I've heard of people having all sorts of "crew" artifacts and just saw a screenshot with over a dozen Tesseract Containers available. Is there a reason to not use up ship upgrade artifacts, especially when your only options are to use or scrap them? Are some of these used up in missions later on?

Shipbots: Become redundant when you have everything. Do not need upgrading, but need a CT lab item (dunno if there is one)
Terrasects/MassStoragePods: There comes a point where these are pointless. Often saved for the Pochycron Vault.
Androids: Generally used
Rescued Prisoners: Generally used.
DurtainiumBrackets/XchargeCells: Generally used.
Any that I missed?

As for using ship bots:
Maintenance Bot:
CT Lab item.
Costs: 30 Ship Bots, 20 Repair Drones, 20 Shield Restorers
Reduces upkeep by 10% for 1 week. Stacks.

At the moment, Helmsmen, X-Charge Cells, Alien Data Disks, Tess Containers and Mass Storage Pods are used in the CT-Lab giving good rewards to use them there. People are saving them to use there.

Lol please say your kidding.

Thanks guys. I really did not want to feel like I needed to start hording any more crud. My ship's cargo bay is already a disaster...

Idk? It was an idea off of the top of my head. There are people who do not use shipbots and have asked for a CT item using them. I thought it fitted with the items.

Maybe this?

Nano Bot
Costs: 200 Bots 100 Repair drones 100 Nanites Swarms
Hull Module: +Hull defence + Adds a small regeneration effect for the hull.
(Limit 1)

That's a better idea, although if you can only use it once it defeats the purpose of the object. We need something re-usable.

Scouting Drone
20 Shipbots, 40 Spy Probe - attack, 40 Spy Probe - Defense
Increases the chance to find a rare/extremely rare NPC for 30mins.

wait is the matience bot real

no it's not just an idea he had but for the lab you need 100 xcharges for one module 100 helmsmen for another but the real problem would be finding them in the lab in the first place. As for holding on to things I do cause I can tho not crew or ship buffs cargo sure ship-bots to.