Help with the "pipe" aspect of the game.

[Steven of Astora]

Hi, so far i've fallin in love with this game and haven't had any real trouble up until the whole "connecting pipes to reactors" part. I've tried looking at the tutorials for it but it just doesn't seem to make sense to me. Can anyone explain them in an easy to uderstand way that an idiot like me can grasp?

I don't really like this part of the game but maybe my opinion will change once i "get it".

[cearn]

I take it you've read this already : training #5[www.coranac.com]? The rightmost picture on the first row explains it. The last piece of a pipe (the piece with the '+' on it; the cursor will change form when you place the mouse over it) can be dragged over the map. So left-click the piece, hold it and move it around. If it's dragged next to an inlet, it'll automatically connect to that inlet.

If that isn't enough, explain what you're currently trying to do and we'll take it from there.

Other relevant info on pipes and production levels:

• Molecules move through pipes at 1 piece/cycle.
  
• Input buildings will release molecules every 10 cycles. Plan your reactors around this rate.
  
• You can cross over other pipes, but not over itself.
  
• Inside a reactor that's connected to pipes: an input command (α/β) can only be executed if there's a molecule at the inlet. If there isn't, the waldo will wait until there is. Similarly, you can only output (ψ/ω) if the outlet is clear; if it isn't, the waldo will wait. This can be used as timers instead of syncs.
  
• Most importantly for production levels: plan your reactor layout first! Look at the inputs, look at the outputs and write down reaction schemes to make that happen. Then decide which reactors need to what and how they're supposed to be connected. I tend to draw it out with pen and paper before I really start.

[Steven of Astora]

I just need a clear explanation of how these levels are completed. I know how to connect pipes i just dont get what to attach things to. My understanding of it is that you connect the storage tanks to a reactor. Then you go into that reactor and create whatever combination is needed in the freighter and connect the pipes on the right side of the reactor to the freighter.

But what happens when i need to put 3 molecules into a reactor? I figured that the left side of the reactors were "input" areas and the pipes coming out were suppose to go to freighters.

So if you could just explain in steps what to do like "attach X to X and create the combination shown X."

Sorry if im being difficult, im trying to explain exactly what my problem is but my english skills are lacking.

[Berahlen]

Any pipes coming out the left side of a building accept molecules. All pipes coming out the right side deliver molecules. You don't necessarily need to use every input or output pipe, or even all the reactors given -- indeed, most of the achievements are to do complex tasks with very few reactors.



Basic flow of a puzzle is this:

1) Look at raw materials, required final product, and how many reactors you have to work with.

2) Think of convenient intermediate steps that you can dedicate one reactor to.

For instance, if you need to make benzene (a ring of six carbon atoms with odd bonding), and your input is just single carbon atoms, it might be too complicated for a single reactor -- so try having one reactor create chains of three carbons, and then pass them to a second reactor that just joins them and adjusts the bonds. And so on.

3) Lay out the reactors, and join them with pipes.

4) Go into the reactors from beginning to end, and right click on the outputs you're using (they'll light up when you mouse over). Drag and drop the molecule you're hoping to deliver through each pipe. Make sure to position the atoms in the grid space and orientation you want it to show up in for the next one -- intermediate outputs will show up in the next reactor exactly where and how they were flushed. Some tasks make it more efficient to drop molecules in the far corner to put them closer to the middle in the next one for maneuvering room, some in the closest edge to loop faster or deconstruct a molecule more easily, etc.

5) Go through each reactor and construct a circuit to deliver each of the intermediate steps you wrote down.

6) Watch something inevitably break, and then fix it. Repeat until enough useful things start getting done that you have something to work from for step 7.

7) Adjust previous notes and reactors as you come up with ideas that'll make later ones easier or more efficient.



If you need a reactor to take more than two different things -- which does happen later, and there are really good reasons to do this sometimes -- you have to do some prep work with a previous reactor.

Molecules will pop out in the next reactor in whatever order they were pushed through. So if you have an H2O, break it apart, and output the oxygen in the upper left, followed by the hydrogens in the lower left and right, the next reactor will call them one at a time in exactly that order.

This is useful, for instance, to easily construct hydrocarbons by pre-placing a pair of hydrogen atoms one space apart. The next reactor only needs to input twice from that pipe, then grab the carbon and move it between them.

It's also good for passing a sequence of pieces you didn't quite have the space to handle in the previous reactor. If you need to mess with a complicated acid or something, you can break it into the chunks you need and output each one separately through the same pipe. The next reactor can take them one at a time and build the new molecule much more smoothly.

Near the end of the game, you often just flat-out need to output more stuff than you have pipes for. You wind up having to use output pipes to pass several different things at once, and it becomes a juggling act to do what you need to.

[Berahlen]

Okay, so I picked one of the ones off of Research Net and just solved it blind while taking screenshots to walk you through my thought process when I approach this. This is Cyanamide (Vol 3 Issue 4 of Research Net). It uses a couple tools and restrictions you aren't familiar with yet, but I want to put across the train of thought. The general flow of the problem is relatively simple, and I condense the problem considerably with some careful multiple output action.

Spoiler alert and stuff, this does involve exhaustively solving a puzzle, albeit not one in the main game, and not one it'll take too long for people who are poking around Research Net to do anyway.



Okay, so this is what we have to work with:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116964584

Note the Assembly and Disassembly reactors; Assemblers only have one output and can only make bonds, and Disassemblers have only one input and can only destroy bonds. This means I have some restrictions on what happens when. Also note the Recycler in the bottom; that means I'll probably have leftover atoms I need to throw away. Here's how I react to this:

1) I need to break apart the hydrogen. It goes right into a Disassembler.

2) I need to break apart the cyanogen and throw away one of the carbons. It goes into another Disassembler, and one of the outputs goes to the Recycler.

3) I need to combine everything back to make cyanamide at the end. So I feed the remaining outputs into an Assembler.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116964678

Next, I go into the cyanogen reactor and write out the outputs I want. If you click on the gray rectangle at the far right of the screen next to a used output space, you can drag and drop output notes. Noting that I needed to leave half the molecule untouched, and have an extra nitrogen to glue back on later but can't do it here, I realize that I'll have to throw them both through a mixed output -- and your notes have extra grids to represent that. Also note the lower right tells you it's connected to the Recycler, which is where the extra carbon will go.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116964758

What that means is that I want to alternate those two outputs in that pipe. Every time I break up a cyanogen, I want to push through the CN half, followed by the lone N atom, in those positions. So far, I chose the order and positions arbitrarily -- right now I'm only worried about "pieces go this way".

Same story for the hydrogen reactor. Since I'm already using mixed output, I figure I might as well go all the way and show just how powerful it can be. I plan to stagger the hydrogen atoms apart in the positioning I want them in the Assembler to stick it all together with minimal fuss.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116964795

Oh, and here's what the editor for the notes looks like.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116964900

And when you go into the third reactor at the end, your output notes from the others show up as expected inputs wherever they're piped to!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116964953



Note that we haven't actually placed any waldo code yet. This is purely a conceptual and organizational step to wrap your head around the problem, and make it easier to keep track of what you're doing. This is just a broad scale of what I want to happen.



The next step is making it happen! I build the waldo track to produce the thing I wrote down.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965029
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965070

Upon completing each circuit, I test it to make sure it's doing the step I want it to and depositing the right things in the right places.

And then I go into the third reactor and think...you know...I probably could put everything together from here, but it would probably be a mess and I'm lazy. So I start thinking, what would be the most convenient way these could pop in? And when I think of it, I go back and edit the notes to reflect what would be really, really convenient to have.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965187

And then I go back into the first two reactors and make that happen instead.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965272
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965359

Again, testing them to make sure it follows.

Note the vastly simpler flow control in the cyanogen reactor once I realize I want the two pieces dropped in the same place. The red guy just deals with the junk carbon now, and the blue grabs the two pieces we want and handles them identically. Don't worry about the flip-flop -- it's a toy you get much later in the game, but all you really need to know for now is that I used it to make my notes happen.

Also note that I had the cyanogen reactor change the order of its outputs to drop the single nitrogen first, and you're about to see why. Here's what I do in the last reactor.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965470

Because of how I placed all these mixed outputs, all I have to do is have red collect the nitrogen I want at the T of the final molecule and have it sit still while blue spawns all the other stuff around it and bonds everything in one step.

Here's what it looks like from outside.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116965577

As you advance through the game, you'll have a bunch of reactors with a ton of output notes, and they clutter up the screen. You can right-click and hide them from the external view -- they'll still show up inside the reactors. You'll probably want to hide...most of them throughout the game.

I gave it a go, watched it build and drop off one molecule, then hit full speed and saw a victory screen. Thankfully with nothing breaking along the way this time, but inevitably it will happen most of the time. By the end of the game you will grow to despise the broken reactor sound.

That's the general approach I take to solving these puzzles. Get a handle on the general flow of pieces, chart out where I want the pieces to specifically end up, adjust as necessary to make the later parts easier, and then make each piece happen.

Hope that helps! If anything about that was unclear, just say something and I'll try to go into better detail. :)

[cearn]

Originally posted by Sunbro Steven:

I just need a clear explanation of how these levels are completed. I know how to connect pipes i just dont get what to attach things to. My understanding of it is that you connect the storage tanks to a reactor. Then you go into that reactor and create whatever combination is needed in the freighter and connect the pipes on the right side of the reactor to the freighter.

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Originally posted by Sunbro Steven:

But what happens when i need to put 3 molecules into a reactor? I figured that the left side of the reactors were "input" areas and the pipes coming out were suppose to go to freighters.

Ah, that. Well, you can't have 3 inputs per reactor; 2 inputs and 2 outputs max.

However, you can use the output of one reactor as the input of another. So you can create a partial product out of 2 inputs in one reactor, and then use its output and the third input in another reactor to build the final product.

Since you mention 3 inputs, can I take it you've reached mission 2.6, "Sleepless on Sernimir IV"? That's where this first becomes an issue. You start with H, O and C and have to make CH2O. Since you have 3 inputs, you need to use 2 reactors. Now, there are 3 ways to connect the reactors:

Scheme I : O,H first, then C

1)  O + 2H    -> O, H, H
2a) C + O     -> C=O
2b) 2H + C=O  -> CH2O

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116989885

Scheme II : H,C first, then O

1)  2H + C    -> CH2
2) CH2 + O    -> CH2O

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116989973

Scheme III : O,C first, then H

1)  C + O     ->  C=O
2) 2H + C=O   ->  CH2O

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=116990008

In production missions, you have to break down the full reaction scheme into sub-reactions, with each reactor taking care of one of the sub-reactions. Usually, there will be multiple ways of creating the end-product, labeled here as I, II and III? Which one should you use? Well that's just it: they'll all work :D.

Of course, some schemes will be more efficient or easier to use than others. In this case, Scheme I is rather nasty, so that's probably not the way to go. II and III are both easy to implement, but III will be slightly faster because the bottleneck will be attaching the second H, so doing that as the last step saves a little bit of time.

EDIT:
Oh, one final note. When you output stuff, it'll appear in the next reactor in the order and form that you've outputted it. In the screenshots, I've attached notes to the output of reactor 1, so you can see what it should output. However, a note is only a hint; it does not determine what the output actually is.

EDIT 2:
I just realized a version of scheme I that isn't as messy:

1)  O + 2H         -> H-O-H

2a) H-O-H          -> H . H
                        O

2b) H . H + . C .  -> H-C-H
      O       .         O

In reactor 1, make an H2O stick (H-O-H, in that shape). In reactor 2, put the bonders in reactor 2 in a T-shape. Grab the H-O-H at the O, carry it over to the bonders. Once there, break the bonds and drop the O so that you have you have the arrangement shown above, with the H,H,O at the tips of the T. If you place the bonders in such a way that the center of the T is placed where the C will input, you can input, bond+, bond+ and you'll have the final molecule.

I know this sounds insane, but knowing how to do these kinds of input/output/bonder placement manipulations will become so incredibly useful at the later stages of the game.

[Steven of Astora]

Boy all this terminology is really making my brain explode but i think im getting the gist of it lol. And yes i was indeed on mission 2.6. Thanks for the detailed explenations with the pictures and everything, much appreciated.

[[Linux] unbridledExüberance]

While you can't have 3 inputs to a reactor, you CAN put multiple different types of molecules into 1 input. For example, it is perfectly legal to supply a H20 molecule then a CO molecule to the same input on a reactor. In fact, this will become extremely useful.

One thing you have to be careful with (or exploit) with production levels is that molecules are not repositioned at all. If you output an atom in the upper-left of an output, when it comes into another reactor, it will be in the upper-left of the input. As such, you usually want to be consistent with where you drop molecules. In research levels it doesn't matter, but in production levels it can kill you since you can miss grabbing inputs.