Glass -> Not lucky bonuses not ordered neatly.

[Prezombie]

I've got Panther Salve = 10 blocks Run Raptor Run = 30 blocks Redundant Raptor = 120 blocks Catamaran = 90 blocks

Plus the 1 block gained from the not lucky, It should cost 249 blocks to gain the maximum bonus. Or 194 and 1 river. Or 139 glass blocks and 1 wave/river.

Instead, with 244 blocks, only 239 blocks are being consumed. The "consumes a wave and/or river" has little use if Catamaran activates earlier than the others, because if you're at UW castles, and only RRR, RR, and Catamaran activate, the Not Lucky reward isn't even large enough to earn a notification.

Edit, and strangly, this cycle, a 249-block-eating not lucky gave the same castle reward as a 39-block-eating not-lucky, once I factored in the ~4 UW castle bump each successful NL.

[TFMurphy]

If you have 244 Blocks, then you don't have enough for Panther Salve to activate, which basically scuppers the whole thing: you only get the boosts from Redundant Raptor and Catamaran if Panther Salve works. Catamaran (and LCB) shutting down Panther Salve is a nasty problem though -- they should probably check for having 10 more Glass Blocks than they need to allow for Panther Salve to still work (otherwise, what's the point?).

As for your edit, you're hitting the Built Castle cap. Once you have either Panther Salve or Fractal Sandcastles active, Not Lucky can only build up to 2% of your Total Castles Built stat. This cap does not include the bonus from Flux Turbine, however, so decent use of Temporal Rifts and Flux Surge make Panther Salve a viable method to hit Infinity Castles. However, as you've found, you almost never need all 5 Panther Salve boosts active to hit the cap -- I got by most of the time with just Redundant Raptor and Catamaran active (I had a lot of Redundakitties clicked at the time).

[Prezombie]

Considering that at this point the panther salve boosts start becoming rather redundant, at this point spinning the flux turbine is much more effective, going from 2% castles built to 72% castles built, and I won't be surprised if the next rift pushes me into an exponential growth >1.

Seems rather silly to have a bunch of redundant, expensive to maintain boosts that quickly scrape the hard cap, and then have a much cheaper one which completely ignores the cap altogether.

Wouldn't it make more sense to put them the other way around?

[eternaldensity]

It would also make more sense to have planned it beforehand rather than afterwards.

So, yeah. My head's currently in a different space, but I'm open to suggestions.

[Prezombie]

I would say to pull up the hard cap, rebalance the panthers so they can all run effectively at once, spending a modest sum of blocks to get <200% the total built. Catamaran might make more sense to spend the river and wave as part of the cost, not as a backup alternative.