Wandmaking is an interesting offshoot of crystals and enchantment! They can do almost anything the other two can. Wands are vastly easier to make and debug and tend to be more aimable, even...

But they have a limited number of uses and then need to be worked on or fueled, or are just consumed forever.

Hmm, this is interesting. She's guessing for an understanding on how exactly they differ from the other two she'll need to take Wandmaking 101?

Precisely.

Potions, then?

Anything that is a liquid! Usually meant for one time use. But in addition to the classic cherry red healing potions* and other obviously magical effects like flight and invisibility, there are a variety of quality of life things. Stimulants, anti-acne, cleaning. Even industrial applications. EverGlo is used in greenhouses because it emits something functionally identical to natural sunlight for about a year before fading into a thick blue goo. There are various acids, dyes, and so on too.

If she has more questions, yes, sign up for Potions 101.

*Human or merfolk use only. Use on species with unfamiliar magic may result in unpleasant side effects for which Suvak University is not liable.

Figures. Still, this is fun. Crystals, now.

The defining feature of crystals are being recharging. Use, wait for it to charge, use again. Many crystals have an overcharge feature - you can get a single-use much more powerful effect at the cost of destroying the crystal. Some crystal term project examples include investigating the tradeoff between recharge time and maximum output, or the invention of a shield crystal with 93% as much performance that only takes 85% as many steps to make.

Man this is kinda cool.

And finally, golems.

She already has an idea of what golems are capable of from chatting to those two guys in the mall and Nils. One essentially useful feature is that golems can trigger every kind of magic that usually requires a human input. That was revolutionary when it was invented some 9000 years ago, and was responsible for the creation of the entire field of golemcraft.

One of the group of students over there, chatting animatedly about some kind of group project, is adamant that his approach is better, more stable. The others call it too much work for marginal improvement.

Well Sadde is likely to agree with him. She has no idea what he's talking about but he's clearly correct about whatever it is.

He's also the hottest person she's ever seen and she's seen lots of hot people. I mean look how pretty he is. He's so pretty. She should tell him, but then he might be upset about a stranger doing that, and anyway he's also being smart and she should probably just watch him be smart for a bit longer.

As the argument procedes it becomes clear that what he is arguing for is using a set of shareable memory for whatever they're building instead of giving each piece its own dedicated memory.

It'll be tricky, yes, they have to program half a dozen extra things. But memory is crucial here, see, if only one piece fails the whole thing stops. Unless they assign it dynamically, then the memory governor can avoid the busted piece! It's way more reliable!

They retort that his half a dozen management systems are probably a whole project's worth of work each.

"Except I kinda happen to have them sort of memorised," the pretty sparkly winged person fails to stop herself from walking up to them and interjecting. The cute smart boy needs help here to convince his peers!

"Hey, don't just listen in like that! We could have been discussing something sensitive."

"Can it, Leah, we'd have used the project room if it were secret. You're being rude. So, you know a dynamic memory system from somewhere?"

"I apologise," she tells Leah, then turn to the hottest person on this or any world and says, "I do! The where is complicated but basically 'another world,' I could show evidence of this but I'm told this evidence is upsettingly similar to rifts, visually."

"That sounds fascinating!"

Someone else speaks up, "I agree but we need to finish talking about our project first though."

"You probably should! But! For what it's worth, shared memory is used by all the, er, golems in my world, and it's vastly more efficient than dedicated memory. You can load and unload programs—subroutines—with shared memory, and different programs can communicate more easily and share resources."

"Program? You mean like hooking two whole main units to the same memory? There's a thought..."

"Terel, the rest of us aren't golem nerds. This is just a project for 230. Can't we do it the simple way and you look at your memory thing on your own?"

"Oh, fine, fine."

"Probably a good idea, yeah. Wanna talk about it later, though? And maybe we could—" No, not coffee, she doesn't actually drink coffee. "Erm. Talk."

"I definitely want to talk about it... I've got class in like twenty minutes. Do you have a networked call crystal?"

"Alas, I do not. I could wait for you somewhere?" Forever and ever if need be.