I figured this could use its own thread because I don’t want to fill up the news thread with GIFs.
There is one puzzle I am obsessed with but I can’t seem to get the high score. It is Health Tonic. I have created three solutions, one for cost, one for cycles, and one for area. Area’s the one killing me.
I’m 2 short to beat Wourme on area here. I’m having trouble progressing through the game when I’m sure I could beat this score.
I love how many ways there are to make even the simplest thing. It’s pretty incredible. I tend to start with something cheap, mostly on accident, then try to optimize for other things if I care
This game captures one of my favorite elements of Factorio very well. (I still plan to set up a multi-player server for Factorio when it leaves Early Access.)
I may have to go back and try some of the other Zachtronics games when I am done with this one. I’d been meaning to try SpaceChem, but I was kind of intimidated by the idea of it. I also avoided Demon’s Souls for a while due to that sort of intimidation. Maybe being wary of a game is actually a sign that I will like it.
Oh, I wasn’t all that late to the game on Demon’s Souls. I had finished it and was hooked before Dark Souls came out. Even having experienced all the games in the series, I still get nervous thinking about starting each new one before I actually play it.
I swear this might be the most elegant looking puzzle game I’ve ever seen. I probably won’t get to it for a while as it is hard to justify when I have two other “Zach-em ups” that I already own and have yet to start (although I don’t even know if I can parse TIS-100, it was tossed in a bundle), but I look forward to some day crafting the least elegant solutions man has ever seen.
I also half-fear the game eventually getting as insane as Spacechem did as that game drug me into some dark places.
As far as I can tell this game stays pretty sane. I think it’s probably the most approachable Zachtronics game because most of the difficulty comes from trying to optimize, not necessarily from the levels themselves.
It even automatically keeps all your arms in sync, unlike SpaceChem (it essentially finds the arm with the most commands, and puts “waits” on the other arms so they have the same period, with some clever rules for offsets). I think this is a huge usability boost for beginners. It can get frustrating when trying to optimize, however. If I need to have arms with different periods, I have to duplicate commands out to the least common denominator. I’m hoping he eventually adds a feature to remove the syncing on a per-arm basis (that way, I only have to mess with the arm that’s out of sync, not all the arms).
The fastest you can pull inputs in this game is one every 2 cycles. For this one, I had a period 8 machine making a 3-sized output. This means I was wasting one input pull every 8 cycles. To fix this, I added the arms on the bottom to make their own copy of the output with the extra input I was getting every 8 cycles. (I do have a modification of this machine that does it in one cycle faster by having one less step in the upper portion, but that solution broke the gif maker and I didn’t feel like making it manually). Although, shit, now that I think about it, a 6 period machine would probably be faster and simpler since then the input rate would match the period. Down the hole again!
yep… although I did learn some important things while trying to optimize this one! There are useful things you can do with an extra 2 cycles, and you can grab something 1 cycle early if it’s soon to be connected to a currently-stationary object.
EDIT: Oh wow, using those revelations I just saved 2 cycles on the 2nd puzzle (Face Powder), which I thought for sure I had already optimized completely. Neat!
EDIT2: Hmm, down to 26 cycles on Face Powder. I think that’s the absolute minimum.
I’m glad they give friends scores in comparison so you can tear out your hair trying to figure where they eked out ahead. I feel obligated to go back to a solution because Birch has a single cycle over me. *shakes fist*
Area is something I just instinctively work towards and then have to unwind when aiming for cycles. It sort of goes hand in hand with cost so you can kill two birds with one stone. However cycles is literally an escalating arms race. When I get home I’ll post someone’s video of a ridiculous example of such.
I agree that it’s much easier to get a grip on than SpaceChem, especially after seeing a tournament of good players play through that one. I’ve got a problem solving perspective but some of the solutions they came up with in optimizing certain ways is boggling.
My favorite cycles solution I saw was on reddit. All of the outputs are fully saturated so it has to send extra salt off of the bottom left side in infinitely expanding chains.
