There are two kinds of artifacts
Quest Artifacts and Lore Artifacts
For Artifact Sets, go to Artifact Sets
In-game description
Enter the Archeology Association to control the progress of your Excavations. There you will be able to fund more excavations to find Faction Coins, the rare Rubies and ancient Artifacts from the civilizations of the old.
Archaeology was first implemented in the "Ancient Races" expansion for introducing the Neutral Factions.
Excavating enables to find Rubies (See the Ruby page), with luck: Faction Coins, and at certain thresholds or under certain conditions: Artifacts. Specific artifacts are required to unlock the Neutral & Prestige Factions.
Some artifacts will reward direct bonuses and the amount of discovered artifacts take part in some Research upgrades.
Requirements
Archaeology is unlocked once you have over 1 B (1e9) gems, produced over 10 Oc (1e28) coins and bought the
Archeology Upgrade.
Upgrade Cost: 100 Oc (1e29). To be bought once throughout the entire game and permanently unlocks an "Excavation" button which will appear on the left under the Upgrades tab.
To unlock the chance to find Lore Artifacts, it requires the
Survey Equipment Upgrade.
Upgrade Cost: 100 Dc (1e35) and at least 100 excavations. To be bought once throughout the entire game and does not show up as bought upgrade.
Excavations
The first excavation costs 1 Oc (1e27) coins, and each subsequent excavation costs without any cost multiplier reduction 20% more than the one before.
Cost Formula: (1e27 ^ (0.75 ^ A) * (1 + (0.2 - C) / 5A) ^ x), where A is the number of Ascensions, C the sum of your flat cost reduction upgrades (such as E290) and x the number of excavations.
Everytime you excavate, you have a 35% (40% with 'That Excavated Quickly' upgrade) chance per excavation to find a certain amount of Faction Coins as reward.
Faction Coin Reward Formula: (1500 + 0.05 * (x-1) ^ 2.75), where x is the number of excavations you have.
Note: Everytime you reincarnate or ascend, your excavation counter will be set back to zero.
Excavation Reset
To be able to do more excavations within a Reincarnation you can do an Excavation Reset, which also sets the counter back to zero. There are two options:
Ruby Reset and Free Reset.
Ruby Cost for Ruby Reset: (floor(x / 3000) + 1), where x is the number of excavations.
Note: Not recommended. It is better to spend rubies in ruby power, unless you have very specific reason to spend them on a reset.
Free Reset Requirement Formula: (2000 + 50 * R + 500 * x), where R is the amount of Reincarantions and x is amount of Free Resets already done this Reincarnation.
Note: When doing a Free Reset, you will lose all gold on hand and receive a 90% production penalty until you abdicate or reincarnate.
Note: Free Resets are not available until around R30, since the requirement is too high for lower stages.
Note: Each ruby found from excavation is a single all-time reward. No matter how the counter is set back to zero, you cannot find the same ruby again.
