Unable to wrap my head around mutli arms

[Canyew]

Before anything im still pretty new to the game, and only on chapter one. However it's killing me I see these multi fixed arm systems that were never addressed in the tutorial exactly how they work (I get they mostly work like the single arms but trying to experament with them have been furitless) I'm not exactly sure how to implement them, and I know for the fact they are the key for most likely, making some of the most efficent designs. Is there any tips I can get on how to apply them, how they work?

Other than that the game is pretty much like spacechem in a way, but easier since it's nowhere near constricted as SC. This is also two of the problems I solved in chapter one, maybe a visial aid could help out as well.

Airship Fuel: https://imgur.com/a/qdcWk

Waterproof Sealant: https://imgur.com/a/sv7r0

[GMC]

They work exactly like single arms, but they can grab at 2, 3, or 6 locations rather than 1. As with single arms, you can extend or retract the arms with W and S while dragging.

Grabbing and releasing operate all of the arms at once. If the multi-arm is already holding something, and you want to grab something else with an unused arm, you have to release first.

With multi-arms, you don't use the reset action (C) as often; it's more common to just rotate until the nearest arm is in the desired location. This is one of the main reasons to use a multi-arm: the more arms, the fewer cycles it's likely to take to get to a position where one of the arms is able to grab something.

While all multi-arms cost the same, more arms isn't always better, as you can end up grabbing something you don't want to.

[pikachus_odyssey]

Here's a solution I made for one of the journal puzzles. It uses both a double and a triple arm, so I think it serves as a good example of how you can use multi arms to save cycles:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1232624350

Let's start with the double arm at the bottom. First, it grabs an air, rotates three times, and drops it to the right of the salt. This leaves the arm that had been empty in the correct position to pick up another air, which it does after pausing for one cycle,* before rotating, dropping it to the left of the salt, and rotating back, ready to pick up the first air at the start of the next cycle.

Meanwhile, the triple arm grabs the salt, moves back and forth in order to bond it to the three airs, then rotates four times, passing its cargo over various glyphs of bonding, duplication and calcification before dropping the now complete product on the output. At this point all it needs to do is move one hex to the right, and there's an arm in place to grab the salt at the start of the next cycle.

This solution saves 2 cycles per output, or 12 cycles total, over an otherwise identical solution that uses single arms in place of the multi arms. This may not sound like much, but when you consider how fast the solution is in the first place, that actually works out as a 15% reduction in cycle count. I don't know about you, but if I could reduce my cycle count by that much with such a simple change, I'd be very happy.

* It needs to do this because otherwise it would try to pick up the air it just dropped at the same time that another arm is moving it away, resulting in the solution crashing and failing.