Vaults

Vaults are one of the most popular parts of Cell Machine, even though their creation was not intended by any developer. Vaults are combinations of cells which protect one or more enemy cells.The YouTuber Fanhalo created them as a fun little idea which he then expanded on within said video. This quickly became a popular idea within Cell Machine, second only to nukes.

History

It was previously mentioned that Fanhalo created the concept of vaults. In his original video, he made four different vaults, named quite creatively as "Vault V1", "Vault V2", and so on. During the video, he failed to solve his Vault V4; this led to his viewers appearing in droves to post solutions to that vault. Other YouTubers then followed, creating and solving vaults. Soon, however, a catch-all solution to "all" vaults was created, known as the can opener. This machine simply moves rotators into the right position to a layer every tick. It has been proven that it is impossible to stop a vault from being can-opened in some form if it does not contain immobile or trash cells.

Vaults stalled for a while after the discovery of the can opener. However, people ended up pushing the boundaries of vaults and began trying vaults with immobile and trash cells. For no comprehensible or sensible reason, many people protested and became ridiculously angry about people making these vaults. Many people ended up learning about Cell Machine through vaults, and the videos that were out never had these cells. When these first vaults with immobiles or trashes were made, they were called challenge vaults. And, they were certainly challenging vaults. Some examples are the Machine Box or Manticore series of vaults; the former has consistently been in the top tier of difficulty. Machine Box vaults make up the top 5 vaults in difficulty.

Although some series also helped push vaults in this direction, Chrysalis, one of the most well-published vaults, was what truly solidified this change. Chrysalis used only a single immobile cell to make the vault much more difficult than it looked. It was created in such a way that there was only one specific cell that could be used to stop the timer- from there, it was just a matter of effectively can-opening the rest of the vault. This created just the right level of difficulty for many people to solve it, but not be a regular can-openable vault.

This change in creation style also brought a change in solving. For one, there wasn’t only one method for solving vaults. The terminology and function of these methods is out of the scope of this section, but this made vault solving much more difficult to understand than just making a can opener, or removing things over and over and then making a nuke. It now required a time commitment to even start vaults. It became easy enough to predict who would solve a vault, because only a few people knew how to do so.

Now, vaults are once again stagnant. The designer of the Machine Box vault series has become so far ahead of the rest of the community that there are three unsolved vaults sitting at the top of the difficulty list. What happens next is up to the community!

Terminology & Methods

Vault terminology, mostly due to a few people intentionally overcomplicating things, is complex beyond belief. There are a staggering amount of terms.

Solving Terminology

Opening Methods

The root of a majority of vault terminology is the can opener. This was made before challenge vaults caught on, and other than the word vault itself is the first vault term. It is made with walls of immobile cells, a line of generators as long as the vault, and a line of push cells as long as the vault with rotators placed to disable anything within the vault.

For challenge vaults, the opener is the first term. This follows a quite similar model to the can opener, but has many differences. The generators are replaced with movers, and generators are placed flush to the opening, pushing the cells into the vault. The payload of push cells and rotators now has many different cells. This is only really used in 1-gap vaults, as are most methods. Most difficult vaults are 1-gap vaults.

A fuse opener, usually shortened to fuse, is actually much different from a normal opener. It usually has generators and push cells alternating to propel cells rather than a line of generators, but more importantly the entire opener is in a single line. For space purposes, this often fixes a lot of issues. It is also quite easy to make, being only 3 cells wide with 2 of that length just being immobile cells. Fuses can solve nearly all vaults.

A ner is a form of an opener; it is usually either attached to a fuse or an opener where the generators would normally be. The ner is used to only push cells a specific amount for each tick. This is nearly exclusively used for pit vaults, as there is no reason to conserve the amount that you push in for a trash vault.

A popener is a form of an opener, which has a method of letting cells leave the vault through the entrance (or is it an exit now?). This is only used on pit vaults. Usually, this method is an enemy being generated between the opener and the vault. Cells are pushed out of the entrance with a piston, which pushes cells out using a mover and a rotator to occasionally push cells of the vault.

Solving Strategies

A smuggler is used to get cells into a vault that are not usually possible to get around a turn; namely, every single cell that is not a mover. A smuggler IS NOT an opening method. This term is vague, but generally refers to classic smugglers. The classic smuggler gets a cell into a 1-wide hallway perpendicular to a 1-wide entrance. The hallway must actually extend past the entrance, by at least 1 cell. Assume that the entrance is on the top of the vault, and the hallway is going to the right. The smuggler works by: - Putting a right facing mover into the hallway - Using a left generator to put another right-facing mover in the gap on the left - Pushing a new cell into the spot with the left generator - Finally, that new cell ends up within the hallway. Enemy smuggling is also a form of smuggling. This is absurdly annoying to do; the enemy is easily destroyed by any mistake. Any cell can technically be smuggled.

The Mover Factory is an odd name for a vault term, but it stuck. It came from a vault named mover factory, in which the solution is to use mover bias (two movers facing each other stopping) to transport a down facing mover much farther than usually possible in a pathway with many trash cells.

Vault Terminology

The first notable vault term, somewhat obviously, is the word vault. A vault is a compilation of cells that protects an enemy.

Can-openable vaults were the first kind of vaults. Their name comes from the fact that they can be can opened, and are therefore un-notable.

Challenge vaults are the majority of notable modern vaults. Challenge vaults must not be can-openable, must be possible to solve, and must contain at least one immobile or trash cell.

Bulk vaults are nearly all can-openable vaults, combined with a few challenge vaults (most notably, Manticore V4). A bulk vault is any vault that relies on size for difficulty.

1-gap vaults are challenge vaults, where the entrance(s) are 1 cell wide most of the time. Nearly all challenge vaults are 1-gap vaults.

Pit vaults are 1-gap vaults, which have an immobile cell (or in rare cases some other cell, which can not be pushed away easily) at the end of the entrance. This requires much more precision than trash vaults, as you have to conserve space in the pit usually.

Trash vaults are the alternative to pit vaults, but with a trash cell rather than an immobile cell. This removes any dependence on having a ner.

Timed vaults are vaults that become impossible after a certain period of time. have two separate classifications- starting from tick 1, or from a trigger. Vaults that start acting on the first tick require immediate action and often simultaneous work from multiple entrances. Vaults that start their timer with some form of trigger often require a difficult setup before being triggered.

The Funeral Model

Due to an incredibly horrible portmanteau of fuse and ner and opener, funeral was born. Opener does not contribute in any manner to “al” at the end of funeral, and yet. Due to this, an entirely new system for categorizing vault terminology was made.

Openers have two main parts. In this model, they are called the “Head”, which contains the method of pushing cells, and the “Payload”, which is the cells being pushed into the vault. There are two main states that each of these can be in: Fused, or unfused. This leads to the following terms:

Re: Payload is fused
Al: Payload is unfused
Ve: Payload is fused and unfused at the same time.
Fu: Head is fused
Funer: Head is fused, yet still has custom inputs due to something strange like a slide cell. (This is only to allow for “funeral” to exist.)
Ner: Head is unfused
Ver: Head is fused and unfused at the same time. (Another horrible portmanteau of gender reveal and ner, as that is the opposite of funeral according to some people.)

It is worth noting that “fused and unfused at the same time” has various definitions. For a payload, this means that either a fuse has been altered in some way or an opener has a long separation from the vault itself which contains payload. For a head, this is usually a fuse with some minor alteration, or a ner with some extra generators attached.

No one has ever used this model seriously.