current game, my plant type is Frigid Terran and I see two types of Ancient Alien Structure, one is huge taking up 3 hexs and the other Ancient Alien Structure takes up only 1 hex, which is part of the Ice and Conquest Quest. I wonder if this is what you are referring to?

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It's called "Progenitor Device" ingame. It's a normal expedition site found on water tiles that has a white vertical tube-thingy as an icon.

Ryika said:

The code doesn't exactly tell and there's a comment that seems to suggest the opposite, but if you actually give artifacts to all players via that function only a total of 24 per category will be given out, spread around all players.

Click to expand...

A way to test this empirically is to use the FireTuner. I gave myself lots of resource pods until I collected 23 Old Earth artifacts (last one probably got taken by an AI and I stopped after 50 pods giving me no artifacts). Then I combined all of them away and gave myself another 50 or so resource pods. None of the last 50 gave any artifacts.

From the Lua, we can check via the function Game.CanAcquireArtifactType(artifactID) whether a particular artifact is still up for grabs. Since this function only take the artifact ID as parameter and doesn't designate a player ID, it seems likely that the pool is shared by all players.

I actually used a custom function that loops through players and just calls ArtifactUtilities.ChooseArtifactFromCategory(), which is the function that is used by the lua script to see if Artifacts are available (The part of the code we don't have access to).

Here's the code for quick and easy copy-paste if anyone wants to test it themselves:

(Yes, it gives Artifacts to Players that aren't in the game, but that doesn't cause issues)

Here's the log:


Exactly as explained, the function starts returning -1 once all Artifacts have been awarded once to a player and no further artifacts are given out.

Players can't receive artifacts that other players have found. But they can get rewards other players have earned. I've changed the first post to be more explicit about this. The ambiguity was caused when I was tweaking the phrasing of that section.

I added clarification on how the acquire probability is calculated. And I used the in-game name of the progenitor improvement.

Interstingly enough the MAFW reward can be created from just 2 Progeniter artifacts and either 1 alien or 1 Ancient Knowledge artifact... (I am not sure if the mod Awesome Stations) causes this or not.

A game I played this week, I got both MAFW and Quantum Politics... WOW!

rtfox68 said:

Interstingly enough the MAFW reward can be created from just 2 Progeniter artifacts and either 1 alien or 1 Ancient Knowledge artifact...

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As long as you have one artifact that has MAFW as the preferred reward, you will have a chance at getting the MAFW. For example I always save up all the artifacts until I get one of the 4 Progenitor artifacts that has MAFW as its reward preference, then I do combinations of that 1 artifact with everything else and I can get MAFW more often than not in my games.

The preferred reward of each of the 3 artifacts you combine will always be in the list of possible rewards. Then if the 3 don't all belong to the same category (OE/AW/Progenitor), the hybrid rewards are thrown in.

So in practice, artifacts should be divided into 2 groups (from a player's view):

1. those with a reward preference that you want, e.g. MAFW
2. those with a reward preference you don't care about

And every time you get a new artifact, you should do combinations of 1 from group #1 and 2 from group #2 to see if it gives you something you want. Every time you actually do the combination, you should go back and try all possible combinations again because the pool of rewards have changed and the same combination that gave you something you don't want could now instead give you something you want.

Personally I don't like this system now that I've had time to play with it. Not the randomness, but the incentive to try out all the different combinations, i.e. micro-managing the artifact research.

I would rather the artifacts system be deterministic.

mnf said:

Personally I don't like this system now that I've had time to play with it. Not the randomness, but the incentive to try out all the different combinations, i.e. micro-managing the artifact research.

I would rather the artifacts system be deterministic.

Click to expand...

Depending on your perspective it is deterministic (same inputs of artifacts equals same reward output). But doing all the combinations to see if the reward you want is available is a giant pain. In theory it would be possible to write some code that did all those checks for the player and showed them the info in the UI. Or the mechanic could just be modded to be different by re-writing much of Artifacts.lua.

It's possible to revamp the Artifact UI and instead of listing artifacts, it lists the rewards from all possible combinations of the artifacts currently in stock.

The problem is that often there will be multiple combinations that end up with the same reward, and it is up to the player to decide which artifacts are worth "less" to actually use. So such an UI must not only show the rewards, but also the combinations for each of those rewards.

With 7 artifacts in stock, you need to list 7C3=35 combinations. Even if there are only 4 different rewards you can get, you need to list all 35 combinations for the player to select.

Then there's the element of immersion to consider.

I probably mis-used the word "deterministic". What I had in mind is something like this proposal I posted:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=557634

Any word on how to receive the artifact-related achievement? I started a game last night on a standard sized map on an arid world (to increase the frequency of alien nests) to give me the best chance to acquire artifacts. Am I safe in my presumption that as long as I'm continuously combining artifacts over the course of the game that eventually, I'll achieve all the artifact wonders possible? This is one of like 4 achievements that I've not earned yet, and I'm not sure the best way to get it.

"Maximum Artifacts
There are 24 artifacts in each category (old earth, alien, progenitor). Each artifact can only be given out once, you can not get artifacts other players have found. Once there are no more artifacts left in category you won’t get more artifacts from that category."

Thanks for that. I wondered why I wasn't getting any more from Pillaging Alien nests.

I have discovered, that it is very possible to obtain Progenitor-class reward from combining one Progenitor artifact and two Old Earth artifacts. I've done it twice in my current game and most likely i'll do it 3rd time as i move on past turn 60. Here's how.

1. Obviously, hunt for Progenitor artifacts from the start, it's the priority, but do NOT combine progenitor artifacts together when you get 3 of them. Wait for when you

2. Get as many Old Earth artifacts as fast as possible, we aim for dozen+.

Notes. Most likely this will involve at least some save-scumming, but can also happen if you're very lucky. Most certainly this will involve making at very least five, but yet better six+ explorers very 1st thing you build. Most likely you will want either Prosperity virtue for +3 expedition modules per explorer, or +1 expedition module from level 2 Supremacy affinity, or both. Quite possibly you will also want the mixed +100% expedition speed (which is one reward for combining artifacts, "mixed" cathegory, i believe). I did. It boosts 5-turn-long excavations to 2-turn-long, and obviously 10-turn-long ones into 5-turn-long. This saves your explorers lots of turns especially when we talk excavating early-game in Miasma, which is a common situation - they'll spend less turns _healing_ themselves after excavating in Miasma with this bonus, too. Sometimes you can do 2-turn-long dig near alien nest and live with it, too. Getting 1-2 Alien artifacts early in the game for this "mixed" reward is thus also recommended, but don't piss aliens any much, if they get angry, whole thing will get much harder to pull off.

3. Once you have dozen or more Old Earth artifacts and some 2...5 Progenitor ones, carefully analyze what Old Earth artifacts you got, and find out what are artifacts which lead to very same Old Earth reward. Ideally you want to have either a group 3-4 Old Earth artifacts which lead to very same Old Earth reward, or at least 2 groups of 2x Old Earth artifacts which lead to same Old Earth reward. Then, get that/those Old Earth reward/s, but spend only ONE artifact which "gives" it, not spending other ones which lead to this particular Old Earth reward.

4. Combine "remaining" artifacts of above mentioned group(s) with ONE Progenitor artifact in the artifact Library, to see what reward would be given. If it doesn't lead to Progenitor reward, but gives one of Mixed rewards - do not take it, EVEN if you actually want that reward, but wait until you can get another group(s) like mentioned above, and then repeat p.3 and try to combine with those new artifacts.

Notes. This way, sooner or later you will find combinations of "1 Progenitor + 2 Old Earth" artifacts which give Progenitor-class reward! I got me -50% unhealth and +2 units visibility this way by the turn 60 in my current game, spending only TWO Progenitor-class artifacts. Plus i got me all the desired Old Earth rewards, of course. This was done with quite much save scumming, yep (guilty! %) ). And i still have 1 Progenitor artifact and 2 more Old Earth artifacts sitting in the Library, and lots of map still to explore - most likely i'll find few more Progenitor-class artifacts and get 1-2 more Progenitor-class rewards (using remaining two Old Earth artifacts to do so).

Above mentioned need - NOT to get "Mixed" class results even if desired until after you're "done" getting all you want/can from Progenitor class rewards - is due to the fact that Old Earth artifacts will run out rather soon (as mentioned in the 1st post of the topic, only 24 artifacts of each class will be given to players, total). I already have them ran out in my game by turn 60. Which is why getting Progenitor class rewards takes priority (except above-mentioned +100% expedition speed Mixed reward). Once you run out of Old Earth artifacts, this method for getting Progenitor rewards will obviously not work. However you will still be able to get few Mixed rewards by using remaining and few new Progenitor plus may be "last one" Old Earth artifact, combining each of those with two Alien artifacts, to get Mixed rewards.

But to get _many_ Alien artifacts, you need to pillage Alien nests, and doing so pisses aliens off, and pissed aliens really make explorers' life much harder - which is why getting "Mixed" rewards is best to be done "after" you get desired rewards from Old Earth and Progenitor cathegories. This shouldn't be delayed for "much" later, though, as opponents pillage Alien nests now and then and so they get Alien artifacts now and then, reducing total number of alien artifacts _you_ can get. So, once all (or nearly all) of the map has been scouted and combed for all possible Old Earth and Progenitor artifacts, it's the time for BIG war with aliens right away! Pillaging their nests left and right to get as many Alien artifacts as possible ASAP, to get desired Mixed and Alien rewards before opponents can get any (many) alien artifacts to themselves. If one's goal is to "get as many Artifact rewards as possible, all the best ones included" overall, of course... Which i kind of had in mind this whole post through.

End result: this way you can reliably get at very least 3 Progenitor-class rewards on any (non-small) map if you abuse save scumming, and still most likely get 2 Progenitor-class rewards if you don't, without the need to find 9+ (or 6+, correspondedly) Progenitor-class artifacts. And, this way, it's more likely to end up getting exactly specific Progenitor bonuses you'd want (than with the usual "combine 3x Progenitor artifacts" way).


P.S. Yep, the whole thing has serious disadvantage of waiting quite long time for piling up enough artifacts, without combining them, which delays getting those nice production/science/culture boosts from doing so. And, of course, if you go for this, then you do NOT burn any artifacts "solo" for their boosts. Therefore this is not suitable for "win in least amount of turns!" gameplay, - the whole method is intended for rather opposite goal of the gameplay: "get as much as possible to get, grow as tall and wide as it's possible to grow, and go for eternal "just... one... more... turn..." after beating AIs to win". Or some sort of. %)

P.P.S. Above mentioned Progenitor reward for +2 tiles visibility range to all units is one AWESOME thing to really boost ongoing artifact hunt. It helps TREMENDOUSLY with both much faster removal of the fog of war from all corners of the map, and also with keeping explorers and other scouting units safe. In fact, i consider this Progenitor reward being THE most important Progenitor reward for any "long" game: after all, there are lots of ways to boost Science, Health, Culture/Virtues, and in a long game, "we'll make it there" to the end of the Science tree / Virtues anyway, and late-game Health is not a slightest issue, but things giving +visibility to units - are quite few out there, and will help to play "forever and ever". And this Progenitor thing gives not the +1, but +2, so it's a MAJOR boost, especially early-game, and to ALL units, not just military ones. Combined with some other +visibility upgrades further on, it becomes really overpowered, too. For example, units seeing 8 tiles away while forming a line through open ocean - is something _very_ hard to take out, even if there are few of them. Because they see any danger approaching and have time to regroup, fall back, flank, ambush and focus fire as much as they want. So, due to all that said, i am quite surprised that this +2-visibility-to-all-units Progenitor reward - is not even mentioned among ones most important...

Machiavelli24 said:

Want to know how exactly artifacts are acquired in Beyond Earth: Rising Tide and how their reward is determined? I dug through the code to find out.

How artifacts are acquired

Old Earth Artifacts
Are acquired when you:

1. Collect a resource pod
2. Excavate a derelict settlement or derelict ocean settlement
3. Excavate a wrecked ocean colonial lander

Crashed satellites will never provide artifacts. You have a 20% chance to get an Old Earth artifact. Every time you don’t your chance of getting one goes up by 10%. Every time you get an Old Earth artifact your acquisition rate goes back down to 20%.

Alien Artifacts
Are acquired when you:

1. Pillage an alien nest
2. Excavate an alien skeleton or alien ocean skeleton

You have a 38% chance to get an Alien Artifact. Every time you don’t your chance of getting one goes up by 7%. Every time you get an Alien artifact your acquisition rate goes back down to 38%.

Progenitor Artifacts
Are acquired when you:

1. Excavate a progenitor ruin or progenitor ocean ruin
2. Excavate an ocean progenitor device

You have a 55% chance to get an Progenitor Artifact. Every time you don’t your chance of getting one goes up by 3%. Every time you get a Progenitor artifact your acquisition rate goes back down to 55%.

Maximum Artifacts
There are 24 artifacts in each category (old earth, alien, progenitor). Each artifact can only be given out once, you can not get artifacts other players have found. Once there are no more artifacts left in category you won’t get more artifacts from that category.

Preferred Reward
Each artifact has a “preferred reward”. If you get an artifact it will be drawn from a pool. Artifacts (of the specific category) will be put into the pool if they don’t share a preferred reward with an artifact you already have. If an artifact shares a preferred reward with one other artifact you already have then the chance it will be put into the pool is 50%. The chance is 33% if two, 25% if three and 20% if four.

If nothing is added to the pool you will not get an artifact and you do not get the +10%/+7%/+3% bonus to finding future artifacts.

How artifact rewards are determined

The three artifacts you combine will determine the pool of possible rewards. The actual reward will be drawn from that pool. Changing the order of the artifacts has no effect. Removing and then placing the same artifacts in will not change the reward. The pool will not contain any reward you’ve already earned. Multiple players can earn the same reward. There are 6 rewards for each category and 6 mixed rewards, totaling 24 possible rewards.

If you are breaking down three artifacts of the same category (Old Earth, Alien, Progenitor) the pool will be all the prefer rewards of those artifacts. If all of those rewards have already been acquired than the pool is all rewards for that category. If still no rewards are in the pool than the pool is all available rewards.

If you are breaking down three artifacts that do not all have the same category then the pool is the preferred rewards for those artifacts plus all the mixed rewards. In the unlikely event that these rewards have all been acquired the game will add all the rewards for the categories of the Artifacts. And if those are all taken, all rewards will be added to the pool.

Strategic Ramifications

Grabbing as many resource pods early is the best way to acquire Old Earth artifacts. It is much faster than doing excavations. Crashed satellite excavations will never provide an artifact.

When trying to get a specific reward you need an artifact with that as its preferred reward. Having other artifacts of the same category lets you form more unique combinations, each one providing at worst a 1-out-of-3 chance of giving you the reward you want. If trying to get a specific reward with a mixed set the odds are much lower because the 6 mixed rewards will clog the pool. Resulting in a 1-out-of-9 chance.

The Alien rewards are relatively weak compared to the extremely powerful Progenitor and Old Earth rewards. Some of the mixed rewards may be considered more useful than the Alien rewards.

Notable rewards
Old Earth

• Warp Spire: +50% yield from internal trade routes
• Drone Command: +2 tiles worked for free

Alien

• Sky Chitin: +50% Strength, +3 Range for Air Units
• Tidal Navigation: Naval Units gain +100% Defense against Ranged Attacks

Progenitor

• Machine Assisted Free Will: Technologies cost -30% less Science
• Quantum Politics: +100% Virtue speed
• Dimension Folding Complex: -50% unhealth from population in all cities

Mixed

• Slumber Slaughter Extract: +50% Worker improvement speed
• Soul Discerner Training: Covert Ops take -25% less time

Click to expand...

i like sky chitin since i build alot of planes +3 range and 50% strength is big

Thank you for a very informative article

However, there is another side to consider - trading single artifacts for one time yields boosts. Is there any information available too on what you get why?

And then a last question...the artifacts you find always have a parameter "condition" attached (represented both in the description and by a kind of health-meter at the side) Is that purely cosmetical or does it have any gameplay influence on how artifacts behave, when you use them?