Inventions - Useless?

[theinjected1]

Besides the pallets, has anyone figured out a use for any of these inventions? Either I am not using them correctly or they are just there to waste space. Suggestions?

TIA

[creed462]

the grabber can be used to bubble items when the screen is full

[wolfplay013]

you can make an autosmelter with grabbers

[Darkside Hamster]

I've found a use for everything but the puncher. I still don't know what the point is other than for torturing the NPCs

[Inés]

The only thing I like is the things where you put your materials. Really helpfull. Besides that, I don't really see the other items really useful, but it's okay, I think the update is cool and it brings a new thing to the game that a lot of people like and i am okay with that, Nothing was going to be useful or be liked by everyone but they worked really hard to do this new mechanics, props to them.
The only thing I ask PLEASE is to fix the achievements that can't be done. I really like the achievements thing on steam

[Leslie]

Their point is to enable auto-farming.

Punchers to be used on mines/planters and the anvils, so they auto-collect, auto-water, and, auto-repair.
The minigrab gathers the resources to a single tile, so that the clawbot can stack them in a palletron.

It doesn't work because the gate-keep in this game is space and time.
You don't run out of resources, you run out of space to store it all while you wait for the crafting table(s) to finish. Using 5 slots (2 puncher, grabber, claw, pallet) to auto-farm 1 resource doesn't make sense, when you could have 5 pallets to store up to 5 different resources, all ready to go when the table is free.

[Darkside Hamster]

Originally posted by Leslie:

Punchers to be used on mines/planters and the anvils, so they auto-collect, auto-water, and, auto-repair.

Huh. Thank you, I'll see if I can get it to work.

[Carthes]

Yeah, they are kind of obscure in how to use properly. But I haven't made a ton of them because they are such a timesink to produce, and I am still simply trying to manage my smelters and overflowing drills... being very aggressive to sell off items I don't care about to focus on upgrading both drills + planters.

I just started playing a mobile tower defence + merge game yesterday. It's on iOS (maybe Android too) called Twisted Tower. It has an automated grabber/stacker/merger item all in one that works pretty great.

You drop one of any type of item to it to calibrate it, and then it magnetizes in up to a full stack of five before merging into +2 items. So you drop the next stage onto another automator, and it does the next tier... and so on. It's a lot more elegant, a lot more accessible... very intuitive.

They cannot however be used as storage stacks beyond 4 items (or it merges and spits out the results).

Honestly, they did a great job of merging a TD with a merge game, even though I have quite enjoyed this one... the ability to push further levels of difficulty on the main 'base' map as well as a separate campaign mode to unlock new materials is clever. I looked at one of the lead players, and it looks like somehow the game supports having over a thousand residents (NPCs that are sort of auto tools for you to mine/harvest) at once, and over 50,000 difficulty levels of the core tower defense mode (known as 'Rituals' in the game).

Very cool and it implies a lot of longevity, while here I'm slooowly working up to 9k energy to unlock the last region, and while I feel it's actually making me anxious about having more stuff to manage/store away! Haha.

I would not at all be mad if the MergeCrafter devs took a look at this iOS game for inspiration for an update or sequel... ;)

[daeore]

Explosives are a huge time saver. Once you get drills on places that dig up full sized rocks (stone/iron/gold/diamond) you can have a single t3 explosive (looks like a box, and one shots diamond nodes) take a heap of them out at once. A tip for this though. Merge a node together, leave it, then when your drills dig up more nodes, they will stick to the one you left. This will make clusters of the same resource, and will help you keep your blasting organised.