What counts as a multiplication/exponentiation builtin is quite poorly defined, and although many languages might get by without them just fine here, they might not for other sorts of challenges/other builtins. I'd advise against banning them. One alternative is to create your own mini language for the purposes of the challenge and do atomic golf.

user‭ I don't know how to make one at all. Might learn from Lyxal, but meh.

user‭ Don't worry. It's only THIS challenge (hopefully) of mine that'll ban specific built-ins. The only reason it was excluded to be used was to make the challenge harder. Getting those perfect squares with those 2 helpful operations is kinda boring, so I "flavored" it.

No, I didn't mean make a full-fledged golflang, just use pseudocode or maybe take a subset of Python/C/whatever without multiplication and exponentiation.