As promised, wacky waving arms video on Alchemical Jewel:
EDIT: Also gauntlet thrown 31 cycle Health Tonic with merely my fore (4) arms. Each of them has a single wait space so I’m thinking it’s not quite optimal yet.
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Area is easier for me. Even my ‘better cost’ solutions are tiny. Maybe i played too much spacechem, space is very tight in that game.
Thats a 70. I think its possible to get a 60 in this level. (basically your solution minus a rail)
Edit: Yes it is.
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dangit
You just need to pack your lead a little closer 
Zach Barth is doing a AMA today.
I am intentionally not studying anyone’s attempts at cycles because that’s an area I haven’t focused on as much so far. But to the extent that I have tried it, this has consistently been my (somewhat frustrating) experience:
I was going to post a GIF of one of my ridiculous cycle-focused machines that crashes right after it reaches the goal, but it’s an enormous file. The game seems to have become confused recording the animation anyway so that it doesn’t really reflect how it worked. I think it expects it to loop nicely and attempts to compensate somehow.
Yeah, there are little optimization tricks to both of those puzzles. Face Powder is especially devious, I think, but instructive on how you should approach the harder puzzles.
Today at work, it suddenly entered my mind that the Hair Product solution I posted above was not optimal. In fact, I couldn’t help seeing it as downright sloppy once I realized my mistake. I’m embarrassed to have described it as elegant. (It is elegant now that I’ve fixed it, though.)
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AUUUGH rassle-frassing cycle-saving @Gate88 somehow getting 2 cycles out of what I thought was optimal Waterproof Sealant. Here’s a near optimal cycle Airship Fuel to console myself…
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I remember reading years ago about people who put their experience leading WoW guilds on their resumes. Apparently it worked sometimes? Maybe you should include some Opus Magnum GIFs on your next resume?
How do i post spoilers?
Surround it with [spoiler][/spoiler]
Hi @SageGrimm I’m sorry!
EDIT: I think there’s another cycle to squeeze out of this level but I can’t quite get it to work with my design.
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A couple control tricks that I’m not sure are explained anywhere in the game but I find super useful when messing around with my machines:
- If you select a group (either in the instructions or on the field) and hold control and drag, you’ll duplicate that group. If you duplicate arms this way, it’ll duplicate their instructions as well.
- If you’re currently dragging a group around, pressing A or D will rotate that group. This is useful because all commands are rotationally symmetric, so the parts will all act the same after rotation (although I find sometimes I have to re-lay tracks. Not sure if they rotate correctly.)
- If you’re currently dragging arms, you can rotate them with A or D or extend/contract them with W and S.
- You can undo with CTRL+Z and redo with CTRL+Y/CTRL+SHIFT+Z.
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Infinite blood potions
Well, looking at my solution it’s clear that I didn’t saturate input which would let you make another product while the main machine made four. So at least at a high level I know how that was possible (and it’s a clever puzzle to teach optimization). Still, damn that’s low.
Stamina Potion is another one of those nice early teaching puzzles because it leads you to learn how to use twisting of the input which tends to be cycle-expensive.
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For some of the later puzzles, I find myself having to focus simply on finding a solution at all. When I attempt to go for efficiency, I spend too long on an unsuccessful approach.
I like how some of the products look like others at first glance but can’t be solved in the same way due to how the connections are laid out.
premature optimization is the root of all evils
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very relatable lately
sometimes I wish I disliked programming so I’d hack something together and get back to productive game work quicker
i only seem to care about working on one thing at a time for X time (weeks to months, often) and those things lend themselves better to different projects so add that to the reasons why i never finish anything
but yeah wow uh unity editor extensions, am i right . . . ? ? ?
anyway time to go rewrite the unity grid gizmo to use PO2 sizes i guess!
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