Anime Zero Artifacts: Slots, Scores and How Refine Rolls

What an Artifact Is

Artifacts are a second gear system, separate from the crafted accessories that sit in Head, Face, Neck and Back. The panel's own subtitle states the shape: “Wear 1 Core and 3 Supports on each fighter.” That is four equip slots per unit, chosen from a shared storage that the panel counted at 32 / 200 in the recording.

Slot	How many	What the panel prints under it
Core	1	“1 slot · one big effect”
Support	3	“3 slots · smaller effects”

The loadout belongs to the fighter, not to the account: the recording switches the unit dropdown to Frost Heron at Lv. 115 and the same four slots are empty again. Three preset tabs sit beside the dropdown, so a unit can keep more than one arrangement instead of rebuilding it by hand.

Reading an Artifact Card

Every card answers the same four questions in the same order. Read them top to bottom before you equip anything:

1. The score. A single number on the card's plate — 540, 460, 420, 380 in the recording. It is what the storage sorts by.
2. The rarity and the type. Printed as one line under the name, such as SUPREME · BURN, SUPREME · ECHO, SUPREME · UNIVERSAL or FINE · SUPPORT · BURN.
3. The effect, and the price. The effect is a real sentence, not a stat: “Each enemy hit by Burn Blast gains 1 Burn stack”, “Once per run: a lethal hit leaves you at 1 HP, then heals 30% Max HP”, “Each pending Echo from a different skill adds +5% to the next Echo (max 4)”. Most cards print a drawback line right under it — Burn Blast DMG -20% on the first, Max HP -5% on the second.
4. Three affixes with tiers. Each row is a stat, a tier out of five and a value: CRIT RATE TIER 3/5 +3%, DMG TAKEN TIER 4/5 -2%, BOSS DMG +8%.

The drawback line is the part players skip. An artifact with a strong effect often carries a penalty on the same skill the effect boosts, which is why the score alone does not tell you whether to wear it.

The Type Has to Match the Kit

The type in that rarity line is not decoration. The recording opens LOOPBACK, a SUPREME · ECHO artifact whose effect keys off Echo stacks, while the selected fighter is a Burn unit — and the panel prints the verdict in red: ECHO NOT TAKEN · NO EFFECT. The same card then shows its plain stat lines as normal.

So the first filter is not the score, it is the kit. Check what your unit actually applies — burn stacks, echo stacks, or neither — and treat a mismatched artifact as a stat stick with a dead line. UNIVERSAL is the type that does not depend on the kit, which is why a 460 SUPREME · UNIVERSAL like LAST BREATH is worth holding even when you do not yet know where it goes.

Refine: Two Different Buttons

The Refine tab is where an artifact stops being random and starts becoming a project. It has two modes, and they are not interchangeable:

Button	What it changes	Evidence in the recording
Reroll Affix	Which stat a row is, not how large it is	The row flipped from BURN DMG +4% to ULT +4%, then in a later roll from BURN +6% to DMG +1.5%
Reroll Value	The number on an affix you already have	Present as its own button beside Reroll Affix; it was not opened in this recording

Both modes end on the same choice: the panel shows KEEP OLD and REPLACE, with the hint “Keep your old row or take the new one”. Nothing is applied until you pick one, so a bad roll costs currency but not the stat you already had.

The right column answers the question players ask next — what could this have been?

• The pool is printed. A reroll converts the chosen affix into “one of these, each equally likely”: DMG, Boss DMG, Crit DMG, Max HP, DMG Taken and Ult Energy Gain, at 16.67% each, totalling 100%.
• Duplicates are excluded. The panel greys out the rows already on the artifact and says so: “Can't roll Crit Rate or DMG Taken: already on this artifact.”
• Rare affixes are separate. A RESONANCE · RARE AFFIX AT 100 meter counts up as you roll — it read 0 / 100 and then 1 / 100 in the same session — and the small print says “rare affixes come only from Resonance.” Rerolling cannot produce one directly.

Two counters sit at the top right of the panel, both starting at 1,000 in the recording; the purple one fell to 960 across the rerolls. Only the gold one is named on screen anywhere in the footage — Tempering Dust, the reward the ARTIFACTS code pays — so this page does not name the purple currency.

How to Tell Whether a Swap Helped

The loadout pane is the scoreboard, and it updates the moment you equip:

1. LOADOUT SCORE sums the equipped cards; a single Core read 420 next to an empty Support row.
2. DMG FROM AFFIXES shows the percentage the affixes contribute — +4% with one core equipped, +0% with nothing.
3. STAT TOTALS lists the named stats the affixes actually add: BOSS +4%, CRIT +2%, TAKEN -1%.

For the damage number itself, the recording uses the training dummy with the DPS METER in the corner, which is the honest way to compare two builds: swap, hit the same dummy, read the number. A higher LOADOUT SCORE is not the same claim as higher damage.

Storage Housekeeping

Two hundred slots fill faster than players expect, and the panel gives you four tools for it:

• Sort by score on the storage header, plus filters for All, Core and Sup and a row of type icons.
• KEEP BEST and SALVAGE at the bottom of the storage pane.
• AUTO EQUIP and RECOMMENDED in the loadout pane, for when you do not want to choose by hand.

Salvage is the one that decides whether you can keep farming: with a hard 200 cap, the artifacts you do not salvage are the ones you cannot pick up. Filter to Support, sort by score, and cut from the bottom rather than from whatever is on screen.

What This Read Does Not Settle

1. Where artifacts drop. The narration names Story, Trials and Zodiac Trials; no loot panel in this recording shows one dropping, so treat the source list as reported rather than read.
2. The name of the purple Refine currency. Only Tempering Dust is printed on screen.
3. Reroll Value and the Codex tab. Both exist as buttons; neither was opened in the footage.
4. What a rare Resonance affix does. The meter implies one at 100 rolls; no card with a rare affix appears.
5. Rarity ladder. FINE and SUPREME both appear; whether anything sits above SUPREME is not shown.