Nice job. I think Richard matched you though :-)
I’m still behind.
56 cycles on Armor Filament (chapter 2)!
I have finally matched everybody’s 62 cycles on Raffined Gold, although I have no idea how I managed to successfully pull off the ( I think needed?) slightly desynched chain, as I was going through the process using merely intuition and some trial and error. I think the lack of this approach is what keeps me away from the higher tier, as I used the reset order all the time on all my puzzles.
Well, because you mentioned it, I went back and tried it too. I was stuck on 63 cycles, very frustrating!
I also had to use desynched commands to get to 62, but until just now I hadn’t figured out that you can right-click and drag on the program area to scroll your program and thus get more space for instructions.
What do you guys mean by desynched? A 62 on that puzzle should be totally straightforward, no tricks needed.
And just to get back into the game, I shaved off one more cycle from Chapter 2 puzzles of Hair Product (50), Mist of Incapacitation (26) and Courage Potion (26).
I believe you, but I couldn’t figure it out. In order to get 62 I had to move the gold atom off the converter in the same cycle it got created. This is on an odd-numbered cycle, so the arm that moves it off has to be out of sync with the ones moving the mercuries on to the converter. It’s actually even weirder than that, though. I had to have 6 empty cycles between delivering the first lead and the second, but seven cycles between the second and the third, and every one after that. I still don’t really understand it.
Can’t we focus on Armor Filament, where I’m still 2 cycles ahead of you?!? (The only one where I’m ahead of you!)
But that kind of thing is totally normal and harmless :) Just to check, did you notice that programs can start from any time slot, and they’ll basically do the right thing when looping. (So if you have two programs of length 4, with A starting on cycle 1 and B on cycle 2, you get an execution of 1: A1, 2:A2B1, 3: A3B2, 4:A4B3, 5:A1B4, 6:A2B1, etc).
Ah. That sounds odd indeed, especially this early on. There’s a couple of later puzzles where a competitive solution requires writing out the full execution with no looping. Those puzzles are the worst.
This is true. This game needs better control structures, and possible some kind of procedure call syntax.
Here’s my 62 cycle Refined Gold solution, since everyone seems to have got there now. I’d love to see other people’s as mine is very boring.
Oh, I like yours better than mine.
Mad props for managing to use a 6-arm for something that’s not radially symmetric. It’s probably the least useful piece in the game.
That’s a lot of spinning! Looks like three rotary telephones went through the teleporter in the Fly.
Josh, how do you reduce the size of your animated gif down to < 1 MB? When I created mine it’s almost 5MB so it is too large to post here.
I didn’t, I think the size of the resulting GIFs just varies wildly depending on the solution. The Refined Gold one I posted was too big and I had to upload it to imgur and post the link here, the Face Powder one was small enough to upload here directly.
Ah, OK. Thanks
Here is my solution for Refined Gold.
I have a question. I had to program it like this…
Is there a simpler way to do this without all the repeat blocks? I couldn’t get it to work if I just let it reset to the first instruction.
I bet jsnell has a better answer, but your 1 and 2 arms have a 4-instruction cycle, and your 3 and 4 arms have a 10-instruction cycle. So you’ll have to repeat your 1 and 2 arms 5 times, and your 3 and 4 arms twice, so everything comes out 20 instructions. As he mentioned earlier, they don’t all have to start on the same cycle (vertical column); they’ll all repeat at the end of whatever the longest one is. At least I think that’s how it works.
Super similar to Rob’s here:
My program is an even uglier mess, because of a still lacking comprehension of the inner meanings of these commands:
Wow, that is similar!