Alchemist Cubes by Kris Antibus & Xamuel Jones

Alchemist Cubes is a highly themed 4x4x4 Cube Set. It has 18 unique pieces that can be used to make over 4,900 cubes found by running Burr-Tools for weeks for the best set of pieces and associated puzzle problems. 54 specific problems were hand-selected and turned into alchemical formulas you must solve to find the right pieces. A 1,500 word narrative is included with a list of 54 themed spells to solve. The problem set comes in a PDF file which will be sent to the winner of this auction and the puzzle comes with leather pouch and scroll.

In the puzzling world, a shockingly large number of the puzzling genres can be boiled down to assembling and disassembling pieces. The genre of burrs and tics are the classic examples that come to mind. So Alchemist Cubes was born from the idea of just distilling a puzzle down to this raw idea of putting pieces together into a cube. However, the pieces don't interlock the way tics and burrs do. The pieces are simply placed into a cube without any complex manipulations or rotations required. The idea is to instead figure out how to take a subset of pieces from the base 18 pieces set, and see which ones go into a cube.

The alchemy concept comes from the idea of having 4 pieces for the 4 elements (air, earth, fire, and water) along with 2 "special" pieces, the void element and philosopher's stone. Then the puzzle problems are given as incomplete spell formulas that solvers need to assemble from the elements before successfully casting the magic. Abracadabra!

This set is the #00 (Infinity) Maker's Edition.It's a one-of-a-kind set that took over 90 hours of watching the printer, layer by layer, in a time before automated color-swaps was a thing in 3d-printing. It is dense with 11 types of filament. This copy was originally auctioned off, and I bought it despite being one of the designers because this particular copy was so handsome that I had to have it since the "standard" version of Alchemist Cubes doesn't have any filament color switches this version was made with. And Kris wasn't going to ever print out another copy nearly as complex again. The constant filament switching was an ordeal for him to do at the time. Including this copy, only 36 copies of Alchemist Cubes were ever made total.

Each set of pieces is a thematic element of the puzzle:

The void (space) piece is themed on "The Dark Side of the Moon" album cover with rainbow bands, smoky and clear parts to represent the prism and has 17 layers in 39mm of space alone

Fire is in the warm colors of flames, water is in shades of blue and white like an ocean wave, air is all varied in clear patterns and light colors.

The earth pieces have marble in walnut to represent the plants and minerals of Earth.

The filament color bands in them represent their numbers, 1 to 4.

Finally the Philosopher's Stone piece uses a filament called "Wizard's Sleeve" and cannot be found anymore. 

Here is the link to the imgur album to take a look at it more detail than can be shown here with photos taken by the original maker, Kris, himself: https://imgur.com/a/RnF6avi