Ok, so I am.just a out to start a campaign and one of the players decided to take an artifact and I want to make my own so I can hook it into my story. Thing is, the item creation rules are so confusing. Firstly there is the whole bit about the levels of the items and CP spent on artifacts. Then there is the bit about the presence and how many power levels you can buy but power levels are determined by the source of the power but the number of levels you can buy is limited by the items presence and then there is a thing about weaknesses and costs being negative but I didn't find any negative costs and the presence of the item is increased by the magic abilities but trying to reverse engineer the example items in the book doesn't add up to the correct total presence (just seems to include the quality but no magic) and how does one determine motion of use.... Etc.

Are there any step by step.guides anyone has thrown together?

There's only one step-by-step I've ever found, and it was one that used custom rules, so it'd not super helpful, unfortunately.

There is, however, an artifact builder in Excel that I've found (made by Rii Nagaja, who I believe was in this very forum once upon a time, or, if not, then the other one), and then there's the one inside my Open Office Sheet which I also like, because I made it, and because it can toggle between the normal rules and my custom ones, which I like better anyways.

I'd go into more detail about this right now, but Scissura already contains my diatribe (well, not EXACTLY a diatribe, but certainly a long-winded rambling) on the subject, and normal Artifact Creation is a long, drawn-out process, AND most of the things I'd be going over are calculations that both of the sheets do automatically anyways. Notion of Use and Supernatural Analysis have no hard rules about them, so they're really just numbers you set at-will. They follow certain patterns though, so you can usually just look at items of the Power Level and go from there. If none of the three things I've linked here help, then I may be willing to come up with a quick-start guide to Artifact Creation, but it'd take me a day or two to get it done (because I'm in the process of moving and such).

Hope this helps.

Wow, thanks so much. I'm going to dive into it when I get home from work this evening. But cursory glances show this will work great. Thanks for providing such tools! Makes life so much easier for the rest of us.

You are most welcome. I'm here to help, after all.

So, I'm looking at artifact creator and I have a quick question. As a GM, making an item, I can ignore all the bits about PP and materials providing a certain PP, etc. Correct? The only thing I need to keep track of is keeping the presence of the powers below the original presence of the power, right? Using the items in the book as a guide for the general overall strength of, say, a level 2 item, right?

Right enough, yeah. If you want to you can think about materials and PP when creating a story behind it, but otherwise there's not much point. There was also a guide on converting PP to a certain Artifact Rank, so that you could easily make calculations and not judge it on a subjective level. I put the charts in Scissura, but I also think the Artifact Creator has a page which breaks down the costs for most of the artifacts, so that can help.