Penumbra (Requiem) Ending General Discussion

[Dren]

Just to clarify, the artefacts don't seem to have anything to do with the ending. I only found 2/9 artefacts in Requiem (yeah, I suck that badly), and I still had the option to turn and leave, ending up on the ship.

Yes, but if you collect all of them, you get something little extra. Same thing works with Black Plague's artifacts.

Oooooh... Guess who has two games to play through again?

It's just a little something after the end credits and statistics. I don't think it's worth it to re-play the entire game just for that (it could be worth it to re-play the game, but not just for the extra). So here's how you can cheat your artefacts together:

Spoiler below!

Find your savefile. On Linux, it's in ~/.frictionalgames/Penumbra/Requiem/save/spot. I don't know the locations for other platforms. Open the save from the incinerator (most recent one if you just finished the game) with a text editor. gedit worked for me, notepad would probably do the job as well. Somewhere at the beginning of the file there is a line:
<var type="2" name="mlStat_Collectables" val="N" />
where N is the amount of artefacts. Guess what, you can change this number to nine (or higher. I've got 10!). Save the file, start the game, load the save and finish once more. After the extra you'll also get a password.