Saltfire Day 72 10 September 2026
Basalt
How do you make Basalt in 8 merges?
- 1 Ember + Salt Ash
- 2 Salt + Salt Crystal
- 3 Ash + Crystal Stone
- 4 Ember + Ember Flame
- 5 Flame + Flame Blaze
- 6 Blaze + Stone Lava
- 7 Breath + Breath Wind
- 8 Lava + Wind Basalt
Why is 8 merges the shortest possible?
Day 72 asked for Basalt — a tier-4 element, one of the complex — and it goes in eight merges. Not fewer: par is worked out across the whole recipe tree before the puzzle ships, and then proved by replaying the chain above against the game's own rules, starting from nothing but Salt, Ember, Dew and Breath. If that replay had spent one step more or one step less, the build would have failed and this day would never have run.
Four of the eight merges come straight out of the primordials — Ash, Crystal, Flame and Wind — and everything else is built on top of those. The last step is Lava + Wind, which is where Basalt finally condenses.
No intermediate here is wanted twice: every element the chain makes is consumed by exactly one later merge, so par is simply how far Basalt sits above the primordials. There is nothing shared to save a step on — eight links of chain, eight merges.
Basalt has exactly one recipe in the tree — Lava + Wind — so every route to it has to pass through those two. Four steps fuse an element with itself (Salt + Salt, Ember + Ember, Flame + Flame and Breath + Breath). Self-merges are legal moves and a few elements only come out that way — always worth a try when a run stalls. Dew never appears in the short way through — though nothing tells you that while you are playing, which is rather the point.