What an Artifact Costs in Shards
The artifact calculator answers what it costs to get from your stars to the stars you want. This is the question underneath it: what does a finished artifact cost, and how far apart are the three qualities?
Every figure below is computed from the star and experience tables that drive the calculator.
The shard ladder is the same for everyone
Each star costs the same number of shards no matter which artifact you are feeding:
| Star | Shards | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20 | 20 |
| 2 | 80 | 100 |
| 3 | 160 | 260 |
| 4 | 280 | 540 |
| 5 | 460 | 1,000 |
| 6 | 700 | 1,700 |
What changes is where you stop. Quality decides the last star you can reach, and that is the whole shard difference:
| Quality | Stars | Level cap | Shards to finish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blue | 4 | 30 | 540 |
| Purple | 5 | 40 | 1,000 |
| Orange | 6 | 50 | 1,700 |
An orange costs 3.1 times a blue in shards. The last star alone — star 6, at 700 — costs more than an entire blue artifact.
Experience is where the gap really opens
Shards buy stars. Experience buys levels, and the level caps are 30, 40 and 50:
| Quality | Experience to cap |
|---|---|
| Blue | 658,360 |
| Purple | 1,921,750 |
| Orange | 4,523,710 |
That is 6.9 times a blue for an orange — more than double the shard gap. Each quality has its own curve, so the qualities are not comparable level by level; what is comparable is the finish. On the orange curve, levels 41 to 50 alone cost 2,263,380 experience, which is three and a half maxed blues.
Read it the other way and it is friendlier. Taking an orange to level 30 — the level a blue tops out at — costs 877,740, only 33% more than finishing a blue outright. The expensive part of an orange is not getting it useful; it is the last twenty levels, which are 81% of its experience.
Orange stars come in ranks
Blue and purple take each star in one payment. Orange splits the last four stars into ranks, so the shards arrive in smaller pieces:
| Star | Ranks | Shards per rank |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 2 | 80 |
| 4 | 3 | 93 |
| 5 | 4 | 115 |
| 6 | 5 | 140 |
The total is the same 1,700. What changes is that an orange gives you something back sooner — you do not have to bank 700 shards to see a step.
You wear 8 of the 35
There are 35 artifacts in the tables — 8 blue, 10 purple, 17 orange — and 8 slots: 5 force and 3 crown. Only 4 of the 35 are crowns, so the crown slots are almost decided for you. The choice is which 5 of the 31 force artifacts go on.
The 24 loadout templates in the tool cost, in shards for their 5 pieces:
| Loadout | Shards for 5 pieces |
|---|---|
| Any Gold or PvP template (five oranges) | 8,500 |
| F2P, mixed | 5,940 or 5,480 |
| F2P, cheapest | 4,780 |
The cheapest full set is 56% of the all-orange one. Whether the stat difference is worth the other 3,720 shards is a question the cost table cannot answer.
Eighteen artifacts are in no template at all
Of the 35, 17 appear in at least one of the 24 templates and 18 appear in none. Two carry almost every build: Apollo's Bow is in 20 of 24 and Excalibur in 16.
That is not the same as saying the other 18 are bad. The templates are built for field combat, and an artifact whose stats are research speed, building speed or depot capacity will never show up in one — it is doing a different job. Book of Thoth is in no template and it is a development artifact; that is the reason, not a verdict.
What this does not tell you
The tables have costs, not value. They do not say which stat wins a fight, how shards drop for you, or whether a second finished purple beats a half-finished orange. They say what each finish costs, so that the trade is at least visible before you commit shards you cannot get back.
Run your own stars in the artifact calculator, and if you are budgeting across systems, the cost tables for buildings and research are added up here.