Can you push something up or down a block and then move it right back again?

[dunbaratu]

There seems to be a way with the counter block to push something left one block, and then push it right one block again using plungers. Prior to getting the counter block this was impossible without causing an infinite loop because whatever trigger caused the first push will just cause it again when you push the shape back into the trigger that started it. But with counters there's a way around this - you can cause that first plunger to only push the first time, and not the second.

That's great, but how do I do that same thing vertically? All the methods of vertical movement seem to be unconditional - gravity and blowers - and thus the only type of conditional movement you can do with them is to suppress their movement (with a blocker) and remove the suppression blocker when you want to trigger the move. That works for one-way operations like lifting and then moving aside, or dropping and then moving aside. But it doesn't work for a back-and-forth where you want to push up *and then come back down again*.

You can do a back-and-forth-one-block motion with horizontal movement, but I can't find a way to do it with vertical movement. Is there a way?

There would be a way if the game allowed you to block a blower vent, but this seems to have no effect. The wind from a blower seems to be able to pass right through any obstacles, so you can't obstruct a blower with a plunger to bring a lifted object back down again.

[starfish]

Yes. Once you know how to move block back-and-forth horizontally, it's pretty easy to do that vertically.
Hint 1. Blocks fly when there's lifter within 5 blocks below, fall when there isn't.
Hint 2. You can attach lifter to pusher/blocker.
Hint 3. My favorite trick.[i.imgur.com]

[dunbaratu]

I read as far as hint 2 and stopped. It's one of the very first things I tried doing back when I first got the pusher. I just concluded that pushers don't work that way and moved on. I found the hint about it in the barracks to be super annoying because it just told me the thing I kept trying to do worked just fine, when clearly it doesn't.

EDIT: oh. I just got it. There's two DIFFERENT ways that blocks I place differ from input blocks: 1 - I placed them, and 2 - they are glued to the floor. I was attributing my experimental results to #1, Tthus concluding "pushers don't work on blocks I place", and I was operating on that rule for the rest of the game after that), but it's actually because of #2 isn't it? It will work on blocks I place so long as I place them hovering in the sky. It's only when they start off already touching the ground or another object that they aren't pushable.

[a Orc]

Yes, all blocks can be pushed, lifted and rotated just like input blocks. You have to either let them start of hovering in the sky, or attach them to a pusher and make sure they don't touch any else. You can move huge structures as long as they aren't attached to the ground.

[dunbaratu]

Knowing how to make your own blocks be affected by pushers (as opposed to the default behavior where they aren't) finally opens up ways to make all the logic gates I've been wanting to use also (AND, NAND, NOR, and NOT - you could always do OR easily enough by just joining conduit from two different triggers together into one, but the others really aren't buildable without movable blocks.)

[dunbaratu]

And flip-flops. My solution to Landing Alignment Guide just ignores the new counter block and just uses a flip-flop design I cobbled together to get the job done. (I'ts set to push the wall up, then reset to let it fall back. Far simpler than trying to get the exact counter timings right.)

[PsyBlade]

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

Knowing how to make your own blocks be affected by pushers (as opposed to the default behavior where they aren't)

What are you talking about? All blocks being affected by pushers* in the same way IS the default. There is no secret to enable that. It's always on and you can't disable it even if you wanted.

The only thing you got to be carefull about is the a pusher can't tear one welded block off the other. It either pushes the whole object or it doesn't push at all. But that too is true for both factory and input blocks.

*or any other block (with the exeption that factory blocks are indestructible while input blocks vary)

[dunbaratu]

The default behavior is that pushers don't push the blocks you place. That statement is true because the default case is that every block you place is immobile. Getting them to not be immobile requires using temp blocks to place the block, which you then delete. That is certainly a deviation from the default.

The difference you claim doesn't exist between input blocks and blocks you place is this: Input blocks that enter the scene adjacent to each other, such as when you have the input rate set to maximum, are not automaticaly welded together just because they have entered the scene occupying adjacent locations. Your blocks, on the other hand, are. The face that you glued the block to when you placed it is not the only one it's glued to. It's also glued to all the other blocks that just so happened to occupy adjacent spaces, even if you never used them to do your placement. That's the secret fact that never manifested itself prior to my trying to use a pusher on my own blocks - the rules for what does and does not cause the blocks you place to be glued together were different than I had deduced from using the game, because none of the cases I had encountered so far showed the difference between what I thought the rule was and what it really was. Because most of the behavior of the game is learned in experimentation and inductive reasoning, you really need such an example to appear before you can realize a rule isn't what you thought it was. With inductive reasoning, if the evidence you've seen equally fits two rules, and you've got the wrong rule, it's impossible to detect that it's the wrong one until more evidence comes along that doesn't fit both rules equally well. For me, the first such evidence was the use of pushers on my own blocks.

Which unfortunately make me come away with the conclusion "pushers don't work on my own blocks - that's not implemented in this game. Shame, There's a lot I would have liked to do with that", rather than the conclusion "They do work, but I have to go back and reexamine my understanding of the conditions that cause blocks to be glued together first before I can get it to work."

Frankly, I'm surprised I managed to get as far as I did without using the pushing my own blocks mechanism, if as it turns out, you were supposed to be able to all along.

[PsyBlade]

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

The cases that differentiate "it's welded to all adjacent blocks" and "it's welded to just the block face you used to place it" don't come up until trying to use a pusher on a block.

The later idea never even occured to me. And as (Imho) the game does nothing to encourage that thought, *I* have a hard time calling the fact that it is wrong a secret. Not anticipating and then telling you about the truth about every thought that might occour to you is not the same as hiding something.

But yes, the game could do a better job at explaining some of the more obscure rules.

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

The default behavior is that pushers don't push the blocks you place. That statement is true because by default the blocks you place are immobile becuse by default they're always glued to other things that in turn are glued to the factory floor.

Nothing forces you to have them glued to anything. With the amount of space most levels offer I see blocks touching each other as the exception rather then the default.

Following the example picture from game: a pushed evicerator, what block other then the pusher is touching the evicerator *by default*.

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

Your own blocks differ from the input blocks in precisely the fact that the input blocks are not automatically glued together just because they happened to enter the scene adjacent to each other. Your own blocks, on the other hand, are.

Actually the behavior is the same for both. Blocks that enter the scene both AT THE SAME TIME and adjacent to each other are glued together.*

There even is a level that uses a factory block as input.

*Except some special faces of some blocks, such as the buisiness ends of welders, lifters, scanners and conveyors.

BTW: I don't want to fight with you or anything. I want to clarify the game to all that might read this thread (you included)

[dunbaratu]

Originally posted by PsyBlade:

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

The cases that differentiate "it's welded to all adjacent blocks" and "it's welded to just the block face you used to place it" don't come up until trying to use a pusher on a block.

The later idea never even occured to me. And as (Imho) the game does nothing to encourage that thought, *I* have a hard time calling the fact that it is wrong a secret. Not anticipating and then telling you about the truth about every thought that might occour to you is not the same as hiding something.

The reason I called it hidden is that the difference isn't detectable at first. A collection of blocks in which the blocks are only glued together at the block faces where you clicked on them when placing blocks behaves exactly the same when you run the machine as would a group of blocks where every adjacent block is glued together. This is because all the blocks are going to eventually be glued indirectly into one block via a transative properly (A behaves like it's glued to D not because it really is, but because you glued it to B, which in turn you glued to C, which in turn you glued to D.) So the difference between the two rules isn't detectable by purely adding blocks. To detect the difference you cannot merely be adding blocks, but both adding and deleting them, and carefully note the exact order you attached them and deleted them, to realize that there are blocks being glued together that you never explicitly clicked together.

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

The default behavior is that pushers don't push the blocks you place. That statement is true because by default the blocks you place are immobile becuse by default they're always glued to other things that in turn are glued to the factory floor.

Nothing forces you to have them glued to anything. With the amount of space most levels offer I see blocks touching each other as the exception rather then the default.

Literally *every* block you introduce into the world starts its life glued to something else because the editor forces you to build that way. The user interface does not provide a means to place a block except by choosing the face of something else to stick it to. To have an unglued block requires going back and deleting one of the blocks you used to put your desired block where it is. Thus my characterization is correct that pushers pushing your own built blocks is NOT the default behavior because by default none of your blocks are going to be movable.

When you try to counter this by stating it's possible to make movable blocks, you're arguing against a strawman. I never said it wasn't possible. I said it wasn't what's going to happen by default. And it's not. I had never encountered the cases that deviate from that default in just the right way to provide evidence for how the gluing mechanism really is working, and thus the fact that the reason the pusher wasn't working was because the object I thought was free to move was in fact glued to adjacent blocks without my realizing it.

That hint that pushers push things was rather useless. I'd already tried many times by then.

The helpful hint would have been to mention how to make a block be mobile in the world. The fact that this makes it subject to the machinery of the game would be a natural conclusion, whereas how to make it stop being stuck to stuff (or even the fact that that is the problem in the first place - that it's being glued to things without me realizing it) - was the hint of advice I actually needed at that point. Trying to use pushers on things in the machine is just an obvious thing to try, which I had, and it hadn't worked.

Everything being glued to everything it touches (the actual way it is) and everything being glued to only the faces you joined together (the way I thought it was for most of my play through the game) behave *identically* to each other except in very specific cirucmstances. To detect the difference you have to be adding blocks then deleting them in a different order from the order you added them, and memorizing what that order was, and then running the machine (you won't see the block move in the editor - you have to run the machine to detect that a block is disconnected) to notice that things aren't falling off like they should be if only the joined faces were glued. That's a very specific set of circumstances that you can go through most of the game having never witnessed.

BTW: I don't want to fight with you or anything. I want to clarify the game to all that might read this thread (you included)

And all I'm doing is pointing out that the relevant rule about gluing is a lot more hidden than you are claiming it is, and therefore very easy to miss.

[PsyBlade]

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

That's a very specific set of circumstances that you can go through most of the game having never witnessed.

And all I'm doing is pointing out that the relevant rule about gluing is a lot more hidden than you are claiming it is, and therefore very easy to miss.

It only was hidden from people operating under that that assumption, which Id guess aren't that many.

Besides you don't have to remember the exact sequence to detect the difference. Not remembering it works fine too: Given that the game gives no indication of which block was used to place a block, any editing of an existing structure would eventually result in total chaos when you inadvertandly remove the wrong block. The lack of falling appart factory then indicates that something works differently then you think.

[dunbaratu]

Originally posted by PsyBlade:

Given that the game gives no indication of which block was used to place a block, any editing of an existing structure would eventually result in total chaos when you inadvertandly remove the wrong block.

Only if you immediaely run the machine after doing the deletion. In the edior, unsupported things don't fall yet. They only fall when you hit 'R' for run. So if you follow up deletion with re-attaching something new, then it's not immediately obvious. By the time things fall quite a bit later when you're finally ready to hit 'R', it's been too long to remember the order of building.

It's also a bit unclear that gluing is the reason the pusher isn't working. It doesn't provide any visual or graphical animaion hint that the object it's trying o push is glued in place. It just literally turns off the behavior of the pusher entirely. It would have been more clear what was happening if it was similar to how the spinners work, where you get a 'click click click' when it tires to rotate a thing that refuses to rotate.