I wish I could find sub-1000, but it's just not going to happen for this layout, I've hit a local minimum with this one. There is actually very minimal conditional logic here. Left half of the solve either dupes elemental and outputs, or stays salt and turns into vitae and mors to get disposed. Right half first scans the input "metal" and then loops to create a copy every 21 cycles. The trick here is that gold acts the same as an elemental, so it'll always be creating some metal. There is a simple check at the end before the metal is outputted to see if elemental is currently outputting, but otherwise nothing crazy.

I don't know how well this will rank since it's fairly straightforward, just heavily optimized within this specific layout. I used to dupe 2 metals and use one to restart the duping, but figured out retaining the memory was better, but that was my only real improvement off of my initial solve. Since I'm not pulling QS at full rate, the metal rate could be cut in half, but I'm not sure it's worth the cost. Surely sub-1000 is possible, so I'm very curious who'll get it.