Risk of Rain 2 Artifact Guide: Sky Meadow Codes and the Reliquary Boss

Artifacts in Risk of Rain 2 are run modifiers that can either tilt the odds in your favor or turn every stage into a death sentence. Some hand you free items, some let monsters invade across biomes, and a few will wipe an entire team if a single player drops. That variety is exactly why people keep coming back long after they have cleared the standard loop.

This guide covers where the artifact unlock chamber lives, how to beat the boss that gates each artifact, and what every artifact in the game actually does.

Finding the Artifact Chamber in Sky Meadow

Every artifact in Risk of Rain 2 is unlocked the same way, and always from the same location: the Sky Meadow stage. Sky Meadow is fixed as the fifth stage of any run, so you will need to clear four environments before you can even start the process.

Once you load in, walk away from the spawn point and scan the ground for a large circular hole. It sits relatively close to where you start and is hard to miss. Drop into it and you will land in a hidden chamber containing two things that matter:

• A 3x3 grid of shape tiles on the floor.
• A laptop placed in front of the grid.

Each artifact has its own pattern of shapes that needs to be set across the grid. Step on the correct tiles to build the pattern, then interact with the laptop to confirm it. If the code is valid, a portal appears at the nearby teleporter. Step through it.

Beating the Artifact Reliquary

The portal drops you into a fight with the Artifact Reliquary, a stationary boss that ignores normal damage. Spamming abilities into it accomplishes exactly nothing.

Instead, the arena spawns waves of monsters. Killing them has a chance to drop Artifact Keys, and each key you feed to the Reliquary strips 25% of its health. The encounter ends after four keys have been delivered, so staying alive and clearing adds quickly matters more than raw single-target DPS.

One detail catches a lot of players off guard: the artifact you are trying to unlock is already active during the fight itself. Going for Artifact of Glass means dodging the entire boss room at 10% health. Plan your loadout accordingly.

Finish off the Reliquary and the artifact is permanently unlocked across your save file.

Every Artifact and What It Does

There are 18 artifacts in total. Picking the right one, or stacking several together, is half the fun.

• Artifact of Chaos: Friendly fire turns on for both survivors and monsters.
• Artifact of Command: Skip random rolls and pick your items from a selection menu.
• Artifact of Death: If one player dies, the whole team dies. Reserve this for groups that actually trust each other.
• Artifact of Delusion: After each Teleporter event, you must remember which chests held your real loot to keep them.
• Artifact of Devotion: Broken drones convert into Lemurian Eggs. Feeding them items hatches loyal Lemurian followers that inherit the item effect.
• Artifact of Dissonance: Enemies can spawn in environments where they normally do not belong.
• Artifact of Enigma: You begin every run with a random equipment that re-rolls each time you activate it.
• Artifact of Evolution: Monsters collect items between stages, scaling up alongside the players.
• Artifact of Frailty: Fall damage doubles, and any fall damage is lethal.
• Artifact of Glass: Allies deal 500% damage but have only 10% of their normal health.
• Artifact of Honor: Every enemy spawn becomes an elite variant.
• Artifact of Kin: Only one species of monster can appear per stage.
• Artifact of Metamorphosis: Players are assigned a random survivor every time they spawn.
• Artifact of Sacrifice: Chests no longer spawn, but monsters drop items on death.
• Artifact of Soul: Wisps emerge from defeated monsters.
• Artifact of Spite: Defeated enemies leave behind a cluster of bombs that detonate shortly after.
• Artifact of Swarms: Twice as many monsters spawn, each with half their normal health.
• Artifact of Vengeance: A doppelganger of your character invades every 10 minutes to ruin your day.

The Artifacts of Devotion and Delusion were added later in the Devotion Update, so older guides may not list them.