Wormbo I've been working on this on and off for about two and a half weeks.
I've known about the Dandelifeon for many years, and I've been playing a modpack for the past 3 weeks that uses Botania and wondered what the 'best' solution was. I did some reading online and found this solution that used 6 initial cell blocks, but I thought there must be an equally optimal solution with fewer initial cell blocks. First thing I did was write the simulator and tried some of my own approaches, which didn't pan out. I saw that the author had some success with a genetic algorithm so I did the same and ended up getting a generic 4 cell result. After knowing it was possible, I wanted to further optimize for minimum required cell-play space (air + 9 zone + 4 seed), and after some more experimentation and tweaking I was able to find this.
I conjecture that an asymmetric 4 cell solution is impossible; I wanted to find one because they look the coolest IMO, but I was unsuccessful.
Since 3 initial cells can't do anything interesting, we now know that 4 is the minimum number required. I also ran an exhaustive check to prove that at most 6 cells can enter the final 8-block region at once, so this solution is proved to be optimal in those two regards.
