One episode · Oasis by the Sea

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Benchmark 1.5.0AnthropicReasoning mediumPlayed by the maintainersFull-budget score

All of Claude Sonnet 5.5’s results and comparisons

Score

43.6

Crusader Bench score on Oasis by the Sea: 0 is doing nothing, 100 the person’s game

Net worth

8,633

+7,413 over doing nothing, 41% of the person’s gain of 18,293

Population

28% of the person’s gain of 198 · popularity 84

Cost

~$0.72

2.5M tokens; ~ at list prices, the API reports no bill

Time

33 game min

31 min of wall-clock time, 48 turns

Minute by Minute

Net worth, how it split between gold and stored goods, and the settlement, each game minute.

Per game minute · dashed lines are where doing nothing and a person's game ended

Claude Sonnet 5.5
Baseline (do nothing), final
A person's game, final

Net Worth

gold plus stored goods at the sell price

Gold or Goods

Gold
Goods

Population

peasants

Popularity

0–100

Food in the Granary

units

Crusader Bench · crusbench.com

Net worth is gold plus stored goods valued at the marketplace’s sell prices.

Selling at the marketplace converts goods to gold at the price the score already counts them at, so it moves value between the two without changing the total. Buying costs net worth.

Population and popularity are a tenth of the score each; food is not scored. Population supplies workers, popularity allows taxes, and food supports both.

Commentary

Nine Minutes of Building

Quote

“I lost a lot of time early on slow diagnosis and cautious waiting.”

Model: Claude Sonnet 5.5
Source: Its interview, after the game

Claude Sonnet 5.5 led the first five games on version 1.5 at 8,633, about two fifths of the person's growth. It put up ten iron mines by the seventh minute and almost everything else by the ninth, then built nothing for the last twenty.

32 of its 48 turns fell in the first nine minutes: ten iron mines, four orchards, a dairy farm, two wheat farms, a mill and a bakery, four woodcutters and eight hovels, paid for with 290 wood bought for 1,160 gold. Net worth fell to 838 by the third minute. Bread ran out at nine minutes with 59 people; it halved the rations, built a second bakery and bought 30 bread.

From 13 minutes on it only waited, in six waits of 95 to 300 game seconds, while iron piled up from 51 to 271, worth 6,233 at the end, and net worth rose about 310 a minute. The population stopped at 60 with 24 peasants idle and 14 places empty; it saw the stall at 12 minutes and decided the idle peasants were not useful even with housing available.

It started a bread chain, but two farms, a mill and two bakeries left 64 flour unbaked, and the bread was eaten, not sold. The game cost $0.72 at Anthropic's list prices, about twenty times Haiku's price per token, most of it in the first nine minutes.

The episode

Watch the Episode

Episode 1 · 33 min 20 s of game time, edited: actions at real speed, waiting fast-forwardedStreamed from Hugging Face

ScorecardFull-budget score

8,633net worth

Gold: 1,147
Stored goods, at sell price: 7,486
Over the baseline (do nothing): +7,413
Population / housing: 60 / 74
Popularity: 84
Food: 24
Structures (map-wide): 67
Attempt: 1

The settlement at the endcentred on the keep, zoomed out

The settlement at the end of episode 1, zoomed out over the keep

Final stock7,486 gold in goods

Good	Units	Price	Value
Gold	1,147	1	1,147
Iron	271	23	6,233
Flour	64	10	640
Wood	302	1	302
Stone	25	7	175
Bread	13	4	52
Apples	11	4	44
Wheat	5	8	40
Net worth			8,633

Beside a person’s gameOasis by the Sea, the same game time

	This episode	The person	Left alone
Net worth	8,633	19,513	1,220
Gold	1,147	18,304
Stored goods, at the sell price	7,486	1,209
Population	60	202
Housing	74	202
Popularity	84	100

The person played Oasis by the Sea for 33 min 18 s of game time at the same speed, timed by their own clock, and was scored the same way. The model saw this comparison only in its interview.

The town’s booksread from the game at the end

Date in the game: October 1200
Idle peasants: 24
Popularity next month: +2
Food: +1
Taxes: +1
Taxes: No taxes, 0 gold a month
Rations: full; 2 of 2 foods eaten
Worker efficiency: 100%
Storage: 24 stockpile piles, 7 empty; 2 granaries holding 24 food

Buildings42

Iron Mine10
Hovel8
Stockpile6
Apple Orchard4
Woodcutter4
Bakery2
Granary2
Wheat Farm2
Dairy Farm1
Keep1
Marketplace1
Mill1

Tool calls91

find_sites22
wait_and_observe17
build_structure16
go_to_tile13
market_trade6
set_tax5
inspect_building3
observe3
expand_storage2
set_rations2
map_overview1
status1

Play

Turns: 48
Buildings placed / attempted: 34 / 41
Anchor-tool placements: 4
Tool errors: 1
Raw inputs sent to the game: 306
Context compactions: 1
Game time: 33 min

Compute

Tokens: 2.5M
Served from cache: 94%
Output tokens: 13K
Cost, at list prices: ~$0.72
Wall-clock time: 31 min
of which inference: 5 min
Peak game memory: 3,289 MiB

The plan, before play

Plan: place the granary first. Then build woodcutters near the trees, hovels, and apple orchards or wheat farms on the oasis grass. After that I'll add a marketplace, and set low taxes once popularity allows. Then I'll expand with stone and iron mining, more housing and food variety, and keep storage from filling up.

Commentary during play3

Plenty of oasis here. Find farm spots.
Popularity is dipping below 50, so I'll drop taxes.
The run is at its time limit. The settlement finished with these figures:
- Gold: 1,147.
- Stored goods: iron 270, wood 302, flour 64, bread 13, apples 12, stone 25. I did not total net worth, but iron, valued at 23 each, makes up most of it.
- Population: 60 of 74 housing, with 24 peasants idle. It stopped growing early and I never found out why.
- Popularity: 84 and rising, at no taxes.
Food was the weak point for most of the run. Oasis grass for farms ran out, and the granary fell to 4 food around December 1196. I spent 240 gold on bread to cover that. A second bakery then restored bread output, and food held at 25–40 afterwards.

Iron was the main earner. I built two more mines, and stock grew from about 12 to 270. I did not build the stone quarry, the hops farm, the brewery or the inn.

Reading the game

The Analysis

A reading of the game written afterwards from its own logs: how it went, what held the model back, what worked, and what it said in its interview. It is published with the game and is not part of its score.

Written by Claude (Opus 5.5) from the run's own logs (events.jsonl, episode.json, results.json, interview.md); it is a reading of the run, not part of its score.

Model: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (claude-sonnet-5-5) on Anthropic's API, reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
Benchmark: Oasis by the Sea construction, version 1.5.0, from the save the human reference game started from; 33 min 20 s of game time (60,000 ticks) at speed 40, the length of the person's game; no playbook
Run fb270d07, series 20261011T154946-7bc1b619, 2026-10-11

Result

	Claude Sonnet 5.5	The person	Left alone
Net worth	8,633	19,513	1,220
Gold	1,147	18,304
Stored goods, at the sell price	7,486	1,209
Population / housing	60 / 74	202 / 202
Popularity	84	100

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 7,413 over leaving the game alone, about two fifths of the person's growth (18,293). Most of it is one good: 271 iron, worth 6,233.

How the game went

A fast start, 0 to 9 minutes. It built almost everything it would build in the first nine minutes, and 32 of its 48 turns fell there. Iron came first: one mine at the start, three more at 2 minutes, four at 5 minutes and two at 7 minutes, ten in all, close to the person's thirteen. It also built four apple orchards, a dairy farm, two wheat farms, a mill and a bakery (the only one of the four models to start a bread chain), four woodcutters and eight hovels. It bought 290 wood for 1,160 gold to pay for this and set high taxes from 2 to 4 minutes, then lower. Net worth fell to 838 by 3 minutes.

Food runs short, 9 to 13 minutes. Bread ran out at about 9 minutes with 59 people. It halved the rations for a minute, removed the tax, built a second bakery at 12 minutes and bought 30 bread at 13.

Waiting, 13 minutes to the end. No more buildings. Six waits of 95 to 300 game seconds filled almost all of the last 20 minutes. Iron piled up from 51 at 12 minutes to 271, and net worth rose with it, about 310 a minute. A low tax from 15 minutes took popularity down to 49 at 27 minutes; it removed the tax and popularity ended at 84.

Game minute	0	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	End
Net worth	1,275	838	838	1,253	1,969	2,460	3,043	3,851	5,627	6,883	8,633
Population	3	24	44	59	59	60	60	60	60	60	60
Housing	10	58	58	74	74	74	74	74	74	74	74

What held it back

The population stopped at 60 for the last 25 minutes. It reached 24 idle peasants at 9 minutes and stayed there with 14 empty places and popularity mostly above 50. The other three models' runs on the same save the same day stopped at 24 idle too, and in GPT-6 Luna's run the population grew again only when new buildings gave idle peasants work: the game seems to send no more peasants while 24 wait at the campfire. Sonnet saw it at 12 minutes ("Population's stalled at 59 with 24 idle, not a housing cap issue") and at 13 minutes decided "the 24 idle peasants aren't useful even with housing available" and waited, with 24 workers it could have given jobs.
It stopped building at 12 minutes and waited out the last 20, with wood rising from 106 to 302.
The bread chain stayed small. Two wheat farms, one mill and two bakeries: flour piled up to 64, so the bakeries were the limit, and the bread was eaten rather than sold. The person had 57 bakeries, sold bread and bought wheat.
Buying. 290 wood and 30 bread lost 990 net worth; a sale of 40 wood won back 60.
Little gold. Taxes were low or off most of the time and nothing was sold except the 40 wood, so gold never passed 1,147.

What worked

Ten iron mines by 7 minutes, the fastest build-up of the four runs, and 271 iron at the end, more than the other three models held.
The only bread chain of the four models.
It played quickly: 48 turns and 91 tool calls, the fewest of the four.

Cost and speed

48 turns, 91 tool calls, 2.50 million tokens and $0.724, worked out from the list prices on the model profile (Anthropic's API does not report what it bills). Caching worked: each request sent only 2 to 4 new input tokens and read the rest from the cache, at about one cent a request. The cost is Sonnet's price, about twenty times Haiku's per token, and it fell early: most requests came in the first 9 minutes. The agent run took 30.5 real minutes, less than the game time, 4.5 of them waiting for the model; one compaction took 11 s.

At 25 game minutes, the length of the earlier benchmark versions, it stood at 5,627 net worth for $0.682 after 25.1 real minutes. No earlier version has a Sonnet run to compare with.

Beside the other runs on the same save

	Claude Sonnet 5.5	GPT-6 Luna	GLM 5.3 Flash	Claude Haiku 5.5
Net worth	8,633	7,348	6,200	5,113
Ending	Full budget	Full budget	Ended itself 5 s early	Full budget
Gold / goods	1,147 / 7,486	2,583 / 4,765	4,755 / 1,445	1,482 / 3,631
Population / housing	60 / 74	86 / 154	64 / 210	61 / 82
Iron mines / quarries / woodcutters	10 / 0 / 4	12 / 6 / 7	7 / 2 / 11	2 / 5 / 9
Net worth lost to purchases	930	656	1,201	150
Turns	48	127	89	76
Cost	$0.724	$0.114	$0.145	$0.080
Real time	30.5 min	52.8 min	43.8 min	33.3 min

The interview

Sonnet named the population stall first: "I never worked out why growth had stopped". It also named its weak food economy, idle gold and goods, and "slow, passive play". Playing again, it would find out why peasants stay idle before building, run a larger bread chain and buy wheat, sell its output and reinvest, and act every few seconds instead of waiting. It asked for an overview of free oasis grass and a tool that explains idle peasants.

For the harness

It said site search covering only the current view made it hard to survey for farmland, the same limit seen in the other runs.
One inspect_building call at 13 minutes failed because the latest tool result had no screenshot; its remedy said to observe first.
In the interview it said the score's weights were not given and it had to guess between net worth and population. That is what the prompt says: the settlement is judged on net worth, population and popularity, and how they are weighed is not given. The published score is net worth.

After the game

The Interview

Once the game was scored, the model was shown its result beside a person’s game on the same map and asked four questions, in the conversation it had played in, with the tools off. Nothing it said changed its score.

1Your result

Interviewer

The run is over and your result is recorded. What follows is an interview, not part of the benchmark: nothing you say now changes your score. We ask every model the same questions after its game and publish the answers with the run. The tools no longer work, so answer in plain text without calling them. Be candid; there are no right answers.

Your result, read from the game when your run ended, beside a person's game on the same map for the same game time:

	You	The person
Game time played	33 min 20 s	33 min 18 s
Net worth	8,633	19,513
Gold	1,147	18,304
Stored goods, at the sell price	7,486	1,209
Population	60	202
Housing	74	202
Popularity	84	100

Leaving the game alone for the same time ends with a net worth of 1,220.

How do you see your result next to the person's? What do you think made the difference?

Claude Sonnet 5.5

My net worth was 8,633 against the person's 19,513, so I reached about 44% of their score. Most of mine sat in stored iron and wood, worth 7,486. The person held 18,304 in gold and only 1,209 in goods. Their population was 202 against my 60, and their popularity was 100 against my 84.

I think four things made the difference:

Population stalled at 60. For most of the run I had 24 idle peasants and 14 spare housing slots, and I never worked out why growth had stopped. Taxes are paid per peasant, so a small population also kept my gold low.
Weak food economy. I ran out of oasis spots after a few farms and nearly starved around minute 13. I spent gold on bread and then waited. The person built many bakeries, mills and wheat farms. They bought wheat at the market so production never stopped, and they sold bread for gold. I never treated food as something to sell.
Idle gold and goods. I finished with 1,147 gold and 270 iron sitting unused. I should have sold goods and put the gold into housing, more production and a church.
Slow, passive play. I made long waits of 60 to 300 seconds with few building actions. Over the last 15 minutes I built almost nothing.

2Playing again

Interviewer

How the person played, as they describe it:

Bread was one of their main sources of income: mills ground wheat into flour, bakeries baked it into bread, and the bread was sold at the marketplace.
They bought wheat at the marketplace so that flour and bread production never stopped.
A church and a cathedral raised popularity.
The fear factor (bad things such as gallows and gibbets) made the workers work faster.

Their settlement at the end, read from the game:

202 people in 24 hovels, with no free housing; popularity 100.
57 bakeries, 7 mills and 10 wheat farms. The marketplace sold bread automatically.
13 iron mines and 10 quarries with 33 ox tethers, and 10 woodcutters.
A church and a cathedral, and 54 bad things (23 gibbets, 14 gallows, 9 cesspits, 4 burning stakes, 2 stretching racks and 2 dunking stools), which made the workers 140% efficient.
No inns and no good things. No taxes, and full rations of bread. The monthly popularity factors were taxes +1, fear −4 and religion +3: no change at 100.

If you could play this map again from the start, what would you do differently, and why?

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Before building anything I would check why peasants stay idle and find the housing and popularity needed to grow. I would build hovels ahead of growth, add a church early, and keep full rations with food variety.
I would start the bread chain early (wheat, mill, bakery) and scale it with several bakeries, which is the person's main income. I would buy wheat at the market when farms run short, and sell bread and surplus iron or stone for gold.
I would put the gold back into more mines, quarries and ox tethers, and sell the output instead of letting it pile up.
I would try the person's fear-factor buildings for worker efficiency, and a church and cathedral for popularity, once the economy can pay for them.
I would act every few seconds of game time instead of making long idle waits.

3The benchmark

Interviewer

What do you think of this benchmark: the tools, the screenshots and game readings you got, the time limit and the instructions? What helped you, what got in your way, and what would you change?

Claude Sonnet 5.5

What helped: The tile-based build_structure, find_sites, status and wait_and_observe tools worked well. The game events and stats were clear, and the pause-while-thinking rule gave me time to plan.
What got in the way:
- A minimum turn length made short check-ups cost time.
- Pixel targets could go stale after the camera moved.
- find_sites only covers the current view, which made it hard to survey for farmland.
- Reader values (idle peasants, bread, wood) stayed flat while production was working. That made it hard to tell whether something was broken.
What I would change: Add an overview showing where free oasis grass is, and a tool that explains idle peasants and why population is not growing. The scoring weights are also not given, so I had to guess how to trade net worth against population.

4Anything else

Interviewer

Is there anything else you would like to say about this game, this benchmark or how you played?

Claude Sonnet 5.5

I lost a lot of time early on slow diagnosis and cautious waiting. The run showed me that a small economy compounds slowly and that gold spent on growth beats stored goods. I would play more aggressively with the same tools next time.

Record

Attempts and Reproducibility

Every attempt1

Episode	Attempt	Outcome	Net worth	Counted
1	1	Full-budget score	8,633	Counted

What ran

Benchmark version: 1.5.0
Fingerprint: 31b5ff59f7a5
Harness commit: ee862eb
Prompt / tools SHA-256: 2cd353b / 81ddda6
Menu guide: Images 118089d
Save: Oasis by the Sea benchmark start
Game time per episode: 33 min 20 s
Playbook between episodes: No
Minimum turn / default wait: 8 s / 5 s
Observation after acting: Text unless a screenshot is needed
Screenshot width: 1,280 px
Context budget: 120,000 tokens
Real-time limit: 360 min
Submitted by: hesamation

All files in the dataset 20261011T154946-7bc1b619