The branching is the only unknown part of the encoder, so they’re there to make things less obvious.
There are several ways to deal with them:
-
Unlock the branching info upgrade and use tab to toggle the terminal; you’ll see the conditions list (it doesn’t reveal the exact condition, but rather its kind, like “contains_letter”).
-
Usually, a condition is either simple or too hard to be guessed intentionally. Every level should be beatable with backtracking the result even if you don’t know the branching; you would need to compute the parallel branches simultaneously though. If it’s hard, like fnv_hash_even, then you just can’t reliably infer it.
-
Some elements apply a transformation that excludes the other transformation, so it should be possible to reduce the number of branches you need to calculate (e.g. 1 instead of 3).
-
Some levels form an algorithm like a switch or a binary search tree. If you understand the algorithm, you usually don’t even need to follow the algorithm, just apply the direct transformation (so instead of doing N steps, do 1 or 2).
I haven’t found a way to make conditions better. Maybe an icon could make them more understandable, so branching info upgrade is not needed for that. I wasn’t sure if it would make the game more fun to play. I still don’t have the answer. :D