Artifact

Artifacts usually refers to the items in Heretic and Hexen that may be picked up and used at a later time for various effects. The sphere powerups in Doom are also occasionally refered to as artifacts, but this is less common.

In Heretic, the player may only keep one artifact of each type when moving to the next level. This means that attempting to stockpile artifacts for later levels will result in their being wasted, so it is better to use surplus artifacts within each level.