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CK3 Dev Diary #80 - Is That a Dagger in Your Pocket…?

Is that a dagger in your pocket…?​

or

Inventory System/Commission Artifact:​

Howdy all,

Your Friendly Local Community Manager here to introduce this week's Developer Diary! While it was not my article, it was written by our ever mysterious Content Designer, CC! So sit back, relax, and enjoy some neat new features from the team and we can't wait to hear your thoughts and feedback!

Without further ado:

Greetings!

Let’s talk about artifacts and the systems surrounding it.

Artifacts can be divided into two categories, inventory and court, which is also where the items are stored. This dev diary will focus on the former one, so the inventory.

Inventory system​

Feast thine eyes on the inventory screen! Instead of putting all of the goodies into a big pile, we’ve made an inventory window showing what’s currently equipped and how many of each category you can “wear”.

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[image of inventory screen]

Equipable artifacts fall into the following categories; crown, regalia, weapon, armor, and lastly, trinkets. Most of these categories speak for themselves but trinkets, so what are they you may ask? The answer is a myriad of things; they can be brooches, dried flowers, even a worm on a string.

You can also sort after these categories, making it easy to find what you’re looking for when you want to equip, repair, or just browse your inventory.

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[image of inventory screen: artifact section]


In the Artifact Details, you can read the artifact’s history, as well as see what people are claimants. Watch out - some of these people may be looking to steal the artifact away from you…
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[image showing artifact details: history tab]

Of course, it goes both ways! Did your stupid brother inherit the family heirloom? You can duel, declare war, or steal it — as long as you have a claim.

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[image showing artifact details: claimants tab]

Artifacts wear down when on your person versus when they are on display in the court. So keep that in mind as it can be costly in the long run to equip everything for the bonuses if you're not making full use of them.

Since the Antiquarian is such a vital figure in maintaining and making full use of your artifacts, there’s a shortcut to recruiting or just looking at who has that position in your court.

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[image showing the Antiquarian court position info]

As shown in the image, the Antiquarian unlocks the ability to Reforge and Repair, as well as Commissioning Artifacts.


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[image showing the Reforge Artifact interaction]

Commission Artifacts​

Inspirations are fickle like creativity, so if you have the gold and you want something commissioned, you can get in touch with local artisans through the Commission Artifact decision.

An additional benefit of commissioning an artifact is that you get to decide what’s being made.

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[image showing the commission artifact decision; artifact selection]

Now you might wonder, “why would I ever subject myself to the whims and possible long time for a person to become inspired if I can just go to the local artisans and get what I want?”
You see, even if inspirations appear as fickle as love during springtime, it’s that little extra spice — a creator’s passion — that permeates through the final product. It’s that warm feeling of love for the craft that the beholder can feel just by looking at it, it’s something that’s not always present in a commissioned piece.

Ah, my apologies, I appeared to have been carried away there for a brief moment by my muse.

What I meant to say is that in gameplay terms, that means that inspired people can create artifacts of higher quality while the commission artisans will do the bare minimum and therefore be of the lowest quality.


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[image showing the inspiration progress]

Whether a passion project or not, creating something takes time. We ask for your understanding and hope that you continue to enjoy Crusader Kings 3!

This Dev Diary was ghostwritten by the mysterious CC.
 
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Just a small suggestion: Perhaps it would be a good idea to rename the position of Antiquarian to Custodian, as the latter lacks the commercial connotation of the former, is not related to the study of antiquities (after all, artefacts don't have to be old), and would be an era-appropriate term, as a custos (keeper) was generally in charge of keeping the relics, treasures, and archives of the church, but the term was also used in a secular context. Thus, custodian would be a good English equivalent.
 
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The question since first DD about artifacts remain: why the hell random courtiers (many of those may be nobles who never worked in their lives) can suddenly be inspired to make work of art, better than commissioned artisans?

Alright, they can be inspired to do it... but where did they learn how to do that? Why that random woman who might be my Doctor or my son's wife suddenly knows how to make THRONES? She went to carpenter courses? And learned how to make thrones in better quality than commissioned carpenters?
 
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How do you earn claims on artifacts?
When someone dies, their Artifacts get inherited by their Heir. However, the Heir's siblings get personal Claims on those Artifacts. Also, if someone takes an Artifact from you (in a Siege for example), you also get a claim on it.

If you hold an Artifact for long enough, your House also gets a claim on it. This works similarly to a personal claim, except that anyone in your House can take action in an attempt to take it back.

Reminds me of HOMM interface. Now I need to collect just a couple more artifacts and I'm ready to collect my OP knights skeleton stack

Inventory screen with the silhouette of a character as a backdrop? Now that's an old-school look.

This was an important part of Game Direction, that it should look like HoMM :D

Will there be mythological artifacts like Thor s hammer or ark of covenant etc.. ?
Yes! They aren't magical though, and who knows how "genuine" they are...

And yet the Reichskrone seems to lack a durability timer, despite being equipped. Does that mean that certain items can be used indefinitely?
Some Artifacts do not decay over time, but can still get damaged in events, due to sieges and so on.

Is history of Artifact moddable?
The history of an Artifact that appears at the start of the game is moddable. Once the game starts of course, the history reflects what has happened to the Artifact during gameplay.

Are equipped items represented graphically in the Character and/or Court? Like wearing a certain Crown would make the Character wear it in the Portrait
Only weapons have a 3D representation, but if you have a Crown displayed on a pedestal on your Court it will be visible in 3D.

I have a question!
Can non king/emperor characters use this system and commission tools for personal use? I would love to role play with the system and not need to be a king or emperor to use it.
Characters without a Royal Court (so Dukes for example) still have an inventory and can these kinds of Artifacts through commissioning them. They don't have access to the same quality of artisans though so they may not be as good quality in the end.

Looks very promising, but one thing seems to be of concern:

Item deterioration in games is annoying in general, but here we will be forced to often equip and unequip items, like equip The Ring of Master Builder +7, pay for single building, unequip again. Micromanagement worse even than teleporting generals between battles in EU4. I'd very like to ask you to reconsider the system, or at least add some cooldowns and automation.
A bit of clarification: As an Artifact you carry on your person gets worn out, it can be put on display in your Court. (Most) Inventory Artifacts deteriorate over time, but the Artifacts in your Court do not. However, you need to actually convert them into a Court Artifact, so you cannot swap them back and forth (so no micromanagement in this sense).


Nice DD!

What does happen if an artifact loses their whole durability?
It is destroyed and removed from the game.

useful for the antiquarian? Learning and stewardship for forging and looking after artefacts are the obvious ones, but if they are also now protecting artefacts during a siege that suggests the need for either martial or espionage skills. Is this going to be a job that actually has multiple skill boons and you have to decide if you want a knowledgeable but frail antiquarian to look after your treasures but not protect them in times of war, or a strong but stupid antiquarian who might break the cross off of your crown but would die before letting a
Antiquarians are Court Positions so they can have multiple factors affecting how well they perform. As for antiquarians, it is primarily about their Learning Skill, but having made Artifacts themselves, or having certain traits like Administrator also helps.

I'm looking forward to playing it like a child waiting for Santa Claus.

I have a few questions.
Are there any artifacts that can't be handled under certain conditions?
For example, the armor that I, a giant, had made can only be equipped by giants. Or a large sword is too big for a dwarf to equip, etc.
There is support for limiting an Artifact depending on any kind of conditions. I don't know of that many examples (since its not always fun to block you from using stuff), but for example, I think the Essen Crown is only wearable if you are a child.

EDIT: Messed up a quote formatting
 
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What I meant to say is that in gameplay terms, that means that inspired people can create artifacts of higher quality while the commission artisans will do the bare minimum and therefore be of the lowest quality.

Bit odd to clap the commission community like that. I might be inspired to walk out and draw a picture of Ryan Reynolds tossing an angry koala at Boris Johnson, but I can guarantee you that someone I pay £25 to on Fiverr will produce a far better product.

Being inspired doesn't necessarily mean the product will be better, basically. It should be an event trigger that can be factored in to artifact creation, possibly improving the quality.
 
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Looks very promising, but one thing seems to be of concern:
Artifacts wear down when on your person versus when they are on display in the court. So keep that in mind as it can be costly in the long run to equip everything for the bonuses if you're not making full use of them.
Item deterioration in games is annoying in general, but here we will be forced to often equip and unequip items, like equip The Ring of Master Builder +7, pay for single building, unequip again. Micromanagement worse even than teleporting generals between battles in EU4. I'd very like to ask you to reconsider the system, or at least add some cooldowns and automation.
 
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Inventory screen with the silhouette of a character as a backdrop? Now that's an old-school look.
 
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it looks really nice, but i do have a small critique: wouldnt the antiquarian for a royal court be fairly well off? would it be possible to set the antiquarian position to trigger nicer clothes, like title rank does?

it just seems weird to me that someone in a prestigious and well-paying position in a king or emperors court would cut about dressed like a peasant
 
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Artifacts go to the Primary Heir on succession.

House Claims are still gained as long as they are held by the same character. I think it does not reset instantly if it is lost.
As others have said, this really doesn't make sense in elective scenarios or normal partition either (as @Tiax pointed out with the Lombardy example)

There really, really needs to be a three-tier system in place for inheritance,
1) Artifacts with title allegiance (e.g. iron crown) get inherited with the title when you own the title or it is created by confederate partition.
2) Artifacts without allegiance get passed down with primogeniture.
3) Spares (e.g. extra swords or crowns), alongside trinkets are split by partition of people who inherit land from you, perhaps based on rank.

For example, if I'm HRE, but also king of Bohemia and Austria, my Cousin inherits HRE, two of my sons split the kingdoms and my third son inherits the dutchy of Lower Silesia, which I also own, and have the Reichskrone and three other crowns in my possession, my cousin should get the Reichskrone, and my two kingly sons should split the other crowns, the elder one getting two crowns and the younger one only the one.

There should be additional logic that said that if one of my sons inherits due to title allegiance, that counts as a crown inherited due to partition.
 
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Bit odd to clap the commission community like that. I might be inspired to walk out and draw a picture of Ryan Reynolds tossing an angry koala at Boris Johnson, but I can guarantee you that someone I pay £25 to on Fiverr will produce a far better product.

Being inspired doesn't necessarily mean the product will be better, basically. It should be an event trigger that can be factored in to artifact creation, possibly improving the quality.

The question since first DD about artifacts remain: why the hell random courtiers (many of those may be nobles who never worked in their lives) can suddenly be inspired to make work of art, better than commissioned artisans?

Alright, they can be inspired to do it... but where did they learn how to do that? Why that random woman who might be my Doctor or my son's wife suddenly knows how to make THRONES? She went to carpenter courses? And learned how to make thrones in better quality than commissioned carpenters?

It's hard to tell without seeing the finished product of course, but I hope the implication is supposed to be that people who receive inspirations are already master artisans to begin with; like if you commission a sword, the craftsman is just going to be a random smith, but if someone is inspired to create a sword, that person is going to be fucking sword-Leonardo (as in Leonardo da Vinci, but for swords, not Leonardo the ninja turtle, who admittedly did use swords).

I also would be careful about projecting the workings of modern gig economy artists back onto medieval patronage.
 
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Are artifacts partitioned, or do they all go to the primary heir?

Does a House claim rely on a single character possessing it for a long time, or can it be spread out over multiple characters of the same House? And if we lose the artifact for a brief period time, does that reset the clock
Artifacts go to the Primary Heir on succession.

House Claims are still gained as long as they are held by the same character. I think it does not reset instantly if it is lost.

And if I steal an artifact during a siege, but lose the war, do I keep the artifact, or have to give it back as part of the peace deal like the way prisoners are released?
You keep the Artifact.
Can you demand artifacts you have a claim to from your vassals, similarly to how you can revoke titles you have a claim to?
Yes, you can demand artifacts you have a claim on, it is just not very likely they will just give it away.
 
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Will Artifacts like Regalia or Trinket access to claims or CBs??

-Holy Crown of Hungary would enable a Press Claim on the Kingdom of Hungary or its de jure titles
-Banner of Genghis Khan would enable Subjugation of your Dynasty members or Conquest CBs?
-If the Qarmatians stole the Black Stone you would be able to declare war for it as a Muslim, so on and so forth
 
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After thinking it over, and reading other people's comments, I think my three biggest worries are:

1. Will artifacts be inherited in a reasonable manner?

I think inheritance in general, despite being the centerpeice of the game, is one of the weakest parts of CK3's systems. Too often, everything from counties and kingdoms are divided in ways that, while obeying the letter of the rules, do not make much sense. Things like four kingdoms being split between two sons in a checkerboard pattern. These experiences are extremely frustrating, and make it feel like the game was not designed with common scenarios in mind. If the same is true of artifacts, it risks being equally frustrating. People have given some great examples - it can't be the case that if the Byzantine emperor loses the election, the crown goes stays with his family while the new emperor has nothing. But at the same time, it can't be the case that becoming emperor and then losing it means all of your artifacts are absorbed into the empire's treasury. Similarly, if you have the crown of Lombardy, but the kingdom of Italy goes to your second son, it can't be that the crown stays with the first son. And if having a bunch of artifacts is important to the strength of a character, it can't be that second sons are left with nothing and can't hold onto their new kingdom because all their angry vassals have a full armory and they an empty one.

2. Will artifacts change hands at a reasonable rate?

We all like the idea of raiding Rome and absconding with the holy grail, but if artifacts are constantly being stolen every time there's a war, things will feel chaotic. It's already the case that the AI loves conducting decade-long wars where each side goes off and sieges down the other's holdings. If sieges frequently result in artifacts being captured, will major artifacts be changing hands every few years? Family members in foreign courts already get killed and captured with absurd frequency, I would hate to see the same applied to artifacts. This feels like a difficult thing to tune, because a low chance of stealing artifacts will make sieges feel extremely random and swingy, but a high chance will make artifacts feel very ephemeral.

3. Will the AI duel and declare war for artifacts at a reasonable rate?

If every inheritance leads to a half-dozen people with claims on your entire treasury who want to duel you for every little brooch and bauble, things will get tiring very quickly. And if the AI spends all its time dueling other AI characters over minor artifacts, everyone will end up maimed and disfigured before they turn 30.

Similarly, going to war over an artifact feels very fraught from the perspective of AI behavior. The AI is already *very* eager to declare wars it's not really capable of conducting, and ends up in crushing debt after a decade of total war trying to capture a single county. How much worse will that behavior be when the AI is allowed to declare war over a 25 gold brooch?

The way CK3's war and peace system is designed, every war, no matter how minor, has to be a total war that results in the occupation of a large portion of the target country before peace can be secured. The only thing that speeds things up a little is ticking war score for occupying the war goal. But you can't occupy an artifact. So will wars over artifacts drag on even more than wars over territory? How do match the "you need 100% warscore" system against "we're fighting over a jewled dagger"? Won't almost all wars over individual artifacts feel completely out of proportion?

I know not every detail ends up in the dev diary. But I'm somewhat unsettled by the fact that there doesn't seem to be even a note of concern about these sorts of issues in the post.
 
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Can items be associated with titles, cultures, faiths, lands (regions) or dynasties?

An easy example is, shouldn’t the Holy Roman Emperor always have a claim on the Reichscrone if he doesn’t possess it, and wouldn’t otherwise normally have a claim on it?

Another example might be, shouldn’t any Christian prince be granted a claim on the Crown of Thorns, if the item is in the possession of heathens (and potentially heretics), and another Christian prince isn’t already pressing his claim?
 
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Yes, looks really great, I see we can duel people for artifacts we have a claim on, can we fabricate a claim like on a title ?

Can we declare a war for an item ?

If so, can we declare one for an important religious item like a relic, held by someone of a different faith (Like if a christian holds the Seal of Muhamad or something) even without a claim?

Thanks for the good work !
 
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Reminds me of HOMM interface. Now I need to collect just a couple more artifacts and I'm ready to collect my OP knights skeleton stack
 
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