Dead Simon has posted on the Rift Forums about improvements to artifact hunting that he has in the works as well as further explanations of how artifact spawning works.

• 2 types of spawn points – Rare and Common. Rare ones are always in out-of-the-way/difficult-to-reach places. Common ones are easier and you will never find an epic or higher from a common spot.
• There is ~20-25% as many Rare spawn points as Common ones.
• Artifact Spawning – Large no. of spawn points; % of those are up at any one time.
• Unstable Zone Events need fewer players in a zone to trigger compared to other zone events. As such they spawn more frequently during low-pop times.
• Additional ‘something’ added to the Unstable Events to make it “a little more fun and give you another way to get some of the rare artifacts” [Ref: Dead Simon]

2 Types of Spawn Points

There are both Rare and Common spawn points. There are about 20-25% as many Rare spawn points as Common ones.

Common Spawn Point

• The Common spawn points gives a chance at common (white), uncommon (green) and rare (blue) artifacts with smaller % chances of obtaining them the higher the rarity.
• These Common spawn points will never give you an Epic (purple) artifact.
• Common spawn points are in areas that are easy to reach (by the roadside/etc).

Rare Spawn Point

• The Rare spawn points give a chance at uncommon (green), rare (blue) or epic (purple) artifacts with smaller % chances of obtaining them the higher the rarity.
• You will never find a common (white) artifact in this type of spawn point.
• Rare spawn points are in out-of-the-way/hard-to-reach locations.

Artifact Spawning

There are a large amount of possible spawn points for artifacts in each zone and at any one time a percentage of those spawn points will have artifacts spawned.

• When an artifact is harvested, another empty spawn point will then spawn an artifact.
• As time goes by – the easier artifacts tend to get harvested quickly and there ends up being a mass of artifacts that go unharvested in hard-to-reach locations.

This is why you may see huge amounts of artifacts in multi-storey ruins or on top of hard-to-reach bridges and rooftops in the Dendrome and hardly any on the road, at the base of rocks and tree trunks.

So for all those avid artifact hunters out there – it may be worth your while to learn how to get up those difficult and hard-to-reach areas. Not only because there’s usually a ton of artifacts there, but also because they are likely to be Rare Spawn Points.

Unstable Zone Events

Zone Events trigger based on player population. There is an ‘optimal’ amount of players for each zone event and the zone event system attempts to trigger events based on that ‘optimal’ level of players.

• The Unstable Zone Events require less players to trigger than other events.
• Thus, you will get more Unstable Zone Events during lower population times (because higher-pop tends to trigger other zone events).

References

• Dead Simon: Artifact Spawn Points
• Dead Simon: Artifact Spawning/Unstable Zone Events