Opus Magnum gif dumping grounds

I've been playing Opus Magnum off and on for about a month or so, and I keep meaning to post gifs of my machines on discord, but I always forget. So I'm putting some of my favorite designs here instead! ^{_{Especially since everybody in the games channel bought and finished this game months before I did.}}

If you've got some designs you want to post, please do, especially if you optimized for something different! I mostly went for speed, and I'd love to see what other methods look like.


Early designs:

Refined Gold: An early example of how you can optimize for different things in this game. The first gif is my first solution, as I tended to focus on simplicity/size early on. The second one is one I made a bit later, to experiment with optimization for speed.



Face Powder: This one isn't very fast, but it's fun to look at. Made when I was still focusing on simplicity.


Waterproof Sealant: One of the first ones where speed was really my main focus. It still ended up fairly small though, which was nice (and was certainly not the case for most later ones).


Airship fuel: Another example of different ways to optimize the same problem. The first one is tediously slow, but only uses a single arm. The second one was way more expensive and complex than anything else I had done at the time, but was also much faster. (I could probably make it even faster if I took a look at it again now.)



Precision Machine Oil: Another one of my first really fast ones.


Stamina Potion: This one's not very fast, but it's fun to watch.



The Beginnning of the Descent:

Rocket Propellant: The first one that really starts to get complicated, and the first one that I really spent a long time optimizing.


Surrender Flare: The first time I used the double-arm circular track trick. I had no idea what I was doing. It was a complete and utter mess of commands, since I had to repeat the entire process for each arm, and it took me forever to get the timing right. But it was fast.


Mist of Incapacitation: Yet another example of dual-optimization.



Seal Solvent: One that's mostly just fun to watch.


Climbing Rope Fiber: One of the earlier infinite puzzles. I tend to really like the infinite ones, and my solutions to them are often my favorites.


Warming tonic: Things are starting to get a lot more complicated. It was at about this point that I gave up completely on making things small, cheap, or even pleasing, and focused entirely on speed.



Insanity:

Life-Sensing Potion: An utter mess, and the first sign of the madness that now powers every one of my machines.


Very Dark Thread: Another infinite one, and like the other infinites, one I'm particularly proud of.


Litharge Separation: Ruthlessly efficient


Stain Remover: A complicated one that I fucked up pretty badly. Like Life-Sensing Potion, I devised an ingenious way of producing the output very quickly and in a tiny space, by taking advantage of the symmetry of the problem -- without planning ahead to make sure I had an easy way to get it out. The rather kludgy piston arm on a track (something that should never really be necessary) was the result.


Invisible Ink: Unlike Stain Remover and Life-Sensing Potion, using the symmetry of the problem actually worked here, and I'm pretty proud of the result.


Alchemical Jewel: A favorite. It looks nice, it's very fast, and it's incredibly simple -- most of the extra arms are just there to speed things up, and the solution I would use if I was optimizing for cost would only be a slight modification of the design.


Golden Thread: It's an inchworm! Sort of.


Timing Crystal: A similar process to the Alchemical Jewel. Also a good example of the madness that follows speed-optimization. I could have only used two arms for this solution, one for the salt and one for the gold -- but not only did I add an extra arm to speed up the gold insertion then triple-boosted the salt insertion so that it was being used up as fast as possible, I doubled the entire thing by adding another main arm on the bottom track. It took me about half an hour to get the timings and offsets right and to make sure there weren't any unnecessary gaps or removable bottlenecks.

The whole thing net me about one fewer step per output product. Worth it.


Voltaic Coil: My most recent one. This one took me over an hour to complete and fully optimize, and there's still another method I want to try out, and the next few levels are even harder, and even more enticing, and then there's the workshop levels after that....


_{Note: If you steal my designs, and ESPECIALLY if then modify them and beat my score, I'm totally gonna sue you.}

Explosive Phial: So! Fast!

Stamina Potion: An improved solution to an earlier puzzle.


Courage Potion: An improved solution to an earlier puzzle.


Curious Lipstick: The second-to-last puzzle of the main game. Just... what the hell.


Universal Solvent: The last puzzle of the main game. This design, which ended up being one of my favorites, was inspired by Kaynato's beautiful rotation-based machines. I'd like to get this one to produce multiple outputs in parallel, but that requires a degree of madness I have not yet descended to.

(Also, I'm not sure it would actually be faster, as the central component would have to spend as much time on each rotation as the time it would spend at the longest one, so while it would be much faster asymptotically--producing one output every rotation--the overhead from the first output might not be worth it.)

Airship Fuel: An area-optimized version, as a practice for production alchemy, where there's a finite amount of allowed space.


Spyglass Crystal: The journal entries are hard! I'm pretty happy with this one though.

Synthesis of Quintessence via Alcohol: It's not fast, but it's the most one of the most beautiful things I've made in my life, along with the Invisible Ink one. (I may have even added one or two extra arms to complete the symmetry)

Also I'm removing all the spoiler boxes because the gifs don't really take all that long to load, and. fuck clicking through all those things.