Howdy folks, today we're going to go over the mysterious and potentially lucrative subject
of Artifacts in No Man's Sky NEXT.
How it all works, and therefore how to best find them via where and how to look as well
as what the smallest and largest values they can generate at.
So, first off, Artifacts are those buried treasures worth a whole butt load of units,
or at least were, well kinda still are, but we'll get to that in a bit.
You can find them in a chest buried around ruins on planets.
First, you find an Ancient Ruin or an Ancient Plaque, you can do this a few different ways,
the easiest provided you have the Navigation data is to use a signal booster to search
for 'Artifacts'.
Searching for Artifacts with a Signal Booster will give you one of 3 different things, an
Ancient Ruin, an Ancient Plaque or a Monolith, and once it's given you a waypoint for all
3, it won't give you anymore until you've knocked off one of the waypoints by visiting
it, though it will still keep taking your navigation data for the attempt.
In case you're unaware, a Monolith is what you would want if you wish to locate a planets
portal, you scan for it, or just look for one while flying over, land and interact with
it, give it a race-specific item based on who inhabits the system and blamo, portal
waypoint.
The items in question are Vy'keen Dagger, Korvax Casing and Gek Relic, I think it's
fairly obvious where you use which.
But back to going all Indiana Jones and such.
If you are having trouble finding Navigation Data, which can be purchased from some vendors
or found in the wild at glowing red cubes on pedestals, then you could also ask for
directions to get an observatory, which will give you the location of one of these after
completing a puzzle, or just go into 3rd person and find it by eye, but finding it by eye
could quite easily take an hour.
So you will want to get Ancient Plaque and Ancient Ruin, go to one of them, it doesn't
really matter which as you'll use both, then interact with the circular platform there,
some crazy mumbo jumbo about ancient folk will come up on the screen and give you 2
options.
They're both all about seeking knowledge, you want the knowledge of the past as the
other option will just give you some words.
After seeking the knowledge of the past, it will give you a waypoint of a treasure chest
to some other ruins, but these are special ruins.
At this new ruin site, you can find small chests dotted around with an item inside called
'Ancient Key', you need to pick up 3 of them, though there are usually 4-6 buried around
the site, and then in the middle of the site just under the surface there is a large treasure
chest which you will need 3 of the keys to open.
Inside is your treasure.
Now, to find more, do not place your signal booster back down there and then, it will
just give you new waypoints to the nearest Plaques and Ruins that will just point you
back to this one you just looted.
At the very minimum, you need to go to the other side of the planet, or at least very
far away, and then scan again, if you want to play it safe, try a different planet, or
to be super safe, you do a different system via your teleporter, I'm fairly certain after
a while these will reset as your save likely does not track every one you've ever been
to, so having many systems you do this in and cycle, will likely be sufficient.
Now we know how to find them, let's go over how it all works.
The treasures that you find are all procedural, very much like the new tech modules you can
buy with nanites, only a fair bit more simple.
There are 7 different kinds of treasure, each of these different kinds of treasure has a
sort of small, medium and large, these different sizes have different ranges for the value
of the item and the flavour text.
6 of the 7 different types are identical in almost everything, for example, if you encounter
one of the 6 in question, there's a 40% chance it will be small, 40% chance at medium and
20% chance at large.
The small will be worth somewhere between 100,000 units and 200,000 units, the medium
between 400,000 units and 700,000 units and finally the large between 800,000 units and
2,000,000 units.
The small will say in the flavour text that it is between 200 and 500 years old, the medium
between 600 and 1,100 years old and the large between 1,400 and 3,000 years old.
The only differences between these 6 different types are the icon it will display, the way
it constructs the procedural name and the probability of finding that particular treasure
in any specific biome or star class system.
And then we come to the odd one out, this has different drop chances, with the small
being 10 instead of the standard 4, the medium being 6 instead of the standard 4 and the
large being 1 instead of the standard 2.
Not only that but the large of this one has a different value range, instead of 800,000
to 2,000,000, it is 800,000 to 1,200,000.
This is where I explain what I meant earlier when I said they used to be worth a butt load
of units, as that last number, used to have a typo, it used to be 20,000,000 as the maximum
for that range, just on that one, and the drop chances used to be the same as the others.
It's biome probabilities have not changed however as it is still the most common, only
now it is worth the least and even more probable for small.
All of those artifacts you heard about, even the one Semtexuk sent me a screenshot of worth
4.5 million, sadly, they can no longer be gained as in one of the recent patches, patch
1.52.1, the line 'Fixed a number of incorrect prices' can be found and as the previous file
with the typo was from 1.51, that is likely where the change was made.
I can certainly understand the downplaying of the change as, well, no one likes nerfs,
and no one actually lied, that particular fix covers more than this change, it covers
a number of fixes to prevent exploits.
But I actually liked this typo, I really like the idea of a super rare chance to get something
ridiculous, a 10% chance of something crazy if you put 50 hours into it is the kinda thing
I like, I didn't run Stratholme a few hundred times after that damn horse mount for nothing.
But either way the change has been made and in the crazy unlikely off chance that someone
from Hello Games ever watches this, I would request that maybe you don't add it back exactly
as it is, but add a little whimsey and hope for something stupendous, super low drop chances
are A-OK, provided the reward is magnificent.
So if we look at what we have, the minimum value of an Artifact is 100,000 units and
the maximum is 2,000,000 units, still pretty darn good for a few minutes hunting.
Now, with those probabilities, we can actually decrease our chances of finding those pesky
lower value ones, by looking in certain places.
System colour wise, Red, Green and Blue have equal probabilities, but yellow does not,
they are less likely in yellow, which means the lower value ones are more likely.
So, look in Red, Green or Blue systems, now for the Biome types, Barren have the worst
chance at the higher value, weird actually have the highest, but I think that's because
you don't find ruins on weird, unless things have drastically changed, so we can ignore
that one.
The best biome to search for these is definitely Lush, which has the same probably to find
3 of the 6 high-value ones as it has to find the low value, so essentially, search in Red,
Green, or Blue systems on lush planets for your Artifacts.
Toxic, Scorched, Radioactive & Frozen have the next best probability.
The actually specific probability to find them could be debated on what extent it is,
as this depends on how the numbers are calculated, if the different types are calculated and
then once that is decided, the drop chance of the small, medium or large within that
type is calculated, then you have a 75% chance of getting high value in a lush biome in a
Red, Green or Blue system, and 66% chance in the same system types on Toxic, Radioactive,
Scorched or Frozen Biomed worlds.
The 75 and 66% numbers apply to the small also, so if we look at the chance of getting
an 800 thousand units plus, it's 20%, or one that is between 800 thousand and 2 million,
it is 15%.
But, if the probabilities within each set are calculated as a total with the set biome
probabilities being a modifier, then your chances for higher value are much lower, but
the places you should look for them, remain the same.
And there you have it, everything you ever wanted to know about artefacts and a bit more.
I'm working on a few different guides for No Man's Sky at the moment, new stuff and
remaking some old guides that have changed since the update, so subscribe if you haven't
yet and want more guides and over the top explanations toward how the game works.
Have an awesome day folks.