Can anybody tell me what the Scruuge drop? I have heard it's awesome, but I'm not sure what it is. Can anybody help?

I got two spawns out of 100+ kills. Both dropped "Gift to the Naughty" a debatable useful artifact. There are people that say they got way better but this far I cannot confirm it or rebut it.

And what does this artifact do?

Decreases the defense of an enemy ship by 30% for 2 hours. The ship in question must have disabled/hacked/raided you in the past 24h.

....Okay...sounds semi pointless. Are they in general hard to kill?

They are matched. It had 1.7k hp no shields and under 1k-ish attack/defense at rank 160. They went down rather quick. The tricky part is getting them to spawn tho. I got multiple rares, a cohort of uncommon's (two blade harvesters between them) and an extremely rare boss in the process so I'm not really upset about their rarity or their rather poor drop.

There are three more. Each one allows you to up the production of one of your worlds in one of the three resource's by one. With a max at 5X instead of 15X.

Care to estimate a % of those drops ? I mean how many naughty gifts to how many (total) of improving artifacts you got ?

By the way. One thing I never quite got. Why is there a mineral booster (true, only for toxics), a research booster and no artifact booster ? When artifacts, given the fact that most of the "good" stuff is out of the picture is basically the worst resource.

gift of the stars: increase research
gift of the ancients: increase artifact

haven't gotten the naughty or mining artifact.

Hm. Well those are pretty good...one can always use more resource production. No modules though?

I've killed 7 so far. 6 gift of the naughty. 1 gift of the stars.

nope no modules.

I am guessing the last one is "Gift of the Greedy"

so you can go to 5x with those and other resource increasers to 15x?

Milbrandt, yes that is right.

Robert no that is not the last one. The last one is "Gift of the Elements" +1 to mining.

I have killed about 30 so far and found that about half have given the gift of the naughty. The others are mixed of the production ones. I think it is all luck in the end though. (and today has been a really luck day for me )

Anyone know how long the Gift of the Naughty lasts? Or if it can be removed with a containment cage? If not, thats a pretty good item.

2 hours and I only "gifted" it. Didn't received. My guess is that containment cage should remove it like any other de-buff.