Saltfire Day 73 11 September 2026
Tower
How do you make Tower in 5 merges?
- 1 Breath + Salt Dust
- 2 Dew + Dust Clay
- 3 Ember + Ember Flame
- 4 Clay + Flame Brick
- 5 Brick + Brick Tower
Why is 5 merges the shortest possible?
Day 73 asked for Tower — a tier-3 element, one of the made things — and it goes in five 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.
Two of the five merges come straight out of the primordials — Dust and Flame — and everything else is built on top of those. The last step is Brick + Brick, which is where Tower 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 Tower sits above the primordials. There is nothing shared to save a step on — five links of chain, five merges.
Tower has three recipes in the tree, so the route above is the cheapest way in rather than the only one. Another chain of the same length is quite possible; a longer one is far more likely. Two steps fuse an element with itself (Ember + Ember and Brick + Brick). Self-merges are legal moves and a few elements only come out that way — always worth a try when a run stalls.