Artifice

Artifice is an experimental discipline linked to ancient craft traditions. It separated from wizardry long ago, the one tradition focusing on theory, the other on practice.
Some artificers seek to reconstruct aspects of Titanic science, while others focus on the boundaries of 'practical Magic.' Because of this craft background, the discipline is bound up with tool use.
Artifice is an ancient practice, and in most areas enjoys a respectable status and official organisation in the form of a guild or Union. Artificer's guilds range from organisations active in mutual aid, advancement of the disciplines and external charity, to draconian, borderline criminal syndicates intent on controlling practice and expanding influence.

Industrialism

A common core tenet of artificers is craftsmanship. The work of the hand and the hammer and the spark, as it is known by its practitioners in Yethera, must never be done shoddily. A recent deviation from this principle is the practice of industrialism.
Developed by the Artificers' Guild of the Sacred Republic and mostly employed only by government servants, this practice focuses on the craft of infusion, with the goal of producing large numbers of simple magical items with a limited life span. Industrialism is little practiced by adventuring artificers, both because it requires a substantial workshop to practice, and because it lacks a certain romanticism.
Artifiers tend to be eccentric individuals, whose quixotic studies produce disaster and inspiration in equal measure. They consider wizards hidebound, wizards consider artificers dangerous, or foolish, and lacking in rigour.

Sutoan Artifice

Artifice is built on the discovery of the principles underlying folk magical practice, both the first steps to and the practical sibling of wizardry. Despite its experimental nature, it enjoys a lot of popular trust that the incomprehensible front of wizardry rarely relieves. In Suto, this acceptance often masks a less popular truth, as many sutoan artificer guilds direct a good part of their studies to Gontish Arcanotech.
Such research is not exactly proscribed, but it is typically discouraged, and official work on the matter jealously controlled by the more prestigious academies of Suto. These academies use their prestige and position to suppress smaller research groups and corral the supply of Gontish artefacts. While the artificer guilds have the resources to challenge this monopoly, they often fall foul of laws - temporal or spiritual - forbidding practical research and experimentation into arcanotech, or charters drawn up in concert with academic advisers which explicitly restrict guild activities.
Because of this, guild research into arcanotech is often conducted clandestinely, under the auspices of mystery cults within the official organisation. The membership of these cults varies from guilf to guild, sometimes formed of the guild's inner circle, sometimes kept secret from the hierarchy and operating almost as a parallel guild. Either way, these cults guard their secrets jealously, maintaining hidden 'dark vaults' for their relicts and experiments. Even an accidental breach of secrecy can result in dire consequences.
Most artificer recreations of arcanotech are more accurately viewed as magical items, but a very small number of researchers, colloquially known as mechanists, have unlocked sufficient secrets to create genuine arcanotechnology: objects of mundane construction, which are regardless able to generate magical - or rather, arcane - effects.