Opus Magnum

MANNET?

I thought there was still a thread up for this, it was pretty active on this and other zachtronic games.

fucking wish i could finish this game, makes me depressed as im on the last world.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:24f8e08f7d17fa6e6ca24ba50855723482edb4fa
I don't think that's the most up to date version with all four pages of the Journal currently available, but it's the best I could find. There will be a DRM-free version after it's out of EA as well.

Are you sure? I usually keep an eye out for that sort of thing and I've only seen one Opus Magnum thread on 8/v/ since release.

In Opus Magnum? I kind of doubt it, the main campaign's not that tough. For SpaceChem I'd understand, the endgame is brutal.

Can this run on a potatium?

no spacechem. fucking omega elements

Well that was a pain

looks great, probably going to buy it sooner or later. then again, i could still put more hours into factorio and i have yet to even touch the zachtronics shenzhen game, which also looked nice and tempting. too much choice.
there's simply too much games, i feel more overwhelmed than happy everytime a new interesting game comes out.

I remember that being my favorite planet. I don't exactly remember what was so difficult about working with the Omega element, I just like flip-flop switches. Prepare your anus for the final defense mission, by the way, that shit took me a solid week to figure out, and my solution barely worked.

I think the chain puzzles in the main campaign get a little repetitive, but the Journal has some really creative ones. I should go back and optimize, this is an old solution.

Do it, man, Shenzhen I/O is great, I definitely preferred it to Opus Magnum. Still haven't done the Avalon City bonus campaign yet, I've heard it's really challenging.

Fuck, I still need to finish every Zachtronics game ever made. I hate that there's a new one that looks sick as shit knowing where I'm stuck at on Shenzhen and TIS.

omega element don't have a set molecular mass, so you can just spin spam elements to build them up. but its not that that makes it hard its that is a "you have to use everything you've learned so far" end level thing.
I really sucked at the defense missions…

These games look really, really difficult.

This game will make me feel retarded won't it?
I can already hear my brain crying just from looking at those gifs.

Oh yeah, but that's what makes it great. I really appreciated how tough the main campaign of SpaceChem was and that you don't have to go to some optional bonus campaign for a real challenge.
Hey, I never finished the only defense mission in Infinifactory, you're not alone.

What stumped you? There's a lot of hard shit in the TIS-NET but I think the only soul-crushingly hard thing in Shenzhen I saw was the color-changing shoes puzzle.

I think the difficulty is kind of overstated, to be honest, you shouldn't be intimidated. They don't get really, really difficult until the very end.
a) SpaceChem isn't that bad until the last planet and the last two defense missions
b) Infinifactory isn't that bad until the (bonus) Resistance Campaign
c) TIS-100 isn't that bad until the (bonus) TIS-NET directory
and Opus Magnum isn't that bad until the (bonus) Journal of Alchemical Engineering campaign, and even then it's not as hard as his other games.

spatial manipulation of objects in your mind feels good. unless you're a homosexual or a women.

Of course looking at someone else's solution will make your head spin. It's when you've made the solutions yourself that everything falls into place and you see everything
I know this is the case at least for Spacechem, which I very highly recommend

So is it pretty easy to sort of stumble into a decent solution, but the challenge comes from optimizing it?

Is this playable on toaster computers?

Something every math student ever already knows.

Anybody got a magnet for spacechem?

It depends, some of the more complex problems just end up requiring a lot of cycles. Definitely right about golfing being a lot harder though…. sometimes… it just works… I certainly enjoy it.

How do the fucking keybinds work? If I press the input for "grab" all it does is highlight the instruction-thingie.
Dragging shit around with the mouse really grinds my gears.

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You have to hold the key and then click RMB. Shift to highlight multiple things, Ctrl to drag and copy. You can also use A and D to rotate a group of parts when you're dragging it, which is really helpful.

Vitae puzzles are fun. Another WHEEL scheme from me.

More or less, especially in Infinifactory and Opus Magnum. Those don't have any restriction on your workspace, so you can keep expanding your solution indefinitely and you'll never run out of room.

I made a couple but they're not very good.

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That Alcohol Separation solution is actually pretty cool. The global record is 22 cycles, so apparently it's possible to do it crazy fast.

Comfy game, but where's the Loss edit?

here

wew, classic zach, I should've known better
TIS and shenzhen got my hopes up

Holy shit using two arms for one reagent is fast as fuck.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELS
That was really a pain in the arse.

Told you

I'd wish for more novel games in the future like TIS and Shenzhen, since those two were my favorites, but trying to classify their other games as "generic industrial assembly line shit" is a pretty shallow view on it.

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This was fun.

You can say I'm being unnecessarily negative, but the description is not inn inaccurate

spell check is fucking weird

Grammer nor spelling isn't an issue on THE CHAN

That was the crux of it, yeah, but I don't buy the "generic" part either. Zachtronics makes a pretty niche type of game and even the few imitators they've inspired have either fucked up the formula or failed to release their games at all, like Hardware Engineering or God Is a Cube.

You'd probably be more justified in saying it about Opus Magnum than anything else, since it's just The Codex of Alchemical Engineering with a new coat of paint, and even if you weren't aware of the Codex you could say "oh, it's like the chemical bonding from SpaceChem with the instructions and UI from Shenzhen and the factory parts from Infinifactory". All the same I don't think they've churned out enough of them to be accused of making the same generic game over and over again, there's plenty of novelty in each one to distinguish it from another. If they were a lesser developer they could have just released expansion packs for SpaceChem indefinitely and not given a shit about making new games.

gave me literal cancer to be tbh honest

Arguable
There's only so many times you can put together a machine to assemble an output in sequence before it all starts to blend together

SpaceChem, to me, is closer to TIS and Shenzhen than the other two since it's a network of instructions, even if it isn't asm and it isn't lines of text.
Infinifactory at least has the novelty of being 3D and having much larger-scale productions than the others, and I think you could argue it's more mechanically complex than any of his other games too. You can even make fully-automated solutions for some puzzles by using sensors and blocks to simulate punch card instructions.
Opus Magnum, from what I've seen so far, can be optimized to a higher degree than any of his other games.

I'm not going to make you debate huge bricks of text while you're on mobile but I still think you're wrong

Fair enough
I'm arguing from a more subjective standpoint anyway, so it's not a huge deal
I've just wanted a game with good alchemy forever

I'm enjoying this game immensely, thanks anons. Didn't realize this guy had another game out.

Jesus fucking Christ

Then this one's perfect for you, since in my experience this one's the easiest one to complete, although hard to make good solutions for.

That said, this is basically a clone of one of his old flash games, with a fuckton of improvements. Now I hope he'll remake KOHCTPYKTOP: Engineer of the People next. That one was always one of my favorits.
kongregate.com/games/krispykrem/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-people

This was fun.

These turned out pretty good. The invisible ink one is very slow, but I like the symmetry.

Just noticed I never ended up using the piston on that arm in the first one for anything. Oh well.

And there we go, that's the last puzzle currently available in the Journal. I took a break for a couple days to play something else but I knew it had to come to an end eventually, until Page V comes out anyway. This one was genuinely a pain in the ass to get running because of how bottlenecked you are with reagents, but the sad thing is the cycle count is pretty decent, even with how high it is.

I'd look up some other similar solutions on YouTube, Infinifactory fans are out of their fucking minds. Might be the best autism blocks game out there.

Minimizing cost can be such a bitch sometimes.

I personally look at them as two separate series.
SpaceChem, SpaceChem 3D, and SpaceChem 2, along with TIS-100 and TIS-100v2. Personally, I prefer the programming games to SpaceChem, but that's just me. Here's hoping that the next one of those can top Shenzhen I/O, but I doubt it. Might as well just do real EE at that point.

You do have to keep cost/cycle ration in mind but I think the noble family would let you spend more if it sped up production.

TFW you surpass the 1 percentile in water purifier

The molecules are plain pngs in the folder so you can make a custom puzzle and make the molecules anything you want.

Remove Chaika

You're not really wrong, but SpaceChem was technically The Codex of Alchemical Engineering 2 when it came out, I think Zachtronics even said so on their website. And The Codex had an expansion pack called Magnum Opus, which would sort of make Opus Magnum a remake of The Codex 1.5
I remember them joking that TIS-NET should have been called TIS-200 when it came out, since it was longer than the main campaign.
Oh it's not just you, I prefer them too. More than wanting a new programming-based game I just want something that blew my mind as much as TIS-100 did. I think it might happen, too, Zach gave a talk earlier this year and mentioned a game they were working on, and it didn't sound like Opus Magnum.

Top Percentile isn't necessarily the global record, but that's still impressive

Jesus christ

I originally tried to make a giant schlong for that puzzle, but it was impossible to get all the arms synced. Might redo it with pistons. I think I already have the design in mind. But that looks infinitely more tedious than what I did here.

I made a puzzle onnaworkshop, actually took me a couple hours to solve my own puzzle. It's Fulminate of Quicksilver if any of you were interested.

All of your extra little pieces are going into the trashcan in my solution

completed the first challenge.
How the fuck does anybody get more condensed than this? I checked the histogram and a large slice of people got a smaller solution, although I was in the plurality.

Well, I think there's a pretty active Zachtronics subreddit where they share solutions with each other. It's definitely a problem with the histograms.

Also you can totally get it smaller than that, this was a quick pass I did to record a gif and it's still 1 more than the top percentile.

Yeah, there we go

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

When your piston arm extends and then sweeps the Water out there, it counts as hitting those two tiles. There's a button in the UI to highlight the space which has been covered by the engine.

I think yours is bigger because the algorithm isn't considering how many hexes have parts on them, but is counting how many hexes ever have overlap with moving atoms and parts. When your solution extends the second water atom and swings it around into the bonder, it touches these four tiles, which causes your score to go up.

I guessed that makes sense.
I finished refined gold for maximum efficiency (almost) in the time it took for you guys to post that.

If you move the lead input next to the gold output, you can cut it down to the minimum of 6.

Also fuck off those little red and green bonds are impossible to see, I had this all worked out nicely. Probably won't take too much tweaking to fix, but still

>seeing this thread several years later reminds me of it so I googled someone else's solution
I feel like a fucking idiot for somehow not trying to go over the same symbols multiple times in a loop. It's not on the same tier as pic related but still feels pretty fucking awful.

Here's the unoptimized proof of concept solution I tossed. It's a complete clusterfuck and I'll probably go back and make it a more efficient version of it someday, just wanted to get this shit out of the way.

good times
Also, other solutions (not as good)

There we go, your move

Maybe I'm looking at it incorrectly but is that not functional? It's kind of circuitous but it should work fine, seems like your ratios might have a problem.
You haven't seen a clusterfuck

I'm in a similar situation and some people who know me well think I'm suffering from brain damage of some kind, but I don't want this to turn into a blogpost.

It's functional, I've tested it.

Yeah, I'm fucking tired

Well the story was that because he skipped all those grades that somehow affected his ability to play vidya.
Which is bullshit of course.
What I would believe is something like severe depression or drinking too much tap water

I like that first one.

I ended up liking this puzzle a lot, actually, you should submit it to the Journal. Tell Zach he should include it so it can be the third puzzle to use those special bonds.

It's basically fulminate of mercury, and the triple bonds were a necessity. That instruction track is pretty much accurate for what I had to do, though. Gimme a gi->>13829478 neat. I like it how you just threw the air into the trash because the ratios are set up so that one of the air reagent with 2 alcohol makes 2 product with only 1 waste atom and yet somehow yours is faster despite trashing most of the molecule components. Probably because of my hilarious roller coaster of arms on that huge track.

I did submit it to the journal, btw. Nice job on 89 cycles.
This time solve it without the trashcan MUHUHAHAHAHAAH. I would not have allowed the trash if I could have gotten a perfect ratio into it.

I probably could've done this better if I didn't care so much about adding in the WHEEL

Some more solutions I did just now.

My man.

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my final one today, probably

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had to fix this

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
cut cycles down by a bit

Nice. I have poison lipstick.

I guess, but you'd have to double up your instructions to account for for that extra atom to be thrown away every other time an alcohol product is input. It's faster because I can do a 2:1 reagent:product ratio instead of the 3:1 you intended. You may as well try to balance out that initial 9:2 ratio to be 6:1 evenly, SpaceChem style. I'm a little surprised the histograms don't mention your instruction count.

What is it with you people and wheels? I actually made it through every puzzle without realizing that you can put Van Berlo's Wheel on a track and have it move across the board, which should be a useful wheel trick.

A little hard with atom count, since the acid is literally based off of nitric acid, and the alcohol is the one from the campaign. Might create a puzzle later that's less limited by my desire for realism, and perhaps submit that- I am unsure if more than one of a person's puzzles would get put in the journal… dunno, I suppose if it's good enough.

WEW

I don't mean to keep bumping the thread from oblivion but the game just got updated with a new campaign chapter, the Appendix. Addresses my biggest complaint about the game mechanically, that you have infinite space to work with, these ones require you to work in a confined space.

A a a n d somebody made a brainfuck interpreter.

I don't understand why people spend time doing shit like this. Then again, why do I waste time shitposting and playing vidya?

Who could've seen this coming?

This give me headache.

I was about to declare this the hardest puzzle in the game until I realized the 63Corvi-style portals could be moved. Still quite a bit tougher than the main campaign or the Journal. Currently have the lowest cycle count even with the shitty solution but I think maybe one other person is on the histogram so far.

Also, these ones don't have Area listed on the histograms, they count Instruction Count instead, which is really nice

I was really shocked that anyone was able to simulate any kind of computation in something as automated as Opus Magnum

In a way it makes sense, given there's very few operators in BF.

Speaking of working in confined spaces

These new alchemy machines are really beautiful, man, the polished wood and ornamentation look great. The challenges are nuts, too, it's a way harsher space limit than usual even for Zachtronics and every piece you put down feels like you're backing yourself into a corner.

I have supreme respect for Zachtronics. This game, however, rubs me the wrong way. It looks like there's only one solution for every puzzle. I'm wrong, right?

yes, you're wrong.

On a scale from sloppy to mediocre, how is this elemental deatomizationizer-ometer?

Obviously you're wrong, if you read through the thread you'll see drastically different solutions for a lot of puzzles. I think there have been four totally different solutions for Alcohol Separation posted so far, which is what the next user's working on

The area's totally decent but the other two metrics aren't great. One of the piston arms could just a normal arm, for one thing.

I got an early magnet and didn't look for an updated one but I had fun with it.

Those are really good

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I'm sure this can be done better but this is the lowest cycle solution in this thread for it.

Appendix is tough as shit but already has some really impressive low-cycle solutions on the histograms. Should have a pretty Infinifactory-style puzzle done in a minute if I hadn't made the product backwards

Thus far

Yeah, there. I had to waste a lot of cycles at the end because I had mistakenly made it so the vitae part would be on the bottom. The Heist missions in Infinifactory were my favorite, though, so I liked the callback a lot.

My attempt

Actually, the way Zachtronics uses early access is they release complete games on it and then use it to expand them based on community feedback

Anyone got lower cycles than this?

broken it

It was a pain to time this properly so it didn't bind the next one in the middle.

Not bad

Always like when all the pieces are moving like that.

There's a way to save another 16 cycles, too, curious how that happens. Usually it's a matter of having two solutions running in parallel.

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Sorry

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Most of my solutions tend to have a lot of large spinning arms.

I noticed. It's pretty bad for your area but it's a great cycle optimization trick I need to use more often. You should keep an eye out for an updated magnet, I think you'd really like the later puzzles they've added. The last patch notes said they're planning to be out of EA in the near future so there should be a GOG release on the horizon.

I might eventually buy it since I'm enjoying it quite a bit but not during EA.

This is pleasing to my autism.

I'm only a few puzzles in but I already know this is the sort of game where if you let yourself, you can end up never being satisfied.

Yeah, it's been a problem with the histograms since forever, some of the metrics are inversely related to each other. All the more reason to make multiple solutions, though, since the histogram will only record your lowest score.

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought it was specific to the solution.
I think I'll just refuse to let it bother me. Somehow I don't feel as interested in optimizing for cycles as for space and cost.

And only now after I post do I notice that the Airship Fuel has a couple superfluous instructions that I forgot to delete after reducing from 18 to 16 tiles.

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Well, to be clear, I'm talking about the final score it compares to the top percentile. It'll still have dotted lines to show the scores for each individual solution. If you like low-space solutions you'll like the Appendix.

I like wheels

I guess that's that, that's every puzzle currently available in the game done. The playtime snuck up on me, it's almost reached the point where I've played Opus Magnum for as long as it took to beat SpaceChem, it definitely doesn't feel like it's been that long.

I've burned through over fifty of these games so far and at first I thought the computer generated them in such a way that there was always a solution
Now I find that that isn't fucking true, as per pic related. In case you're wondering, no, I have not removed any of the 'marbles' from alongside those lines, that's how they were. As you can see, I need to get to the Tin proxy; I can't get there because all the "paths" to this proxy are fucking blocked by things that NEED the proxy to be removed.
It's like locking the key inside a room. Practically all the impossible situations I come across are explicitly because of the metal proxy cascade being unaccessible. Pisses me off.

That arm doesn't need to be a piston. Save you 20G right there.
(pic related)
m a h n i g g a

Well, that's what they claimed, that there was an algorithm that ensured that every game was winnable, but I don't think that's true. They actually patched it a few weeks ago to make it so that you could match salt with salt, and doing that should have fucked up whatever balance they were working with.

You could submit it as a bug report, maybe something weird happened

Thanks, didn't notice that. I must have just grabbed the wrong arm at the beginning, since as far as I remember I never needed it.

Yeah that's the one I have, the version from the magnet posted in this thread.

Here's another example, taken far earlier in a game. I've hardly made any matches, maybe 2 or 3, you can see the original 3 corners where the puzzle started off. Again, I can't get to tin, because it's blocked by quicksilver. Since you can't get to something that's locked in a straight line, that means I would need to get tin as one of the very last pieces…which is not possible.

This does not please my autism.

I feel like either I'm missing something big about the "Repeat Instruction", or it's oddly niche in its usefulness.
Is there a way to make it only repeat a specific set of instructions, instead of everything?

Can't confirm, but I thought that if there's a gap between bits of instructions, it will only repeat the later set? Play around with it.

Oh, a new game by Zach? Is it released? I'm close to finishing Infinifactory (I think), and I wanted to get into Shenzen next, but this looks comfier.

It's not out of EA yet, but it'll release soon. Probably by 2018.

That's a generous estimate, Shenzhen was in EA for about six weeks and we're approaching that same point with Opus Magnum. They even mentioned in the 11/15 patch notes that it's going to be out soon.

Shenzhen is definitely harder, yeah.