@packbat oh that's neat! i'd love tos ee some of those custom puzzles
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@packbat and i'd love to see your solutions to the more complex puzzles, i like to see other people's approaches to these things
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@Felthry sure thing - any specific puzzles you want us to look and see if we have gifs for? we really enjoyed playing it and we're proud of some of our solutions

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@packbat let's see, i'm interested in parade-rocket fuel, since we did it using only two of the three chambers and i'm not sure what the third chamber was intended to be used for? i also feel like it'd be interesting to see other people's solutions to van berlo's chain, and if a properly elegant solution to curious lipstick is possible, i'd love to see it because ours is... not a mess, but not what we'd call elegant
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@Felthry it looks like we only saved one gif of each, so they're probably not particularly optimized - you can look them over, tho! we did in fact use all three chambers for Parade-Rocket Fuel, too.

Described them in the image descriptions - pretty long.

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@packbat see that one for parade-rocket fuel makes a lot more sense than what we did

we didn't realize you could send a single atom through the double conduit until accidentally discovering it near the end of working on this solution
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@Felthry it's really fun looking at different solutions!

amused by the way y'all sent that one salt atom back and forth just to store it out of the way

(and image descriptions not necessary - we got caught up in enthusiasm)

looking through ours ... I think we really liked our solution to Golden Thread

do y'all have favorite solutions?

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@packbat I'm rather fond of our golden thread solution too!

i think our favorite is probably either voltaic coil or warming tonic, both of which are here (look at the top arm of warming tonic, i like how there's no need to reset it even though it's a single arm!)

i also like how everything interacts to get out of other things' way in this solution to mist of hallucination
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@packbat i think i just like ones where lots of things are dancing around to get out of the way of other things, or just a lot of shuffling around to get things into the right positions (like what happens in the right chamber in eyedrops of revelation here. also i like how we had to manage where things were to prevent another molecule of stabilized water from being input there)
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@Felthry ooo - that input-delay is really neat!

I think a lot of our favorites are either very tiny or, like, very modular

our Reconstructed Solvent solution ended up looking a little silly, I think - not altogether a bad thing, but very wiggly

looking at our Eyedrops of Revelation solution, it looks like we just split all the inputs into atoms and handled them one at a time through the rest of the system

@packbat we had a heck of a time getting the eyedrops of revelation outputs to fit along with the other stuff, and ended up having to put one of them in another chamber

I don't think there's any way to do reconstructed solvent without it being all wiggly
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@Felthry it's really funny seeing the Reconstructed Solvent in the epilogue and being like, "Anataeus, why didn't you just make that? Why you have to be so extra?"

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@packbat Well, the epilogue writer didn't know for sure what it was being used for, so maybe it wouldn't have actually worked

but also Anataeus is absolutely the kind of person who would just casually make the alkahest
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@Felthry we didn't think about it, but our Fragrant Powders solution was (predictably) very much maneuvering things around to fit

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@packbat oh ours didn't have much of that actually!

we did also make a faster and cheaper, and an even faster but more expensive, variant that did involve some finagling of the atoms
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@Felthry ooo, that second one is cool

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@Felthry noice!

our best Voltaic Coil design was similar, but slower and cheaper because we did all our lead operations with the piston arm

we don't actually have a Warming Tonic gif saved, interestingly

we do have a Mist of Hallucination one, though - although not with the nice dodging-out-of-the-way.

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@packbat I feel like different people optimize different things here! we tend to optimize speed whenever possible, at the expense of area and cost
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@Felthry yeah, you're very right - we tend to optimize cost at the expense of speed

see e.g. our Purified Gold solution in 60g that took 1415 cycles

that's a bit of a silly example though

image two is our Litharge Separation - I think it's very much our economical mindset

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@packbat meanwhile, our purified gold cost a mere 620g

we do have a cost/area-optimized purified gold though. the recording is uh, too big for mastodon. it's 12 area and 75g, and i can see a way to get it down to 11 area. it takes 2182 cycles, and reducing it to 11 area will add something in the vicinity of 10~20 to that. another friend of ours has a leaderboard entry that says 9 area and i have no idea how they did it

i am going to just compress it with 7zip and send it to you on matrix or something because i can't find any way to compress it that works
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@Felthry ahh, our fast Purified Gold was 340g, 206 cycles, 34 area

and whoa, yeah, that's tiny - 11 is already tiny, 9 is ... if that's not mathematically the smallest, it's close

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@Felthry loaded up Opus Magnum and recorded our "Warming Tonic" solution -125G, 124 cycles, 50 area

also tried to make a fast one while we had the game open - landed at 270G, 41 cycles, 82 area

(I think one of our Steam friends managed a 27-cycles solution, though)

@Felthry We uploaded them to Steam - https://steamcommunity.com/id/packbat/myworkshopfiles/?appid=558990&sort=score&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall is the page - but we can send files if y'all aren't playing on Steam!

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@packbat how do we get to this on the steam client? i can't seem to figure it out
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@packbat oh never mind, found it!
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@Felthry 👍🏽 🎒 ✨

@Felthry we'd love to see y'all's solutions to any of our puzzles, btw! no obligation or rush, though

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@packbat you'll definitely see them when we do them! might not be today though
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@Felthry yeah, we'll be going to bed soon ourselves

thanks for chatting about this!

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@packbat okay, this one was fun
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@packbat so was this one! not as optimized as i'd like though
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@Felthry oh neat! your solutions are so different than ours - it's cool seeing such a distinct style.

we really should try to get more sleep but here's our GIFs of those two - for Golden Dye we went minimum-area, for the other we just ... did something that worked, it's not optimized.

@packbat i fixed a thing where one of the arms on the track was doing things in a different order from the rest, because it was bugging me (it doesn't change any of the numbers)
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@packbat i just really like circular tracks with several arms on them trading roles, apparently
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@Felthry they're very fun!