OGame – Artefacts Update
A new feature is coming to the Lifeforms expansion with the Artefacts update. Artefacts give players the opportunity to purchase the techs of other lifeforms they really want, rather than receiving a tech at random. This update also changes how you earn experience for your lifeforms, plus introducing a daily limit when searching for lifeforms. Read on to learn more about the changes in the Artefacts update.
What Are Artefacts?
Artefacts are a type of currency you acquire for purchasing lifeform technologies from other species which can only otherwise be selected at random. You can acquire exactly the technologies you want with artefacts.
How to Get Artefacts
You can find artefacts on your discovery missions as another possible result when searching for lifeforms. Artefacts can be found in various amounts, from small caches to major troves.
How to Use Artefacts
Once you’ve found sufficient artefacts, you can use them to fill an empty lifeform development slot. In the menu for selecting techs, you’ll find a new function for purchasing technologies with artefacts.
Technology Artefact Costs
Purchasing level 1 research costs 200 artefacts, increasing to 400 for level 2, and 600 for level 3.
Resetting Lifeform Techs
If you reset your lifeform techs and want to unlock specific combinations again, you’ll need to spend artefacts for each slot just like the first time.
Maximum Artefact Storage
You can store a maximum of 3,600 artefacts. Once you reach this cap, you will only ever find 0 artefacts on discovery missions. It is however possible to exceed this cap if you find enough artefacts in one go.
For example, if you have 3,565 artefacts and discover another 500 on a mission, then you’ll receive the full amount, giving you 4,065/3,600 artefacts. However, as explained, you won’t find any more artefacts once you hit (or exceed) this limit. This is designed to ensure that you don’t ever lose out when you make a discovery.
Changes to Searching for Lifeforms
The Artefacts update makes some changes to how much experience is required to level up lifeforms, and how many discovery missions you can launch per day on the search for lifeforms (and artefacts). The following explores these changes in detail.
Changes to Lifeform Experience and Bonus
The experience you currently require increases exponentially per level, making it extremely time-consuming to level beyond the first three or four levels. In order to give players a better experience and sense of growth, we’ve adjusted this curve to make it easier to unlock higher levels with your lifeforms. The associated lifeform bonus has been reduced from 1% to 0.1%. The amount of experience you receive for re-discovering known lifeforms remains the same. Lifeform experience you’ve already earned will be migrated to the new system and won’t be lost.
Here’s a table of the new values:
Maximum Lifeform Level Bonus
In addition to optimising the experience and bonus values, we’ve also made another change, introducing a lifeform level cap of 100 (and therefore a max. 10% bonus). You’ll still be able to continue discovering lifeforms for the Lifeform Discoveries highscore table, but you won’t earn any more experience for these adventures.
Artefacts for Previous Missions
Since the Lifeforms update has been available on a number of servers for quite some time, and many players have flown a large number of discovery missions, we’re going to hand out artefacts on these servers retrospectively. The number of artefacts players receive will depend on the number of missions flown. Each mission will be worth 8 artefacts, with a maximum amount of 7,200 multiplied by the number of planets the player has. This should ensure that players can theoretically completely restructure each of their planets with artefacts. There will be no ‘compensation’ for any additional missions flown beyond this limit.
Limits to Discovery Missions
Another change we’re introducing with the Artefacts update is that you will have 50 missions per day for finding lifeforms and artefacts. Each day you receive 50 missions, but they don’t expire, so you aren’t forced to fly 50 missions every day and can save them up for later.
Rules for servers where the Lifeforms expansion is already active:
Since some players have already launched lots of discovery missions in the hunt for lifeforms, there’s a special rule on these servers for determining the number of missions available when the update launches, based on the number flown by the player with the most missions. Players who have already flown missions will get this number of missions credited to them. The rules are:
- The player with the most missions on the server defines the maximum for all other players (e.g. 3,000 missions flown).
- Each player who has already flown missions will have them deducted from this maximum, for example if Player A has conducted 200 missions before the update, then they can still fly 2,800 more missions. Since the number of missions increases by 50 per day, and 3,000 is the number of missions in this example, then Player A now has 3,050 missions available.
As ever, we look forward to reading your feedback on the update in the OGame forums or in our official Discord.
The OGame Team
