Systems / 9 min read
SpiritVale Items Guide: Equipment, Materials, Cards & Artifacts
A SpiritVale item guide only stays useful if it separates permanent structure from patch-specific rules. The categories below come from the SpiritVale Info wiki, and every cost, drop rate and craft rule attached to them is quoted from an official announcement dated in this page. Nothing here is a price or a best-in-slot claim: those belong to a dated database entry, not to an evergreen page.
Start with the five documented categories
The community-maintained SpiritVale Info wiki groups progression items into consumables, materials, equipment, artifacts and cards. Equipment covers weapons, armour and accessories; materials feed crafting and refinement; cards are the socketed layer; artifacts are the set-based layer that the wiki treats separately from ordinary gear. That classification is still the fastest way to work out what an item is for, but two later updates moved the boundaries of it. The 0.32.0 Advanced Artifacts and Grimoires update added an advanced tier on top of the artifact system and a craft for advanced grimoires, and the 0.34.0 PvP Conquest update added a new offhand item type that can be used with a weapon while keeping a two-handed stance. So classify first, then check which version your information belongs to before you value anything.
Advanced artifacts: the numbers 0.32.0 published
The 0.32.0 announcement describes an Advanced Artifact Box that gives a random artifact out of 32, drawn from eight sets, and lists three ways to interact with it. The box drops at a stated 0.1 percent rate from A-Rank and S-Rank maps, it can also be obtained for 25 Umbral Fragments, and dismantling an advanced artifact produces a Masterwork Core. Refining an advanced artifact requires a Masterwork Core on top of the existing material, and the announcement says the core is consumed on success. Those four sentences are the whole of the official advanced-artifact economy: a box, a drop rate tied to the two highest map ranks, a fragment price, and a core cost for both dismantling and refining. Anything a guide tells you beyond them, including which of the eight sets is strongest, is player observation rather than published fact.
Masterwork Cores are the real constraint
A Masterwork Core is not a generic material you accumulate by playing; the 0.32.0 notes present it as something you obtain by dismantling an advanced artifact. That single detail decides your upgrade order. The same core is spent on advanced artifact refinement, and the same update also requires 25 of them for an advanced grimoire craft. If your plan needs one refined artifact and one grimoire, you are planning around dismantled advanced artifacts first, not around anything you can buy from a vendor listing. Because the notes say the core is consumed on success for refinement, budget for the successful attempts and record failures separately rather than assuming a fixed cost per attempt. The announcement does not publish a market price, a drop-weighted average, or a time estimate for either path, and this page will not invent one.
Grimoires are crafted at class masters
Advanced grimoires are not farmed like artifacts. The 0.32.0 notes say they are crafted at class masters using a matching artifact set, 25 Masterwork Cores and one corrupted core, and that the result is account bound. Two consequences follow directly. First, the craft consumes a full artifact set, so the set you were saving as a set is also the set you might be spending. Second, an account-bound grimoire is committed to the character that crafted it, which makes the class decision come before the material decision rather than after it. The 0.34.0 notes then show how much a grimoire can move: Second Wind, described there as the berserker grimoire, is disabled in PvP; Overflowing Grace now provides shielding to the healed target instead of the priest; and Hidden Strikes is listed as now working properly. A grimoire's value is therefore a version-stamped fact, not a permanent one.
Perfect crafts inherit refinement and cards
The 0.34.0 notes include one line with a large effect on how you spend cards and refinement materials: Perfect gear crafts now carry over Refines and Cards. Read narrowly, that is a statement about Perfect crafts only, and it does not promise the same behaviour on ordinary upgrades. Read practically, it means a card you socket and a refinement you commit are no longer necessarily lost when you move to a Perfect-tier version of the same item. Before that line existed, the cautious assumption was that any socketing investment on a placeholder was temporary. The safe version of the new assumption is narrower: check whether the craft in front of you is a Perfect craft, and if it is not, assume nothing carries over. The card socketing page covers the socket layer itself, and the refinement page covers material sequencing.
Map rank decides what is worth farming
The 0.32.0 notes publish a map-rank table that is more useful for item planning than any tier list. S-Rank is listed at 2.00 times health, 1.75 times damage and 3.00 times experience; A-Rank at 1.75, 1.45 and 2.40; B-Rank at 1.50, 1.30 and 1.90; C-Rank at 1.25, 1.15 and 1.40; D-Rank at 1.00 across the board. The same note names S-Rank as Dark Fortress and Dark Manor, A-Rank as Forge, Night Garden, Warcamp and Turtle Nexus, B-Rank as Abyss Castle, and C-Rank as Goblin Cave, Swamp, Forgotten Depths, Starfall and Demon's Maw. This matters for items because the advanced artifact box is stated to drop from A-Rank and S-Rank maps only. The 0.34.0 balance pass then reduced health scaling for the middle ranks, from plus 25 to plus 15 percent on C, plus 50 to plus 30 on B and plus 75 to plus 45 on A, so a farming note written against the 0.32.0 numbers is measuring a different map than the one you are standing in.
Before you spend materials, ask four questions
First, which of the five categories is this item actually in, because the answer decides whether you are crafting, refining, socketing or equipping. Second, which version does the rule I am relying on come from, since the artifact economy changed in 0.32.0 and the gear-craft inheritance rule arrived in 0.34.0. Third, is the result account bound, which applies to advanced grimoires and changes whether the investment can ever move between characters. Fourth, does the step consume a Masterwork Core, because cores come from dismantling advanced artifacts and are the scarcest input in the published chain. Write the answers next to the item and the date you checked. A short note that names a version and a cost is worth more than a long one that names neither, and it is the only kind of note that survives the next balance pass.
Small changes that alter inventory work
Three lines in the 0.34.0 notes affect how you handle items rather than what they are worth. Consumables and gear can now be bound to the hotbar, which changes how much time you spend in menus during a fight. The settings toggle for picking up all materials now includes consumables as well, so a farming session clears ground drops differently than it did before. And fuzzy search in the auction house now works with Chinese and Japanese, which matters if you are searching item names outside English. The 0.32.0 notes add that the auction house is now accessed from the Market Board in towns, so listing and collecting are physical trips rather than remote actions. None of these are balance changes, but together they decide whether the items you already own are easy or awkward to use.
Frequently asked questions
Where does a Masterwork Core come from in SpiritVale?
The 0.32.0 announcement says dismantling an advanced artifact produces a Masterwork Core. The same notes use cores for advanced artifact refinement and for the advanced grimoire craft.
How do you get advanced artifacts?
The 0.32.0 notes describe an Advanced Artifact Box that gives a random artifact out of 32 across eight sets, dropping at a stated 0.1 percent rate from A-Rank and S-Rank maps, or available for 25 Umbral Fragments.
Do cards and refinement carry over to a better version of the same gear?
The 0.34.0 notes say Perfect gear crafts now carry over Refines and Cards. That statement covers Perfect crafts specifically, so do not assume the same for an ordinary upgrade.
Can an advanced grimoire be traded to another character?
No. The 0.32.0 notes state that advanced grimoires are crafted at class masters and are account bound.