Alien Artifact Changes
Artifact Stockpile
Alien Artifacts are no longer a trade good and will no longer be traded by civilians. Instead, any alien artifacts recovered from ruins, or the artifact reserve, will be held directly at the population.
They are displayed near the top of the third column, below any construct or ruins and above the capability Yes/No section.
Alien Artifact Reserve
In v2.7.1, when all items have been recovered from a ruin, the ruin is removed and plays no further part in the game.
For v3.0, the ruin will still be removed but it will leave behind an ‘alien artifact reserve’. This represents the scattered minor artifacts that were not detected by the main survey. The number of alien artifacts in the reserve will be random, anything from a few hundred to tens of thousands, but that number will be heavily influenced by the size and scope of the original ruin. The size of the reserve is not known to the player, but it can be inferred from the rate of recovery.
Construction units can continue to search for these artifacts after the ruin is removed. They follow the normal recovery check process, followed by a second check with a percentage success chance equal to: artifact reserve / 50000.
If this second check is successful, a number of alien artifacts equal to four rolls of D50 (4 - 200) will be recovered and the reserve will be reduced by this amount. Over time, the remaining artifacts will become harder to find.
Construction units will be more effective working on unexploited ruins, but this provides a potential use for those units when no other tasks are available. The recovery of artifacts also becomes more important due to the changes in Xenoarchaeology (see next post).