Artifacts and relics

Prestiging earns relics, which you spend to discover and upgrade artifacts. Every artifact you own is always active; you don’t need to equip it.

What an artifact gives you

Each artifact adds artifact damage and has its own effect, such as more pet damage or boss gold. Artifact damage increases with every level. The artifact’s effect grows more slowly at higher levels, while its upgrade cost keeps rising.

Because upgrade costs rise as effects grow more slowly, spread relics across the artifacts that help your build instead of pouring them all into one. The upgrade buttons let you spend 1%, 5% or 25% of your relics at a time. You can also favourite artifacts and upgrade them together.

Which artifacts to favour

Prioritize artifacts that boost your damage source, your gold source and your skill tree branch. The in-game build guide lists key artifacts for each build. An artifact that boosts another build’s damage still adds artifact damage, but its special effect won’t help your current build.

Some artifacts have a level cap. 37 of the 103 cap between levels 20 and 60. They’re inexpensive to finish, so you can max them out early.

Book of Shadows

Book of Shadows increases the relics you earn from each prestige. It has no level cap, so upgrading it can help fund every other artifact.

• Book of ShadowsPrestige Relics

You can’t choose when Book of Shadows appears, but you can narrow down when to expect it. Artifacts are discovered from ten pools in order, and the game shows you which artifacts are in each pool. Book of Shadows is in the fifth pool, so it usually appears between your 25th and 35th artifact.

Salvaging

Salvaging removes an artifact and refunds its relics. It costs diamonds; the price rises with the size of your collection, from 43 diamonds up to a cap of 2,000. Salvaging also triggers a prestige.

Enchanting

An enchantment multiplies an artifact’s effect by a fixed amount, regardless of its level. 66 artifacts can be enchanted. Enchantments are discovered in pools, and Book of Shadows is always the first.

Where relics stop

Relic gains stop increasing at stage 180,000. From there, Transcendence uses mementos instead of relics and monuments instead of artifacts. Your mementos and monuments reset at the end of each season.

See every artifact, its cap and its cost on the artifacts page.