Farming artifacts for credits is too easy and too rewarding.

[grizzled prism]

After unlocking the Advanced Artifact Detector and being able to find invisible artifact nests, it's very easy to farm credits in Romashka Cooperative. Simply go to the 2 nearby anomaly fields and get guaranteed artifacts that sell for a lot. Once you're able to go into distortion fields, a third easy artifact spot opens up.
Once you have collected the artifacts, return to base, sell, sleep to reset the tide, and repeat. Easy money.

The problem here is that artifact farming is low risk with high reward, while doing missions and/or clearing areas for loot is high risk with low reward. It should be the complete opposite!
Exploration, clearing areas of enemies, doing missions, these things should be encouraged and they should be worth it. Instead I find that the complete opposite is encouraged. When it comes to gaining credits, it's encouraged to stay away from enemies to avoid spending credits on ammo and healing. With custom difficulty settings pushed to the absolute maximum, you can easily end up with a net loss doing missions because of ammo costs alone. The loot and mission rewards simply do not cover the cost. This isn't so much of a problem on lower difficulty, but you're still better off farming artifacts.

Artifacts sell for a lot, you can find them in the same area after every tide, there are spots close to base for quick and low risk trips, and you can even avoid dealing with any enemies altogether by using the cover of darkness combined with night vision!
Meanwhile missions reward you with less credits compared to artifacts, their location is different after each repeat, they can end up far away from base, and they're usually crawling with enemies.

I've added a piece of the Romashka Cooperative map with easy artifact farm areas marked with a green circle. Depending on difficulty settings, 2 of these areas spawn 2-3 artifacts, and the one up north surrounded by red water spawns 1-2.

Into the Radius 1 had the problem that farming missions could be easily exploited for credits. You could cancel and accept missions to get a mission in a different spot for a different reward until you got a high paying mission close to base. Repeat the process and you could become rich easily with low risk high reward missions. I'm very glad this got fixed in Into the Radius 2. You can't change the location or reward of a mission now by terminating it and accepting it again. You have to complete the mission to get one at a different location now.

With missions fixed, artifacts are the new problem. I'd like this problem to be resolved somehow so that the fun gameplay of clearing areas of enemies is rewarded instead of punished.

Collecting artifacts comes with its own challenges of traversing anomaly fields while also having to deal with enemies sometimes. The anomaly fields are different after each tide, which maintains a level of challenge. This gameplay works, but it shouldn't be so vastly superior in terms of reward compared to doing missions or clearing areas for general loot. Generally, low risk should yield low reward, and high risk should have high reward opportunities.

[grizzled prism]

As for the solution, that's up to the developers. I'll leave some suggestions just in case though.

There are multiple things that can be adjusted. Artifact value can be decreased, general loot value can be increased, and mission rewards can be increased.

What's perhaps the most important though, is tackling the consistency of available artifacts similar to how missions were improved compared to Into the Radius 1. Instead of respawning artifacts in the same anomaly clusters after every tide, perhaps it's better to cycle where they spawn somehow. For example, say you have 3 different anomaly fields in a map called spot A, B, and C. These spots are in different corners of the map. At first, spot A contains artifacts, and spot B and C are empty. Once you clear spot A, the next tide will spawn artifacts at spot B, but not at A and C. Once you clear B, the next tide will spawn artifacts at spot C, and so forth.

This is just a simple example of cycling artifacts, and it can be done in different ways. The key point is that by cycling where artifacts are and forcing the player to go to different areas of the map, you prevent the player from farming the same spot over and over. You encourage exploration of different areas with different challenges instead of allowing the player to keep farming the same easy spots.
This matches how missions currently work, since you can repeat the same mission over and over, but the location of the next mission changes after completion, forcing the player to explore deeper into the map.

[autumn hollow]

I would also add that altered items are too common in forest and not common enough in outskirts. Forest is way to easy to farm for loot when compared to outskirts.