My correspondent was the one to wise up and demonstrate that one unit of saltpeter and three units of charred sulfur can yield a wasteless machine, requiring a mere 20 tiles. I could not find a reason that, in principle, a wasteful 19-tile machine would be impossible, but we did not seriously pursue more than one night of attempting to draft it. Vitae is such a strange atom to choke the life out of a machine.

This layout was chosen for its ease of duplication--despite lack of access, the Glyph of Duplication plays well, sitting well out of the way of charred sulfur manipulation. The output glyph, Glyph of Bonding, and Glyph of Triplex-Bonding form a spacious staging area, allowing intermediates to be tumbled and bonded quickly. Further, the piston need not fully retract when moving between stations, saving many repetitions of retraction and extension.

- Alchemist Kazyan, in correspondence with Alchemist Jasper