"Wait...people are buying actual liquor for their engines??? I get the alcohol is easy to separate from the additives, but, unless you're getting some seriously strong stuff, these bottles are literally labelled as their total volume being under 20% actual alcohol! It'd be better to just use pure elemental water, fire, and some calcifiers to get much more liquor much more quicker! Why are we buying from breweries at all???"

And then there's a line break to separate the lore from the solve notes.

Well, 81 worst case scenarios for cycles, anyways. Your area may vary.

As usual, when I make a computation solve, this is some of my best work! It's definitely NOT optimal, but as a second-rate alchemist, I take a sense of pride in making an engine that solves this puzzle at all, regardless of placement. It's nothing TOO impressive, just some standard checks to see what's a fire, what's a salt, and what's a neither of those things(and therefore water).  This machine DOES NOT take advantage of the fact you can check your work using the output glyph. At all. Instead, take this as an example of what an engine COULD look like if checking against the output was NOT allowed. I'm excited to see solves more than 1702 wSum less than this. It was really fun making this machine! Good luck to those placing above me!

Signed, Trixie Kagami: The Cheshire Alchemist, Sorting 3 Atoms Since 2025