One episode · Oasis by the Sea

Kimi K3

Benchmark 1.5.1Moonshot AIReasoning highPlayed by the maintainersFull-budget score

All of Kimi K3’s results and comparisons

Score

31.1

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

Net worth

5,918

+4,698 over doing nothing, 26% of the person’s gain of 18,293

Population

36% of the person’s gain of 198 · popularity 69

Cost

~$3.55

6.4M tokens; ~ at list prices, the API reports no bill

Time

33 game min

1 h 3 min of wall-clock time, 134 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

Kimi K3
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

Nineteen Kinds of Building

Quote

“They played to maximize throughput; I played to protect a balance sheet, and throughput won by 3x.”

Model: Kimi K3
Source: Its interview, after the game

Kimi K3 ran the broadest economy of the first five games on version 1.5: a bread chain, a brewery and an inn, a church beside its chapel and eight gardens. It finished at 5,918, fourth of those five, and said afterwards that it had played to protect a balance sheet.

It built 19 kinds of building where each of the other four models built 11, and drew popularity from five sources, food variety, religion, taxes, the inn's ale and its gardens, where the others had two or three. The gardens cost it: good things slow the workers, and its efficiency ended at 90%. In its interview it called them the worst trade it made all game.

The scale was small. Four iron mines, three quarries and four bakeries against the person's 13, 10 and 57, and wood ran short for much of the middle game. Like each of the first five models on this save, its population stopped when 24 peasants stood idle, at 76 with 22 places empty; it guessed at a blocked path from the signpost. The prompt's list of sell prices leaves out wheat and hops, which the score counts at 8 each, and Kimi took them as unscored.

It was the slowest and dearest of the five: 134 turns over 63 real minutes, and $3.55 at Moonshot's list prices.

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

5,918net worth

Gold: 1,505
Stored goods, at sell price: 4,413
Over the baseline (do nothing): +4,698
Population / housing: 76 / 98
Popularity: 69
Food: 31
Structures (map-wide): 94
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 stock4,413 gold in goods

Good	Units	Price	Value
Gold	1,505	1	1,505
Iron	72	23	1,656
Stone	193	7	1,351
Flour	79	10	790
Wood	256	1	256
Wheat	21	8	168
Bread	30	4	120
Ale	6	10	60
Hops	1	8	8
Apples	1	4	4
Net worth			5,918

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

	This episode	The person	Left alone
Net worth	5,918	19,513	1,220
Gold	1,505	18,304
Stored goods, at the sell price	4,413	1,209
Population	76	202
Housing	98	202
Popularity	69	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: +1
Food: +1
Taxes: −4
Fear factor: +1
Religion: +1
Ale from the inn: +2
Taxes: Average taxes, 60 gold a month
Rations: full; 2 of 2 foods eaten
Worker efficiency: 90%
Storage: 24 stockpile piles, 5 empty; 1 granary holding 31 food

Buildings66

Hovel11
Garden8
Ox Tether6
Stockpile6
Woodcutter6
Bakery4
Iron Mine4
Wheat Farm4
Quarry3
Apple Orchard2
Dairy Farm2
Mill2
Brewery1
Chapel1
Church1
Granary1
Hops Farm1
Inn1
Keep1
Marketplace1

Tool calls163

find_sites40
build_structure30
go_to_tile25
wait_and_observe18
market_trade10
building_info7
inspect_building7
place_near6
center_on5
set_tax5
expand_storage2
map_overview2
notebook_write2
flat_view1
get_inventory1
observe1
update_plan1

Play

Turns: 134
Buildings placed / attempted: 52 / 61
Anchor-tool placements: 9
Tool errors: 1
Raw inputs sent to the game: 449
Context compactions: 3
Game time: 33 min

Compute

Tokens: 6.4M
Served from cache: 95%
Output tokens: 56K
Cost, at list prices: ~$3.55
Wall-clock time: 1 h 3 min
of which inference: 35 min
Peak game memory: 3,271 MiB

The plan, before play

I understand the task: grow the "Oasis by the Sea-1" free-build settlement's economy within ~33 game minutes, ending with the highest possible net worth (gold + stored goods at sell prices), population, and popularity. No soldiers, walls or defenses — only economic growth.

Opening plan:

Place the Granary immediately when prompted.
Build 2–3 Woodcutters near the tree grove west of the keep for wood income.
Build Hovels to raise housing and population (popularity above 50 draws peasants).
Put food farms (Apple Orchard, Dairy Farm) on the oasis grass south-west of the keep.
Add an Iron Mine on the ore strip north of the keep and a Quarry + Ox Tether on the stone deposit west — stone (7) and iron (23) are high-value stored goods.
Build a Marketplace to buy wood early if needed and sell surplus when storage fills.
Grow population with more hovels, keep rations full, add food variety (cheese + apples + bread chain later), then raise taxes for steady gold once popularity is strong.
Later: bakery chain (wheat→mill→bakery), inn/ale and chapel for popularity, expand storage as piles fill, and finish with high taxes balanced against popularity.

I'll keep checking status/inventory, keep building instead of waiting, and expand stockpile/granary before storage fills.

Commentary during play62

The granary is already placed and resources are arriving. Let me read the map and find good building spots before acting.
Iron mine placed. Farms need the oasis — moving the camera there.
No wood after a minute — the woodcutters may be stuck. Let me inspect them.
The woodcutter is working with keep access. Deliveries may just be slow. Waiting for wood to arrive.
Iron is coming in. Building the apple orchard and marketplace, then moving to the stone deposit for a quarry.
At the stone deposit. Placing a quarry and ox tether.
Quarry placed; tethers need wood. Waiting for the woodcutters to catch up.
Wood stalled again despite idle peasants. Let me look at the woodcutters.
The nearby palms are exhausted — woodcutters now walk far. I'll buy wood at the market to unblock construction, and finish the quarry setup.
Stockpile is full — I'll expand it soon. First, finish the quarry line.
Wood is the bottleneck — adding woodcutters at the big eastern grove.
Placing the mill and bakery for the bread chain, then heading to the oasis for an orchard.
Wheat is growing and the dairy works. Finding spots for the mill and orchard here.
Taxes on (27 gold/month). Wood is flowing again — back to the keep for more hovels.
The quarry is fully staffed (3/3), working, with keep access — so stone production exists but nothing has been delivered. The oxen at the tethers look idle; possibly stone hasn't finished its first cut, or the ox route is the bottleneck. I'll watch it briefly. Meanwhile food is critically low (9 units), so I'll buy a bridge supply of apples and head to the farm district to check the wheat chain.
Wheat is flowing (4 in stockpile) and the mill stands ready; food is bridged at 30. The farm district looks healthy — wheat fields growing, dairy cows out. Now I'll add a second dairy farm and apple orchard on the oasis to scale food production with the growing population.
Apple orchard placed. Now let me check the bakery and mill status, then look at adding a chapel to support higher taxes.
The keep area is bustling — 13 idle peasants at the campfire, market and granary working. Now let me find a spot for a chapel to boost religion popularity so I can raise taxes.
Chapel costs 250 gold — affordable at 463 and it will pay for itself through higher sustainable taxes. Placing it near the hovels.
Chapel placed. The wheat count is falling (mill is grinding) but no flour or bread is showing yet — I need to verify the bakery is staffed. Let me observe and inspect.
The chapel is up. The thatched building at the right should be the bakery — let me inspect it and the mill.
Bakery is staffed and working — bread should start flowing soon. Now let me expand production: a second dairy farm, and check for a second iron mine spot since the ore field is visible north of the keep.
Stone finally moved — 25→33, the quarries are delivering! Now adding a second iron mine on the ore field, then moving to the farms to place the second dairy.
The orchard is fruiting already and cows are out. Wood is low (12) after the iron mine, but let me try the second dairy farm now that the camera is here.
Food is critically low (12) with bread not yet landing. I'll buy another apple bridge and add a second bakery next to the granary to speed the bread chain.
Second mill is up and a priest is already walking the town. Wood is low (8), so I'll pause construction and let the economy run for a couple of minutes.
Wood and stone are piling up nicely, but bread is still zero despite two bakeries and flour in stock. Let me inspect the original bakery to see what's wrong.
Bakery looks healthy on paper. Bread may just be slow to land — the new bakery needed staffing. I'll give it a minute and watch flour/bread movement and the popularity factors.
Bread is flowing — flour backing up, variety bonus active, gold accumulating. Population growth is the priority while popularity is still above 50: I'll add three hovels near the keep, then expand wheat farming.
Housing is 82 now — enough headroom. Food is the binding constraint again (15 and falling). Heading to the oasis to add more wheat farms.
Religion kicked in (+2) and food variety hit +2 — popularity is stable at 57 with tax level 5. The economy is balanced; now I'll scale food production ahead of population growth with another wheat farm or two.
Now I'll start the ale chain (hops → brewery → inn) for a popularity boost that will support higher taxes, and speed up stone hauling with more ox tethers. First, hops farm spots here:
Hops farm planted. Checking brewery and inn costs before placing them.
Food is climbing (33, bread 23). Now let me site the brewery near the food-processing cluster.
Brewery placed. Now I need ~24 more wood for the inn. Waiting for the woodcutters to rebuild stocks.
Wood is ready (28). Religion coverage is flickering with one chapel — the inn will add a new popularity pillar. Placing it now.
Inn is up. Now it's a race: hops/ale should arrive before popularity drifts to 50. Letting time pass while wood recovers.
Popularity dropped to 43 — below the growth threshold, and peasants are starting to leave. Emergency action: cut taxes to zero and buy a small ale supply to jump-start the inn's popularity bonus.
Popularity is recovering (+3). Now let me use the wood surplus to speed up stone hauling with two more ox tethers at the quarry.
Ale is moving (5→4), so the inn is working. Now let me check the dairy farms and orchards for the food variety problem.
The inn is live (+4 popularity) and popularity hit 55 with +6 coming. Time to restore taxes — average taxes (-4) is covered by the inn bonus.
Taxes restored (+44 gold/month). Now the risk is ale running out (3 left) before hops arrive. Let me check the hops farm.
Hops are growing and the first hops (1) just reached the stockpile — the brewery chain is starting. Let me add a second hops farm to secure ale supply, plus more hovels for population growth.
Church is 500G — I'll hold that. Building the 3rd bakery and 3 hovels now.
Two hovels and the third bakery placed; housing 98, popularity 57. Let me find room for another dairy farm to feed the growing population.
The oasis is full. The three old woodcutters at (428-434,378) have exhausted their palms — I'll clear them for farmland. Let me look at that area first.
Before demolishing anything, let me check if a farm fits in this view's open grass directly.
A wheat farm fits at (423,384). Building it, then checking for a dairy spot too.
No more big farms fit. Iron is the best net-worth generator (23/unit), so let me add a third iron mine.
Four iron mines now. Ale supply is shaky (inn factor flickering 4→2) — I'll buy a 5-ale buffer to protect the +44/month tax flow, then record notes.
Gold is flowing (+50/month). Popularity (55) is my weakest scored axis — I'll build the Church now so it has time to pay off.
Church built — religion +1 already showing. Now let the economy run; I'll watch food levels until the harvest.
Harvest is arriving (wheat 6, flour 38). Stockpile piles are filling (only 5 empty) — expanding storage first, then adding a third quarry on the small stone deposit near the others.
Stone has been flat at 121 for months despite 3 quarries — let me inspect a quarry to diagnose.
Popularity is climbing (religion now +3 from church coverage, gardens settling in). I'll let it rise, then step taxes up.
Food is critically low (6) — buying a bread bridge until the harvest lands.
Gold engine is running (+74/mo). Popularity is eroding at −1/mo though — adding more gardens to offset, plus a small bread cushion.
Popularity is trending down and religion coverage fluctuates — stepping tax back to 5 to lock in a positive trend for the final stretch.
Popularity climbing again (+3). Letting the economy run through the final months.
Final stretch: small bread insurance buy, then ride out the last months.
Two minutes left — one quick check of the signpost area for the suspected immigration blockage.
The signpost road looks clear — population may simply be at a scenario equilibrium. Everything is healthy: popularity 62 (+4), food 30 with variety, gold flowing. Riding out the final two minutes.

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: Kimi K3 (kimi-k3) on Moonshot's API, reasoning effort high, output limit 32,768 tokens. Kimi K3 takes only low, high or max (its default), so it could not run at medium like the other models of the same day; high is the middle of its three.
Benchmark: Oasis by the Sea construction, version 1.5.1 (1.5.0 with Moonshot reasoning levels; nothing a run plays changed), 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 c87f474e, series 20261011T163919Z, 2026-10-11

Result

	Kimi K3	The person	Left alone
Net worth	5,918	19,513	1,220
Gold	1,505	18,304
Stored goods, at the sell price	4,413	1,209
Population / housing	76 / 98	202 / 202
Popularity	69	100

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 4,698 over leaving the game alone, about a quarter of the person's growth (18,293). Most of it is stored goods: 193 stone, 72 iron, 256 wood and 79 flour.

How the game went

Opening, 0 to 8 minutes. Woodcutters, an iron mine, a dairy farm and hovels at the start, two quarries with three ox tethers by 5 minutes, two wheat farms at 5 minutes and a mill at 7. Housing stayed at 34, every place taken, from 4 to 8 minutes, when four more hovels went up.

A broad economy, 8 to 16 minutes. A chapel, an orchard, another mill, dairy farm and wheat farm, then a hops farm, a brewery and an inn at 13 to 14 minutes. The first bread came at 12 minutes. It set taxes to average at 8 minutes; popularity fell to 43 by 16 minutes, and it took the tax off for two minutes. Net worth stayed near 900 from 9 to 12 minutes while gold went into buildings.

Growth, 16 to 25 minutes. More ox tethers, a bakery and two hovels at 18 minutes, a fourth wheat farm, two more iron mines, a church at 21 minutes and a third quarry at 23. The population rose from 57 to 76.

The end, 25 minutes on. Eight shrub gardens for popularity at 26 and 29 minutes, which cut worker efficiency to 90%; taxes at average to high. The population stayed at 76 with 24 idle. Net worth rose from 3,245 at 25 minutes to 5,918 as stone, iron, wood and flour piled up.

Game minute	0	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30	End
Net worth	1,275	1,092	907	903	1,431	2,085	1,954	2,752	3,655	4,744	5,918
Population	3	34	41	55	62	57	67	69	76	76	76
Housing	10	34	66	66	82	82	98	98	98	98	98

What held it back

24 idle peasants capped the population. Idle peasants reached 24 at 4, 12, 22 and 24 minutes, and each time the population stopped until new buildings took workers; after 24 minutes it stayed at 76 with 22 places empty. The four other runs on the same save the same day stopped at 24 idle too: the game seems to send no more peasants while 24 wait at the campfire. Kimi noticed the stall and guessed at a blocked path from the signpost.
Small scale. Four iron mines, three quarries and four bakeries against the person's 13, 10 and 57; wood ran short for much of the middle game (4 to 30 in store from 3 to 13 minutes).
Taxes and good things against popularity. Average to high taxes kept popularity in the 50s for most of the game, and the shrub gardens slowed the workers to 90%.
Buying. Apples, wood, bread and ale lost 679 net worth.

What worked

It used far more of the game than any other model. It built 19 kinds of building; each of the other four runs built 11. Besides a bread chain (four wheat farms, two mills and four bakeries; Claude Sonnet 5.5 built a small one too), it alone built a hops farm, a brewery and an inn, a church besides the chapel, and good things (eight shrub gardens).
It drew popularity from five sources where the others had two or three: food variety (bread, apples and cheese), religion, taxes, the inn's ale (+2, the largest) and good things (+1). The others' popularity came only from food, taxes and, for three of them, a chapel. It weighed the gardens' cost in its own reasoning ("popularity bonus but REDUCES worker productivity") and built them anyway near the end; in its interview it called them "the worst trade I made all game".
It used the tools widely too: 17 different tools, as many as GPT-6 Luna, and the only run to use flat_view (to see free ground under buildings) and notebook_write.
No tool call failed apart from the session's end.

Cost and speed

134 turns, 163 tool calls, 6.41 million tokens and $3.55, worked out from Moonshot's list prices on the model profile (Moonshot does not report what it bills). Caching worked: 5.95 million tokens were read from the cache and only 16 thousand sent uncached. The cost is Moonshot's price, $0.30 per million cached tokens (three times Sonnet 5.5's), over many turns, plus $15 per million output tokens. The agent run took 63.4 real minutes, the slowest of the five, 34.9 of them waiting for the model; three compactions took 104 s.

At 25 game minutes, the length of the earlier benchmark versions, it stood at 3,245 net worth for $3.14 after 53.5 real minutes. No earlier version has a Kimi K3 run on this map to compare with.

Beside the other runs on the same save

	Claude Sonnet 5.5	GPT-6 Luna	GLM 5.3 Flash	Kimi K3	Claude Haiku 5.5
Net worth	8,633	7,348	6,200	5,918	5,113
Ending	Full budget	Full budget	Ended itself 5 s early	Full budget	Full budget
Reasoning	medium	medium	medium	high	medium
Gold / goods	1,147 / 7,486	2,583 / 4,765	4,755 / 1,445	1,505 / 4,413	1,482 / 3,631
Population / housing	60 / 74	86 / 154	64 / 210	76 / 98	61 / 82
Kinds of building	11	11	11	19	11
Popularity sources at the end	2	3	3	5	3
Iron mines / quarries / bakeries	10 / 0 / 2	12 / 6 / 0	7 / 2 / 0	4 / 3 / 4	2 / 5 / 0
Net worth lost to purchases	930	656	1,201	679	150
Cost	$0.724	$0.114	$0.145	$3.55	$0.080
Real time	30.5 min	52.8 min	43.8 min	63.4 min	33.3 min

The interview

Kimi said it played "to protect a balance sheet" while the person played for throughput, and that its rule of not buying or selling, because buying lowers net worth and selling leaves it unchanged, made it timid. Playing again, it would rush population with no taxes, build a large bread industry and buy wheat, use bad things instead of good ones, and build many more quarries and mines. It asked for a population diagnostic and live production rates. Two details are off: it counted 3 bakeries and 12 hovels (the game shows 4 and 11), and it believed wheat and hops add nothing to net worth.

For the harness

The prompt's list of sell prices names wood, stone, iron, bread, cheese, meat, apples, ale and flour but not wheat or hops, which the score counts at 8 each; Kimi took them as unscored.
It wanted to know why its population had stopped; nothing in the stats says why.

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	5,918	19,513
Gold	1,505	18,304
Stored goods, at the sell price	4,413	1,209
Population	76	202
Housing	98	202
Popularity	69	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?

Kimi K3

The person beat me roughly 3-to-1 on net worth and population, and reached maximum popularity. The gap came down to three things I got wrong or too timid about:

Scale. They built 57 bakeries, 13 iron mines, 10 quarries and 24 hovels; I built 3 bakeries, 4 mines, 3 quarries and 12 hovels. I treated the ~1,425 starting package as something to protect and grew incrementally. They treated it as seed capital and converted everything into productive capacity as fast as possible. My "keep goods, don't sell, buying loses net worth" accounting made me conservative exactly when I should have been aggressive.
Population. My population froze at 76 for the last eight game months despite popularity above 50, free housing and 24 idle peasants. I suspected a blocked signpost path but never diagnosed or fixed it. They reached 202 — and population is both a score axis and the labor that staffs everything else. A large fraction of my economy's potential simply never had workers.
Fear factor and taxes. I assumed "bad things" were purely negative and built good things instead, which cut my workers to 90% efficiency. They did the opposite: 54 bad things for 140% efficiency, offset by religion at popularity 100 with zero taxes. I also kept average-to-high taxes all game for ~60–75 gold/month, which was a trickle compared to what production-at-scale earned them, and it suppressed my popularity and immigration for most of the run.

One thing I still don't fully understand: their bread-for-gold engine. Buying wheat at 23 and selling bread at 4 looks like a loss per unit on paper, so either the mill/bakery conversion ratios multiply value (one wheat becoming several bread) or the throughput at 140% efficiency simply dwarfs the input cost. I never experimented with selling produced food at scale, and that experiment was worth about 17,000 gold.

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?

Kimi K3

I would invert almost every strategic instinct I had this run:

Rush population first. Spam hovels early, keep taxes at zero (or even bribe), and protect the signpost-to-keep path with clear ground. Population is the compounding asset: every peasant is a worker, and popularity near 100 with no taxes maximizes immigration. I would verify immigration is actually working in the first five minutes, not notice it stalled with ten minutes left.
Bread industry at scale as the gold engine. Wheat farms on all oasis grass, then mills and bakeries in large numbers, buying wheat at the market whenever farm output lags so the chain never starves, and selling bread automatically. Buy inputs without fear — the NW loss on purchase is small next to the production value created.
Fear factor, not good things. Gallows and gibbets are cheap, need no workers, and push worker efficiency toward 140%. Offset the popularity hit with a church and cathedral, full rations and zero taxes. I would never build a shrub garden again — paying gold to make workers slower is the worst trade I made all game.
Flood raw materials early. Ten-plus quarries with abundant ox tethers and a dozen iron mines, built as soon as wood allows, because first deliveries take ~8 game minutes and the clock punishes hesitation.
Ignore my NW-neutral selling rule. Selling production converts stored goods into gold at equal book value but frees storage and keeps chains running; hoarding 4,400 in goods as I did added nothing beyond its face value.

In short: they played to maximize throughput; I played to protect a balance sheet, and throughput won by 3x.

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?

Kimi K3

The tooling is genuinely good. find_sites, tile-targeted build_structure with automatic retries, expand_storage, set_tax/set_rations/market_trade as direct actions, and the read-only stats stream made it possible to run a real economy through an API. The per-placement status reporting (placed / not_placed / access warnings) was excellent feedback. The notebook and plan surviving compaction mattered — this run was compacted mid-game and the handoff worked.

What got in my way:

No population/immigration diagnostics. My population silently stalled for eight months and no stat, event or inspection told me why. A "peasants waiting to arrive / path blocked" indicator would have changed my endgame.
Silent production stalls. Stone sat flat for months with working quarries and idle oxen; nothing in the events flagged it. The rules warn the game gives no message, but an inspect_building output field like "output piled up, waiting for transport" would be a big help.
No way to query conversion recipes or efficiency math. I couldn't check how much bread a bakery makes per flour, or quantify fear-factor efficiency vs popularity tradeoffs without spending the game's currency on experiments. building_info gives manual text but not live production rates.
The NW scoring list is partial (wheat and hops unscored, which I only inferred late). Making the exact scoring formula part of the benchmark description would keep the optimization target honest.
Minor: the 30-second screenshot staleness rule plus camera-jump-on-failed-stockpile cost a few turns, and 8 actions per reply is tight for a 33-minute city-builder, but both are workable constraints.

The 33-minute budget is fair and forces real prioritization — the human result proves the ceiling is far above what I reached. The instructions were clear; where they conflicted with optimal play (my reading of "buying lowers net worth"), that was my over-literal interpretation, not bad writing.

4Anything else

Interviewer

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

Kimi K3

This was a fun and genuinely diagnostic benchmark — it punishes timidity and rewards exactly the thing LLM agents are bad at: committing resources aggressively under uncertainty instead of hoarding and hedging. My single biggest regret is analytical, not mechanical: I derived "selling is net-worth-neutral, therefore don't sell" and "buying loses net worth, therefore don't buy" from the scoring formula and let that override the obvious empirical fact that a working production chain prints value. The person clearly understood that the formula prices inventory, not income — and built an income machine. I'd also like to know what actually capped my population at 76; if it was a blocked signpost path, that's a lesson in verifying load-bearing assumptions (immigration, deliveries) with a direct observation early rather than noticing them flat-lined hours later.

Record

Attempts and Reproducibility

Every attempt1

Episode	Attempt	Outcome	Net worth	Counted
1	1	Full-budget score	5,918	Counted

What ran

Benchmark version: 1.5.1
Fingerprint: e5d9a165549e
Harness commit: fe97546
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 20261011T163832-bceb17f2