So, first week submitting for the tournament ever, and it's a weird metric. My initial impression of this was "costless cost", we've got 1 arm, no area constraint and 1 of each glyph, but the arm can be a piston and 1 track costs the same as infinite track. My mind immediately went to the animismus glyph, as since we probably want to take advantage of the infinite track, animismus is 1 part more compared to vitae + mors inputs being 2, and track could also lead to fun with the tribonder being essentially free. So I made my initial solution, which was ~1.2k cycles after refinement, and it felt not great, but about what I expected at my skill level. But at some point, I'd noticed that with a piston, one could have full access to a glyph of division, and as such if you used the mors and vitae inputs, you could actually do a trackless solution also at min. I did so, and first try (after 6Ping for polymer reasons) got... 816 cycles? It turns out track is bad?? It seemed like having to pull 2 inputs per half-output w/ animismus was a severe cost, and track doesn't inherently help with cycles when you're arm-limited, especially given that I really wasn't having to do much weirdness at all with the trackless solution. I thought waste would be a problem when counting access points vs needed waste atoms, but by bonding the waste into pairs, I could squeeze out enough spots to be fine, though I did really need the "free" waste from special-casing the (...) part of the output. This left me kinda at a loss though - my assumption was that 2 ways to make the output meant 1 would be for each metric, and presumably saving the cost of animismus meant sum4 would go with direct input, and unlimited track seemed to directly point the parts metric to animismus, but here I was ignoring animismus entirely, which felt like it was against the design goal of the puzzle. So, idk? I've only managed to shave 3 cycles and 2 area from that first attempt, 2 of each from swapping the vitae and mors to save on the initialisation, and 1 cycle from swapping the order of the first two waste dropoff locations so that I could get away with rotating the rotated one 1 less, but have somewhat hit a wall since then. Partially the layout feels super forced - you want the debonder adjacent to the input to make all atoms useful ASAP, you want the division glyph next to that to swap out the gold immediately, you want the bonder next so that now that you've doubled how many atoms you're working with you'd like them to travel the minimum distance, and then vitae and mors are after that. I tried having them in line with each other so they'd both be the same number of swings away, but having one at radius 1 made it impossible to bond the start of a new half-product to the existing chain, and the remaining layout made whatever atom was at radius 3 have a terrible time of getting to the bonder. The input + debonder also seemed to have to be adjacent to the arm rather than 1 out to keep both atoms in line with the bonder and make waste handling easier. It's hard for me to see how much things can vary from here, waste handling feels like the main aspect of wiggle room at the moment. Hoping that I'm wrong about some part of this and track is necessary, I'd not be particularly surprised if better players find ways to make it more useful, but animismus is just such suffering that I can't get there myself. 