this solve goes out to Final Fantasy XIV going down for maintenance. I probably wouldn't have sat down and solved this puzzle otherwise o7

The way I solve for the tourney is really stressful, tbh.  I spend most of the week thinking about the puzzle, but when I sit down and place parts it takes me a long time to really get anywhere meaningful.

During the time I spent thinking I had two major breakthroughs in my thought process.  I was initially thinking I had to use triplex and/or unification to read which specific salt-like the input was.  But when I realized I could save the input in a new salt atom, it opened the world to a bunch of new possibilities.  This let me use animismus and split my mental state machine into a salt-like state, and a non-salt-like/metal state.

My second breakthrough was the idea to bring extra iron atoms to the quicksilver hexarm instead of encoding the amount of quicksilver I need in a long stick.  The tape being handled by the input arm, and simultaneously suppressing the input so there's no extra waste is way easier and cheaper than the giant mess I couldn't get working.  The main problem I ran into is that the place I calculate the quicksilver count is far away from my steady state.

P.S. the steady state for the salt-likes after the victory screen is such a fire beat tbh, was jamming with it earlier o: