I think the biggest code-savers I used in this one were:

Ditching my Java-programmer urges to make a class and instead working with lists and parsing the file by category rather than by monkey using list comprehension. List comprehension is starting to become my best friend since I've learned about it's existence on day 7.

"exec" to execute part of the instructions directly from input rather than trying to parse it myself. Though I'm fairly sure it could have been done shorter without having to pass globals and locals - or maybe even use eval instead of exec altogether. Eval has a return value whereas exec doesn't. Found both exec and eval today by google-fu - I thought if it's a script language that can be ran interactively from shell, it might as well be able to run stuff from a string. Turned out that was indeed the case.

ok wow this certainly helps! :

exec(m[1],globals(),loc)

I didn't know that was a thing. Neat! I never would have had a use for it until now, but it's neat that it exists.

Explanation: Exec evaluates code from string in first arg with other args as context