Glyph Crafting

Glyphs are the building blocks of automata, but each glyph itself consists of smaller instructions that modify reality in some small way. These instructions are provided by the spark.

Glyph crafting is the ability to create new glyphs built from the base instructions.

Creating a Glyph

Creating Dominant Glyphs

During glyph creation, you can mark a glyph as a dominant glyph of a certain element. There are two drawbacks to this. First, you are not allowed to manipulate the element's opposite type. If you do, either directly or through inputs, the glyph's code in the automata will fall apart and the flow will be interrupted, causing all stored intermediaries to be released at random. The second drawback of making a dominant glyph is that you are only allowed to use constant values of the dominant type.

Deciphering

A mage that knows how the internals of most automata work can use this knowledge to decipher automata and glyphs. However, a mage with this knowledge can only see the raw instruction chain of the automata, not the actual glyphs. This raw chain contains additional code used for handling IN/OUT parameters of glyphs and does not contain any label definitions. Jump instructions have their label destination replaced with a four dimensional coordinate that is relative to the surface of the device the automata is inscribed on and is generally impossible for mortals to figure out.