User:Daniels\AlloyGuide

This guide is meant to be a supplement to the other guides on Alloy. The reason I wrote this guide was to share my methods with players who are new to making alloys. While the other guides are great for explaining theories, and showing them in practice, this guide will attempt to give you a method with which you can begin learning how to do alloy well. Now, for the themes that I will be teaching in this guide:

1. Don't be greedy. Know when to give up on an outer circle.

2. Overlapping circles can be clicked, but it isn't a good idea. Click on a non-overlapping section of a crystal.

3. Followup to the above theme number 2: if the any other crystal overlaps too much, then the batch will crystalize (see Alloys Yes and No, point 2 and 7).

4. For best practices, click on a circle that overlaps the most dense group of circles. This circle should also be the closest to the most dense group of circles (but not too close! see Alloys Yes and No, point 2 and 7). By doing this you will be "collecting" circles into one big mass without crystalizing them. After you "collect" as many crystals as possible for a given layout, you click the center of the mass to crystalize the batch.

5. Two of the most important theories of alloys tend to get overlooked:

• The further away a dense mass of crystals have to travel, the more spread apart they will become.
• A very tightly non-crystalized group of crystals is the exception to this. they will move together over one single outer crystal (this is how 100%'s are born).

6. Accept the fact that not all alloy layouts are possible to work with. Even the best alloy makers get a lot of failures, or yields that are not worth taking.

Now, let's put these themes and theories to practice. We begin with an okish layout of circles:

We've identified the most dense group of circles, and placed a red circle around this most dense area. This should be the focal point for any given layout of circles. Using this focal point, we use theme number 4 above, and find the closest circle to this area that is also far enough to click on. The next screenshot shows this point for this particular layout:

After clicking this point, we get this:

In the above picture, we've circled our focus in red. You hopefully notice that there are several spots to click on for the next move. Again, we apply theme 4 from above, and find the closest circle to overlap the focal point. This circle is shown below, along with the point that is clicked on that circle:

We now have this:

The question becomes, do we continue trying to collect the crystal above the mass, or do we crystalize? This is where theme number 1 comes in. While our mass is fairly dense and collected on top of each other, it is not dense enough to collect the top circle. We an just forget about the other two circles in the lower right of the reactory, there is no chance with them. If we tried to click on any of these circles, our nicely dense, non-crystalized mass would start to separate, and we will have lost our progress. Instead, we click the final spot to crystalize the batch:

So, was it worth it to not try for that other crystal? Here is the outcome of our cyrstalization: