Relic

Relics are objects of spiritual or ideological significance. They can be discovered by completing long and dangerous quests. A relic can be installed in a reliquary to attract pilgrims, enhance rituals, and strengthen an ideoligion's ability to convert outsiders.

A relic is a holy item revered by your ideoligion, ideally placed in a reliquary. In order to be obtained, they must be found through a 5 part quest.

Summary

Relics are chosen through the ideoligion creation screen: either at the beginning of your game, or possibly later on if the Fluid Ideoligion option is chosen. A random selection of relics will be generated if you pick the "Ideology system: inactive" option.

Relics are revered by your ideoligion, so pawns of that ideoligion will receive buffs accordingly:

• Finding any relic will give fluid ideoligions +5 development points
• Finding all the sacred relics gives a +15 mood bonus for 15 days. This only stacks once, even if new relics are chosen via a fluid ideoligion and acquired.
• Relics being present at a ritual, i.e. installed in a reliquary in the temple used for the ritual, gives a small mood bonus for 4 days depending on the number of relics present. One relic gives +2, two gives +3, and three gives +4.
• A relic installed in a reliquary gives an additional bonus to certainty loss inflicted by conversion attempted by pawns from that ideoligion on the same map as the reliquary,^[Verify] including the Moral guide's Convert ability. The size of the increase depends on the number of relics currently held. See Conversion for details.

A relic being lost causes a malus of −5 Relic lost mood for 30 days while a relic being destroyed causes a malus of −5 Relic destroyed mood for 30 days.

Relics will sometimes be mentioned by name in the randomly generated lore associated with the ideoligion.

Relic types

Relics can be a range of different items. These include:

• Inert relics: A term used internally for dedicated relic items, i.e. items that serve no other purpose than to act as relics. Inert relics have a relic chance of 5.
• Weapons: Almost any obtainable weapon in the game can be selected. Exceptions include the triple and doomsday rocket launchers, frag and EMP grenades, molotov cocktails, and pila. All weapons have a relic chance of 1, with the following exceptions:
  • Gladius, Longsword, Elephant tusk: 2
  • Thrumbo horn, Eltex staff, Monosword, Zeushammer, Plasmasword, Persona monosword, Persona zeushammer, Persona plasmasword: 3
• Certain single use consumable items such as Psychic animal pulser, psychic soothe pulser, psychic shock lance, psychic insanity lance. Each artifact has a relic chance of 5. However, upon use the artifact will count as being destroyed giving a 'Relic Lost' mood malus

The items will be renamed with randomly generated name and stuffable items will have a random stuff type chosen. Both can be specified by the player during ideoligion creation.

Relic chances are used when an ideoligion is first generated, when an ideoligion preset is used, or when the "Ideology system: inactive" option is chosen. When customizing an ideoligion, the player can choose any type of relic without penalty, making relic chances irrelevant.

Weapons will always be of legendary quality, if possible (e.g. a thrumbo horn has no quality), but otherwise act the same as other weapons. Note that the pilgrim quests, as well as the mood and certainty buffs require the relic to be placed in a reliquary. In addition, being carried makes relic loss or destruction possible. These factors must be taken into account when choosing whether to enshrine or wield relic weapons.

If a relic is a persona weapon, its persona traits will be generated at the same time as a quest^{[Which quest?]}. This means that a player may load a previous savegame to re-randomize an artifact persona weapon's traits if they are not favorable, providing that the storyteller is not in commitment mode.

Inert relics

Dedicated relic items, or items that serve no other purpose than to act as relics. All inert relics are stuffable and have the same stats. They only differ in stuff options and texture.

These are not worthy of taking, due to having no functionality. Legendary high-end weapons are a lot more expensive, look just as good in reliquary, and are actually functional.

General stats:

• Description: An object with ideoligious significance.
• Mass: 1.5
• HP: 200
• Beauty: 1
• Market Value: 500
• Stack limit: 1
• Stuff count: 100 (Defined, but seemingly not used)
• Tech level: Archotech

Type		Stuff options
	Chalice	Metallic, Stony
	Pendant	Metallic
	Box	Metallic, Woody, Stony
	Tablet	Stony
	Fragment	Metallic, Stony
	Hilt	Metallic, Stony
	Ark	Metallic
	Cube	Metallic, Woody, Stony

Pilgrims

Pilgrims come and see the relic if it's in a reliquary.

If you deny them, depending on your Charity precept, you get a mood penalty for not letting them see the relic, and a larger one for betraying them.

• Essential: -8, -12
• Important: -4, -8
• Worthwhile: -2, -6
• No Charity percept: 0, 0

They stay for some hours, and then leave. Pilgrims may give gifts when leaving, and some may join the colony. They can be used as cannon fodder in case of attack of mutual enemies. Attacking/capturing/looting them has no lasting consequences, as pilgrims are temporary faction and are unaffiliated with anyone - other than mood penalty if you have Charity.

Acquisition

In order to obtain a relic, you must participate in 5 different subquests, then travel to the relic's location. Subquests can repeat; if you fail one, more will appear later on. If a fluid ideoligion is reformed to no longer venerate a specific relic, quests related to that relic will be deactivated.

There are 4 different types of subquest:

Hacking a Spacedrone

A spacedrone will land near the colony which you must hack. Raiders from a certain faction will periodically raid the base, with an interval of approximately 8 hours. These raids will be focused on attacking the drone, and raiders will ignore pawns shooting at them. The drone has 750 hack points. Once finished hacking, the drone will explode in 30 seconds in 1x speed.

Worshipful Village

The quest creates a neutral tribal village that is not part of any faction, and worship an ancient terminal containing information about the relic. The villagers are neutral at first, allowing you to visit on the pretense that you are worshiping the terminal too, but will turn hostile upon three conditions: harming a member of the tribe, contact with the terminal, and overstaying your visit (10 hours). Reinforcements will arrive if you do not leave in time after turning hostile.

Ancient Compound

An ancient compound will spawn on the map, containing hermetic crates, fuel barrels, and ??.

Ferried Ancient Compound

The exact same as the above quest, but the quest giver will shuttle a set number of pawns to the location. The location will not spawn until you arrive.

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Relic Location

After completing 5 subquests, the relic's location will be revealed.

You are able to travel to an ancient structure, which is guarded by initially dormant mechanoids. If the Biotech DLC is enabled, this contingent will include mechanoids from that DLC, but not mechanoid commanders.

After 3 days from the relic location being revealed, the mechs will wake up. Otherwise, there is no other time pressure. The structure contains a reliquary containing the relic. The relic can be extracted from the reliquary, ending the quest. The mechanoids will awaken the moment extraction is begun and extracting the relic takes 5 seconds. Afterwards, the reliquary can be deconstructed for valuable gold.

Analysis

Relics can be legendary weapons of nearly any type in the game, and the quests can start very early on, making them worthwhile to most colonies. Even late game, min-maxed colonies that can easily create legendary weapons may want relics, as they provide a slight reliquary mood buff, and relics can be uncraftable weapons (persona weapons, eltex staves, unique weapons).

Many of the quests, including the actual relic location, require traveling on the world map. Therefore, an fast travel mechanism like drop pods or passenger shuttles will make relics easier and more worthwhile to obtain. If these are not available, then the colony needs to be prepared for multiple off-colony trips, by preparing for the pawn's mood and the colony's defenses.

Relic Selection

For the purposes of gameplay, relics should be weapons, as inert relics do not propose any functional benefit other than their reduced wealth. Legendary weapons are difficult to acquire, especially early on, and have great benefits even over Masterwork weapons. Note that late game colonies with production specialists and/or a way to farm inspired creativity (tortured artist crafters, word of inspiration, psilocaps) can eventually farm any legendary weapon that can be crafted. In particular, a production specialist with inspired creativity and high skill is nearly guaranteed to create a legendary weapon.

Therefore, uncraftable weapons are generally the best options. Uncraftable weapons that can be affected by quality include:

• Unique weapons
• Persona weapons
• Monoswords, zeushammers, and plasmaswords, although these are worse than their persona variants.
• Eltex staves

If all DLC is installed, the best weapons will be the best weapons that fit your colony's design and playstyle. Unique charge rifles are an overall great weapon, but unique miniguns and chain shotguns can perform better in a killbox and base designed for them, while assault rifles are better at kiting. For melee weapons, persona monoswords and persona zeushammers are the best options, as the persona plasmasword's flame damage does not scale with quality. Finally, eltex staves offer a boost to psycasting, but compete with bioferrite weapons, which are actually useful in melee and can provide a higher Neural Heat Limit when stacking modifiers. Eltex staves still offer more neural heat recovery than bioferrite, though note that quality does not affect that stat.

Without Odyssey, the best ranged weapons will be the non-unique variants of the aforementioned weapons. However, these can be crafted, so more consideration should be placed on Royalty's persona weapons if available. If not playing with production specialist and not planning on farming inspirations, legendary weapons are hard to craft, so craftable relics should be considered.

Without Royalty, the best melee weapons will be longswords or maces, which can also be crafted. For longswords, obsidian is the best material, although the low item HP means it is prone to being destroyed. Bioferrite is the next best option, and plasteel is after that. Uranium is the best material for maces.

Reliquary

Whenever starting a ritual or conversion attempt, it is easy to place any wielded relics within the reliquary, then take them back as soon as the ritual ends. This enables the mood buff whilst allowing the colony to use relics as weapons at basically all times. Therefore, reliquaries should be eventually be created even if all relics are weapons intended for colony use. However, the reliquary building does cost resources and increase wealth, and the mood buff is only +2 or +1 per relic, so it is not a priority.

Role conversion rituals count for the reliquary and do not have cooldowns or failure chances, so it is possible, if tedious, to continuously add and remove roles to maintain the reliquary mood buff indefinitely.

The only benefit of permanently installing a relic are pilgrims, which are generally low impact, but can be arrested for recruitment or human resources, or occasionally act as a distraction, at no goodwill consequence. This benefit is less than the benefit from having a legendary weapon, so permanent installation is only recommended if the relic is completely outclassed.

Legendary weapon farming

When you reform a fluid ideoligion, you get to generate 3 entirely new relics at a time. "Old" relics remain as legendary weapons. It is possible to generate an indefinite amount of weapons using the following steps:

1. Create a fluid ideoligion at game start.
2. Select three weapons of your choice (see above).
3. Perform the quests to retrieve the relics.
4. Reform the ideoligion, and repeat until you have enough weapons.

This is a relatively easy, if slow, way to farm uncraftable relics.

With craftable items, relic farming is possible, but often inefficient due to the power of production specialists and inspired creativity. A Crafting 20 production specialist has a ~9.6% to make a legendary item. With a source of inspired creativity (tortured artist or word of inspiration), this jumps to 97.54% legendary.

Version history

• 1.3.3074 - Fix: Farskip with Relic gives debuff from losing the relic.
• 1.3.3087 - Pawns no longer smelt relics, to avoid accidental mishaps.
• 1.3.3387 - Adjusted inspect pane and stat readout for relics in classic mode.
• 1.4.3523 - Fix: Relics can stack with other items of the same type.
• 1.4.3555 - Fix: Pilgrims coming to venerate a relic cause charity believers to get unhappy regardless of outcome.
• 1.4.3641 - Fix: Pawns considered free when using shuttle/pods, causing "Relic lost" thought if equipped.
• 1.4.3682 - Fix: Caravans holding relics cause "relic lost" thought on map exit.