Lucidstuck I

In other words BCS is a crutch that we shouldn't rely on 100% otherwise when it does run out we'll be left without having mastered our other dream manipulation abilities suddenly having to rely on them.

Ideally we'd be in the opposite situation, so proficient in our dream manipulation that we start forgetting that we even have BCS due to lacking the need to use it.

Recycling old equipment we no longer use/need would be a good idea.

A wise investment would be some form of crafting station. Like a place for smelting glass (we've got lots of sand on LoHaM) or ores if we can get access to those. That way we can still make stuff without having to expend BCS and we could use crafting to expand the arsenal further.

On the subject of acquiring ores for crafting...
If I understand correctly if Derrick takes a bunch of rocks and a piece of gold for example he can combine the gold across multiple rocks and end up with many "rock with gold in it" items. We could then use that method to dupe ores for the hypothetical smeltery.

Now that I think about it, couldn't we do the same thing with BCS? We could substitute the gold for BCS and end up with many "rock with BCS in it" items.

Would this actually be effective or is there rules which would prevent this that I'm forgetting about?

Combining one item across others is theoretically possible infinitely. So far there's nothing we know of that would stop that, aside from item combination tiers. Even then there's a loophole to put one item across infinite others.

The BCS however is resistant to crafting, so that's not possible as far as I'm aware. However, we can do mundane things to BCS to make it work more efficiently.

Alright. I know pretty much nothing about this kind of thing but would it be possible to bypass the need for BCS by infinitely duping he base components of everything like every chemical in the periodic table? Or if that's too complicated the base components could be things like silk, glass, metal, plastic etc. As I see it the only problem would be that it would take too long but that shouldn't be an issue if we go with the second strategy.

I was also wondering: can derrick uncombine pre-existing items? For example could he take a toaster and seperate the metal from the plastic?

EDIT: I just remembered another important question, what is the range of Derrick's item combination? Could he stand in a dessert and combine an item across every grain of sand? If not then how far can it go? And if so maybe we could weaponize item combination. I think it's worth testing these ideas out at least, if anything the experience would probably increase his skills at least.