Caretaker

What it is

A stat-category artifact that procs whenever the player is healed. On each heal pulse it grants a temporary luck buff and emits a wide damaging ring around the ship. Reward-card line: “When you heal, the world’s odds tilt in your favor and a caretaker ring damages nearby enemies.”

Identity

Field	Value
Category	stat
Icon	clover
Primary color	#88ee88
Secondary color	#44aa44
Bright color	#ccffcc
Proc audio cue	flavored cue (routed through game bus with LPF + reverb)

Per-tier values

The artifact ships four authored tiers (uncommon through legendary). The runtime prepends a fifth “common” tier above these by reusing the uncommon values record and differentiating via the shared flat bonus curve.

Tier	Luck bonus	Buff duration (s)	Ring damage (flat)
Uncommon	30	8	18
Rare	45	10	30
Epic	65	12	45
Legendary	90	15	65

Effect

Trigger: signal player_healed. Banner shown on proc. Each proc fires four actions:

1. Luck buff — Adds the tier’s luck bonus as a flat additive to the ship’s luck stat for the tier’s duration. Stacks refresh with maxStacks: 1, so consecutive heals reset the timer rather than accumulating.
2. Caretaker ring — A damage-AoE pulse centered on the ship. Flat damage equal to the tier’s ring-damage value, applied to all enemies within the ring radius.
3. VFX — A green burst-and-ring effect.
4. Artifact flash — Standard proc flash on the artifact HUD slot.

Ring field	Value
Radius (px)	200
Damage mode	flat
Center	ship
VFX type	burst_and_ring
VFX color	#ccffcc
VFX particle count	16
VFX scale	4.2
VFX lifetime (s)	0.42

Stacking rules

• Single-stack buff: each heal proc refreshes the luck buff’s remaining duration; total luck bonus does not stack across procs.
• Ring damage is per-proc and not gated by the buff state — every heal pulse emits its own independent ring regardless of whether the luck buff is already active.
• Family context: Caretaker shares the player_healed trigger with two siblings. Its ring is the widest of the family; its ring damage is the lowest because the luck bonus is the primary meta-payoff.

Family member	Ring radius (px)
Echo	160
Vitality Surge	180
Caretaker	200

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EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: The player_healed artifact-family comparison table (radii, damage tradeoff philosophy) appears here and on Vitality Surge / Echo entity pages — consider promoting to the artifacts roll-up or to a combat cross-reference page.

EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: The “runtime prepends a fifth common tier by reusing the uncommon values record” mechanic is artifact-system-wide and belongs on the artifacts roll-up, not per-entity pages.

EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: Buff stacking modes (refresh vs other modes) and the maxStacks parameter are shared engine semantics — candidate for an effect-engine concept page referenced from every artifact entity.