Journal

The journal is your permanent record across every Expedition. Every artifact you uncover is added to it, alongside the condition you uncovered it in — Perfect, Weathered, Chipped, or Destroyed. Once an artifact is added, it stays added; if you find a better-condition copy on a later run, the entry upgrades.

Layout

The journal groups entries by era, and within each era by rarity tier (Mythical · Rare · Uncommon · Common). Each entry shows:

• The artifact's name, a description grounded in the real-world find it's based on, and an icon.
• Your best condition to date.
• For artifacts you haven't yet discovered, a placeholder silhouette with the rarity colour but no detail.

Why it matters

• The journal is the spine of long-term progression. Achievements in the Collection category check journal state — "First Roman Find" unlocks the moment your Roman section gains its first entry, and the per-era Perfectionist achievements require every artifact in the era at Perfect condition.
• The condition record is permanent in the sense that it never goes down. A Chipped find logged early in a run can be replaced by a Perfect find weeks later; the journal will display the Perfect.
• The cross-era condition matrix (visible inside the journal popup) is one of the read-outs the game uses to gate later content unlocks.

Tools and the journal

The tool you use determines the condition the artifact lands at:

• Brush — always Perfect on artifact tiles, but painfully slow on rock and bone.
• Pickaxe — Destroyed on artifacts; reserve it for clearing rock around a known fragile.
• Shovel — balanced; trades a bit of preservation for speed.
• Bulldozer Key — reserved for the full release; not in the demo.

Related

• Storm warning — what cuts off your time to fill the journal each run.
• Achievements — Collection achievements that read journal state.
• Eras — how the journal is partitioned.