Legendary artifacts

[Mkok]

Now that we are going to have travel, we could add some sort of legendary artefact items, that would be very hard/immpossible to get, and would allow to further distinguish individual colonies.
They could be obtained either by trading for a very huge amount of silver, exploring ruins, or defeating some kind of bosses/rare events. Maybe you will just be lucky and find one in an ancient temple?

Upon obtaining such legendary item, your colonists would have no idea what it is, and therefore you would have to research it first. This could take anywhere between few days to even years, but once researched, you would know what its purpose is, and could decide what to do with it. Different artifacts could have different uses, but it would be nice if most of them had at least two different uses, and you could choose only one.

For example you obtain a legendary artifact after exploring ruins of an ancient city. You have no idea what it is, so you order your best scientists to investigate. After many sleepless nights and several burnt wires, he figures out it is some sort of generator capable of generating large amounts of electricity seemingly out of thin air. Now all that remains is to figure out how to use it. He is certain he could built an interface allowing the generator to be hooked directly to your power grid. But he also has an idea to use this device to power a powerfull laser rifle. You can choose only one, and both options would be very costly to implement.
If you choose to build a generator, you would gain a small generator generating large amounts of power, you can put at any location that would cool down the area around itself (like an evil ship).
If you build a laser rifle you would gain a very accurate super sniper rifle, with adjustable charging. At 100% you could punch a hole in centipede with one shot, but it would take a while to charge. At less power, you would have less dmg, but faster rate of fire.

Another possible artifact could be a psychic drone transmitter, allowing you to build your own psychic smooth drone which, when powered, would give mood boost to all your colonists. Or you could hook it up on mechanoid frequency to disturb their communications, severely slowing them down?


The idea is to get some very powerfull objects your colonists could literally worship, and built a colony around them.

[schizmo]

I love this idea, I love the multi-faceted use of the artifacts so that the player still has a choice in how they're used. It reminds me a bit of choosing which boss weapon to forge in Dark Souls.

The possibilities are endless and there could be artifacts to assist with any number of colony tasks/needs. Imagine an artifact that emits a powerful light, that could be turned into a brilliant lamp that would illuminate a very large area (placed at the center of a colony to keep the outdoors lit at all times) or turned into a gorgeous piece of spectral artwork that is so magnificent to behold that it surpasses the beauty and impressiveness of any other art piece in the game

A stone that radiates a soothing heat which can be crafted into a statue that prevents the temperature from falling below a certain level in a large area, or can be built into an industrial stove to rapidly speed up/increase cooking output

A similar stone but cold, that could be used to prevent the temperature from escalating too high or used to prevent fires.

My examples aren't as well thought out as yours but the concept of "this or that" is very strong. I think what's important is that artifacts like these be so useful that it doesn't matter which one you get or how you choose to use it, it will always be helpful.