18 is possible!?

The piston in the previous solve consumed an entire third of the instruction quota. Surely we can do better?

With a hexarm instead of a piston, we can kill two birds in one stone and save 5 instructions. Only... the result is pure chaos. And a giant heaping of luck.

I tried a few different places for calcification, realised pretty quick there was no way to keep air out of the system (without an extra arm or instructions, at least), and stuck duplication the first place I could get it to fire. And somehow, against all odds, the solve works.

If you change basically anything about it, such as the conduit positions, glyph positions, etc., it breaks. There's one other position that gives a 760C solve. But those are the only two I could find.

There's a lot of cursed things about this puzzle. It really is chaos in the technical sense. The elements running around the loops are almost random between fire and air, since we have no way to calcify air without hitting too fire as collateral damage. The strategically placed duplication gives fire an edge over air, but the more fire there is, the quicker it gets pulled out to output. Thank goodness for triplex-conditional logic.

The timing is miraculous: there's no particular reason we shouldn't need an extra arm to account for missing quintessence like in the last solve, but we don't. It just never happens. That's another 4 instructions saved, but we do lose 3 to having to move the input out of range of the new hexarm. That means we don't have room for a second triplex, which in turn means we need a second pivoting arm during assembly. It looks like we could swap the positions of the output and input, but the input suppression will cause crashes.

Most remarkably, this solve has infinite rate. It doesn't crash, but the air nation eventually repels the fire nation, and some time after the 17th output it enters an infinite loop, never to output again.

Just like my sanity...