Guide: Artifact Freshness

Artifact hunting is an everyday activity for any Stalker in the Zone. Artifacts have powerful properties boosting the strength of the person carrying them - as such they can be used to make your own build, fission them, or simply to sell (to fence or other players) and get rich.

As you probably know, artifacts have a chance to appear in anomalies (with higher chance short time after Emissions). However what might be less obvious is the concept of artifact freshness.

Freshness shows how recently was the artifact found. It can affect 2 things:

• Fission Energy - when fissioning (converting to energy for upgrades), the artifact will provide more energy the fresher it is.
• Fence Price - when fencing (selling to NPC) the artifact, you'll get more money the fresher it is.

Artifacts can have 3 levels of freshness - you can check it when hovering your mouse over the artifact:

Artifact Freshness UI

It's important to note that fresher artifacts are NOT more powerful in any way. This means that you can completely ignore the freshness if you want to use this artifact yourself or sell it to other players!