Alchemy

Alchemy is the process of using grist, an alchemiter and a carved cruxite dowel to create new items. It is first used in SBURB to create an item which transports the player to the medium.

Using Alchemy
At the start of the game, using alchemy would require punching a captchalogue card using a punch designix. This is done by checking the code on the back of a captchalogue card and inputting this into the designix, then placing a card - whether anything is stored on the card is irrelevant, though it will make the item irretrievable if there is one - into it. This will punch the card, which can be placed, along with a cruxite dowel, in a totem lathe to carve the totem. This can now finally be placed in the alchemiter, which will produce the item at the cost of grist.

Punch Logic
Items can be combined by overlapping cards, thus obscuring some holes (like a bitwise AND operation) or by punching one card with both items' codes (like a bitwise OR operation).

A Captchalogue Code has a maximum of 8 digits. For each digit there are 75 possibilities: the numbers 0 through 9, 26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters, and the special characters ?, !, /, \, @, &, ~, %, :, =, -, #, _, and ^ . This means that the number of possible cards is 75^8, equal to roughly 1,001,129,200,000,000. This may be a big number, but it is not infinite. The number of "working" codes is even fewer as dud objects exist. Because of there being infinite universes and codes are transferable across them, this limit will probably be reached quickly and implies a finite number of creatable items. No explanation for this problem has ever been given, however one possible explanation is that all other codes are extremely complicated and thus require an intellibeam laserstation to understand and use them.

The Punch Code, as well as the binary, is read from left to right.

Binary Structure
Each character is assigned an 8-bit binary number. This is achieved by assigning each character a numerical value, and then converting said value to binary.

Ghost items technically have their own special value, found by adding 128 to the value. This will cause the first binary number to be 1 instead of zero. However, as there are no characters assigned to values past 75, punching a card to create a ghost item does not work. This is redundant anyways, considering ghost items will use the code of the normal item, and that binary value is just an identifier.