There are two kinds of artifacts

Quest Artifacts and Lore Artifacts

Artifact Sets at bottom

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 1B gems, produced over 10 Oc (1E28) coins and bought the

Archeology Upgrade.

Cost: 100 Oc (1e29)

An "Excavation" button will then appear on the top left of the Upgrades tab and you may commence excavations.

The chance to find Lore Artifacts requires the

Survey Equipment Upgrade

Requirements: which requires 100 excavations and

Cost: 1e35 (100 Dc). To be bought once throughout the entire game and does not show up as bought upgrade.

Cost & Faction Coins

Excavation: The first excavation costs 1 Oc (1E27) coins, and each subsequent excavation costs 20% more than the last.

Formula: 1e27 ^ (0.75 ^ A) * (1 + (0.2 - 0.025 (if E290) - 0.025 (if Ancient Egg)) / 5A) ^ x where A is number of ascensions and x is number of excavations.

Faction Coins: 35% (40% with That Excavated Quickly upgrade) per excavation

Formula: floor(2 * ln(1 + (5000000 * 1.15^x))^3), where x is the number of excavations you have (not including the one just purchased).

Excavation Reset

Cost: floor(x / 3000) + 1 rubies where x is number of excavations.

Note: Free reset if enough times excavated this R (R40+ to afford reset amount)

Formula: 2000 + 50 * R + 500 * x here x is amount of resets this R.

Note: It will reset the excavation counter to zero, all previously gained Excavation rewards and Rubies will persist and you can not find them again.

Artifact Sets

Finding all the faction artifacts for a specific faction will also unlock a new selection of upgrades called "Artifact Sets". You will be able to pick one per game only, similar to Bloodlines and Lineages. Abdicating will reset your choice and allow to pick another.

Requires all artifacts related to the faction to use its set.