Experiment: Gems
The Gem experiment is one of 12 experiments in the laboratory, available at laboratory tier 6.
The goal of the Gem Experiment is to fill the board with gems, in order to obtain dust.
Contents
Mechanic
Clicking a tile rolls the tiles around the central tile in a + formation (Max is 5 tiles) into random icons. Roll time varies, from 1 second to 15 seconds. Each time you complete the board, the symbols will be randomized, and a stack indicator on the left will fill up.
You must complete the gem board 9 times in order to receive 1 stack.
With stacks, they can be ground into dust. The amount of dust earned per stack is equal to the grinding duration * dust per second.
Gem Grid Upgrades
- Lock chance: Chance to not re-roll a tile if the icon is a gem. Does not work on the tile being clicked, as in clicking a gem tile always re-rolls the tile.
- Gem chance: Chance for a tile to end up being a gem.
Gem Grinder Upgrades
- Instant complete chance: (left side) Chance that a new grid will instantly entirely into gems. (This value slightly increases the more unused stacks you own.)
- Don't consume stack chance: (right side) Chance that a processed stack will not be consumed, allowing you effectively to grind it a second time.
Prestige Upgrades
- Improvement: Reduces the waiting time between layers by 0.1 sec (max. 9 levels)
- Improvement: Increases the total grinding time by 1 second for each level of the right hand side grinder upgrade. (max. 30 levels)
- Improvement: Increases the dust produced per second by 0.5 second per level of the right hand side grinder upgrade. (max. 30 levels)
- Improvement: Increase the starting level of all upgrades by 1 without increasing the price scaling. (max. 30 levels)
Whenever you prestige, the following effects take place:
- Gem grid will be reset (exotic skill disables this)
- Completed layers will be reset (exotic skill disables this)
- Stacks will be reset (exotic skill disables this)
- Dust will be reset (exotic skill disables this)
- Base level for each upgrade will increase
Another thing that the prestige does is it resets the upgrades on the left-hand side (i.e. lock chance and gem chance), although this is not specified anywhere. Exotic skill would disable this effect as well.
Rewards
| Requirement | Reward |
|---|---|
| 1 Stack |  Lucky Shot
|
| 5 Stacks |  Phasing
|
| 62.55M Gem Dust | +2500% Shipyard: Gem Rewards |
Trivia
- Since it only matters to the player whether or not a particular tile is a gem and the grid has size 5x5, the grid can be seen as being in one of 225=33,554,432 distinguishable states. However, since any kind of rotation or reflection of the grid is ultimately inconsequential to a strategy for solving the experiment, any states that differ from each other merely by those means can be subsumed into one abstract state. This cuts down the size of the state space by almost a factor of 8 - 8 because an asymmetric grid has four rotations each in two reflections, almost because a few states are in some way symmetric and thus have less. The exact size of the state space after accounting for rotations and reflections is 4,211,744 (including the one goal state of full 25 gems) as determined by brute force search.
