Crimson Desert: How to find and use Faded and Sealed Abyss Artifacts

Abyss Artifacts are some of the most important items that you’ll come across in the vast world of Crimson Desert. They serve a few different functions, but they play a vital role in how you progress the story and upgrade your character. The three kinds of Abyss Artifacts are the standard ones, Faded Abyss Artifacts, and Sealed Artifacts.

To find out more about each one and how to use them all in Crimson Desert, take a look at the guide below.

What are Abyss Artifacts in Crimson Desert?

First, let’s start things off with regular Abyss Artifacts. These are the most common kinds of artifacts you’ll see in Crimson Desert.

Standard Abyss Artifacts are used to unlock and enhance skills in the Skills menu. If you visit that menu, you’ll see that by hovering over a smaller skill or the larger red, green, or blue icons, which represent health, Spirit, and stamina, you can either unlock a new skill or enhance your character’s stats in that one area. You can also enhance skills you already own by clicking on them and holding A/X.

Basically, you can think of standard Abyss Artifacts as skill points, and each one you acquire allows you to improve your character in some shape or form. Of course, you might need multiple Abyss Artifacts to enhance or unlock a skill, but early on, a single Abyss Artifact is all it takes.

How to get more Abyss Artifacts in Crimson Desert

Now that you know what Abyss Artifacts are, how do you get more of them?

There are a variety of ways to acquire them in Crimson Desert, but the easiest is by leveling up your character. In the bottom left corner of your screen, you’ll see a gold bar to the left of your mini-map. This represents your XP bar, and when you fill it up by earning XP, you earn a single Abyss Artifact.

Alternatively, you can earn Abyss Artifacts in a variety of other ways, including:

• Completing quests
• Opening Sealed Artifacts
• Defeating bosses
• Finding them scattered in the world as loot
• Abyss Cressets and Ancient Ruins
• Buying them from shops/vendors

You have no shortage of ways to earn Abyss Artifacts, but as for the other kinds, that’s another story.

How to get and use Faded and Sealed Abyss Artifacts

Finally, we need to talk about both Faded and Sealed Abyss Artifacts. Both of these act very differently from regular Abyss Artifacts, and they’re acquired in different ways as well.

First up, Faded Abyss Artifacts are basically how you can respec your character’s skill trees. By using a Faded Abyss Artifact, which you can do from the Skills menu, you can completely reallocate all of your previously spent Abyss Artifacts. From here, you can spend all of them again. This goes for Kliff’s skill trees as well as the two other playable characters’ skill trees in Crimson Desert, Damiane and Oongka.

To get Faded Abyss Artifacts, you’ll earn them through story progression for the most part. Completing specific quests in the story rewards you with Faded Abyss Artifacts. You can also get them from Sealed Abyss Artifacts as well as vendors, chests, and through crafting.

Speaking of which, Sealed Abyss Artifacts act as direct character upgrades that you can unlock by completing specific challenges. For example, this Sealed Abyss Artifact we found features the “Shield of Unchanging Will I,” which unlocks an Abyss Gear called “Wall of Steel I” that you can slot into your shield to give it extra power. To earn this Abyss Gear, you need to complete the challenge: “Bring three enemies crafting in like a tide to their knees with a single ring of your shield.”

Upon completion of this challenge, you’ll earn the Abyss Gear as well as other rewards, such as standard and Faded Abyss Artifacts.

You can find Sealed Abyss Artifacts off the sides of roads at dedicated sites. Sealed Abyss Artifacts light up through your lantern, but they’re also hard to miss during the day too, as they appear as a purple icon on your mini-map. There are over a dozen Sealed Abyss Artifacts in Crimson Desert, so you’ll need to spend a lot of time looking for them.