I'd written something clever in my original solution notes about the frustration of production alchemy from an alchemist's point of view, borne of my own frustration with spending my first five hours unsuccessfully trying to make both silver and vitae in period 6. Once I allowed myself to build a period-8, I got an initial solve. It required substantial delay at the end of each product, which was painfully disappointing, and not fun to actually implement, especially since it didn't loop so I had to 6P. I eventually shaved off 1 cycle in that gap, then I got one more by tightening startup.

I worked on an instructions solve after that, and having a bit of a break and an alternate perspective helped immensely. I started having fun with it! As a result, this might actually be the puzzle I've put the most time into so far this tournament.

After working on instructions for awhile, I tried again to get a cabinet with period 6--or even 7--but I think it just requires too many arms or shenanigans I wasn't able to make work. My breakthrough came from realizing that I didn't need to have the left hexarm run a period 8 in blocks of 3-1-3-1: if it ran 3-3-2, all the materials would be processed earlier in the period! This was actually the 1-cycle startup hack I had used earlier, but that combined with some construction methods I had experimented with in instructions, I was able to eliminate the delay between products entirely and no longer needed to 6P at all.

So here I am, 50 cycles down from that original solve, quite pleased.

Thanks for the puzzle!