Opus Magnum (from Zachtronics of SpaceChem/Infinifactory fame)

I was trying to find a use for the six armed manipulators. If not this puzzle, then which one!

I won’t spoil too much by posting optimised solutions, but this one really made me happy for some reason:

Wow.5

What the hell is going on in this thread? What are those? That stuff can’t be anything that makes sense!

-Tom, who wouldn’t know Opus Magnum from Opus Dei

That is beautiful.

If all you people in this thread don’t also own Factorio, you’re doing it wrong. It should scratch the same itch, especially if you crave “more”.

The 6-arm contraption is either beautiful or insane. Or both. I need to lie down.

Wow, yeah. That one is great.

I tried the demo a year or two ago, but hated the fact I had to move a little guy around. Ruined the game for me. Was pretty disappointed because I had already finished with Space Chem (5 stars) and everything I had seen and read about Factorio looked great.

Fair enough. You get used to it, and mods can help alleviate that pain too should you ever get the itch to try it again (“Long Reach” and “Squeak Through” is what you’d want, for starters).

I will look those up, because everything else about the game looked superb.

Qft23

Dude, you didn’t Q anything!

I was conserving ata.

ood mov

You know, now that I think about it, I should have said I was optimizing for area.

I like you.

You can play Factorio without the little guy if you want to (even switch back and forth). I never played with the little person.

This does indeed feel like the best Zachtronics game so far. The physical constraints can be absolutely infuriating in a good way! It’s so easy to come up with theoretically great solutions, and then have a hell of a time actually laying it out.

It’s pretty slow going for me though; I’m incapable of leaving a puzzle until I get at least tied for 1st on the friends leaderboard and in the best histogram bucket. So 9 hours in, and I still have a couple of puzzles left in chapter 1 :-/

Which bucket? Unless they changed it the three measures are mutually exclusive.

In my opinion the physical constraints are very loose in general compared to other Zachtronics games. I think the loosest, in fact. Even infinifactory had a limited playing field.

But I agree it’s one of their best games, on par with Spacechem for me, but not quite fully improving on it due to the aforementioned issues.

A separate solution for each of the three metrics, of course.

I agree that the constraints are minimal for getting a solution that works. Which is exactly as it should be, I’ve mentioned in earlier zachtronics threads that they usually stop being fun for me when a naive solution is no longer possible due to space constraints, and you have to start with something complicated rather than getting there gradually. The simple thing just can’t work.

It’s the optimization where you start to feel the good kind of pain in opus magnum; there’s so many pieces moving at the same time, and the collision detection is so granular that things like the exact angle you slide something in/out starts to matter. In the code- based ones there’s never any uncertainty like that, since the timing is discrete.

I like that I didn’t hit the same barriers when I completed all the puzzles the first time through. But I do wish that there was now a way to replay the same puzzles with a restriction such as not having the entire grid available, the way many Zachtronics games have done before.