One episode · Large Barren Desert

Muse Wonder

Benchmark 1.5.6MetaReasoning mediumPlayed by the maintainersFull-budget score

All of Muse Wonder’s results and comparisons

Score

50.8

Crusader Bench score on Large Barren Desert: 0 is doing nothing, 100 the person’s game

Net worth

7,667

+2,475 over doing nothing, 52% of the person’s gain of 4,792

Population

106

41% of the person’s gain of 246 · popularity 53

Cost

$2.10

3.5M tokens

Time

33 game min

41 min of wall-clock time, 70 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

Muse Wonder
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.

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

7,667net worth

Gold: 7,427
Stored goods, at sell price: 240
Over the baseline (do nothing): +2,475
Population / housing: 106 / 138
Popularity: 53
Food: 0
Structures (map-wide): 104
Attempt: 1

The settlement at the endcentred on the keep, zoomed out

No final overview was published for this episode.

Final stock240 gold in goods

Good	Units	Price	Value
Gold	7,427	1	7,427
Stone	31	7	217
Iron	1	23	23
Net worth			7,667

Beside a person’s gameLarge Barren Desert, the same game time

	This episode	The person	Left alone
Net worth	7,667	9,984	5,192
Gold	7,427	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	240	1,410
Population	106	250
Housing	138	250
Popularity	53	100

The person played Large Barren Desert for 33 min 33 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: July 1178
Idle peasants: 24
Popularity next month: −12
Food: −8
Taxes: −6
Ale from the inn: +2
Taxes: High taxes, 106 gold a month
Rations: full; no food in the granary
Worker efficiency: 100%
Storage: 12 stockpile piles, 9 empty; 1 granary holding 0 food

Buildings75

Ox Tether33
Hovel16
Quarry13
Iron Mine4
Stockpile3
Chapel1
Granary1
Inn1
Keep1
Marketplace1
Maypole1

Tool calls177

market_trade59
find_sites25
build_structure21
building_info14
go_to_tile12
wait_and_observe11
observe9
set_tax6
place_near5
inspect_building4
center_on3
map_overview2
set_rations2
expand_storage1
notebook_write1
status1
update_plan1

Play

Turns: 70
Buildings placed / attempted: 63 / 69
Anchor-tool placements: 9
Tool errors: 1
Raw inputs sent to the game: 993
Context compactions: 2
Game time: 33 min

Compute

Tokens: 3.5M
Served from cache: 95%
Output tokens: 36K
Cost, as billed: $2.10
Wall-clock time: 41 min
of which inference: 14 min
Peak game memory: 5,970 MiB

The plan, before play

Understanding

This is the Large Barren Desert Free Build: maximise final net worth (gold + stored goods at marketplace sell prices), then population and popularity.
Granary and stockpile already exist. Starting resources arrive over the first ~30 seconds, including enough wood to fill the initial stockpile.
There is no oasis grass, so farms, orchards and the normal wheat/hops chains cannot produce food. Food must initially come from starting meat and later marketplace purchases, funded by production and taxes.
The main wealth engines are therefore:
- Iron mines ~60 tiles east — iron sells for 23/unit.
- Quarries + ox tethers ~100 tiles west — stone sells for 7/unit.
- Woodcutters where trees exist, supplemented by buying wood when that accelerates construction profitably.
No soldiers, walls, towers, gates or other defences.
Popularity must stay above 50, housing and jobs must grow together, and idle peasants must stay below 24 so immigration continues. Storage must be expanded/sold down before it blocks deliveries; converting surplus to gold preserves net worth without using storage.

Opening plan

Read status, inventory and map_overview to confirm resources and exact stone/iron/tree locations.
Near the keep: build a marketplace and first hovels; avoid crowding routes to the stockpile/granary.
Establish iron mines first (highest value), then quarries with adjacent ox tethers; add woodcutters near any usable trees.
Expand stockpile capacity as wood/iron/stone deliveries begin; regularly sell surplus stone/iron rather than letting storage fill.
Buy varied food with export income, keep rations at least full, add religion/ale only when cost-effective, then raise taxes gradually while popularity stays safely above 50.
Keep cycling income into more hovels, mines, quarries, tethers and storage, balancing workers, housing, food and popularity until the final minutes.

Commentary during play0

The model played this episode without writing commentary between its tool calls.

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: Muse Wonder (meta/muse-wonder) on OpenRouter, served only by Meta (no fallbacks), reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
Benchmark: Large Barren Desert construction, version 1.5.6, the version of this map's round, 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 14b9e89b, 2026-10-13: Muse Wonder's second game on this map, a new series with no memory of the first (series 20261013T114929-fd6cd415, run e196d77b, net worth 3,284). The map's score for Muse Wonder is the mean of the two games.

Result

	This game	Its first game	The person	Left alone
Net worth	7,667	3,284	9,984	5,192
Gold	7,427	1,009	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	240	2,275	1,410
Population / housing	106 / 138	106 / 138	250 / 250
Popularity	53 (−12 next month)	50 (−5)	100

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 2,475 over leaving the game alone, 52% of the person's 4,792 and the second most on this map after Claude Opus 5.5's 3,565; its first game ended 1,908 below. It ended almost all in gold, with 31 stone (217) and 1 iron (23) left after selling the rest in the last two minutes, and with no food: the granary was empty and the food factor at −8.

How the game went

The opening, 0 to 7 minutes. The marketplace at 0:05, three hovels at 0:14, two stockpile piles at 0:32, four iron mines at 0:58 (as many as this map gives any model), three quarries at 1:27 and four ox tethers at 1:45; two more hovels at 2:04 and taxes up to high at 2:15. It bought 50 apples and 50 cheese at 2:20 and 2:35, 100 wood at 4:14 and 50 bread at 6:25. Two more iron mines found no room at 5:06 and 5:22. Four quarries with four tethers came at 5:44 and 6:04, rations went to extra at 6:42, and an inn and three hovels at 6:58.

Quarries and selling, 7 to 21 minutes. From 9:49 it bought meat, cheese, apples and bread in turn, 30 to 50 of each, every three or four minutes to the end. Taxes went to mean at 10:53. It sold its starting 20 pitch at 11:28, and from 13:45 it sold stone and iron each time before it bought food: 100 stone and 45 iron first, then 48 to 54 stone and 3 to 13 iron at a time. Three quarries at 11:44, one at 13:32 and two at 15:15 made thirteen; tethers came in fours at 12:09, 17:33 and 19:18, and four hovels each at 13:07 and 19:43. Taxes went to extortionate at 15:31 and a chapel came at 20:00.

The end, 21 to 33 minutes. Taxes down to mean at 22:29 and average at 25:25, rations back to full at 25:21, five more tethers by 26:40 (33 in all) and a maypole at 28:29; taxes up to high again at 29:50. Food purchases shrank to 10 to 20 of each after 28 minutes. In the last two minutes it sold 205 stone, 7 iron, 24 wood and 9 ale.

Game minute	0	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30	End
Net worth	4,726	5,523	5,413	5,282	4,702	4,517	4,750	4,701	5,162	5,240	6,163	7,667
Gold	4,450	4,217	4,071	3,922	2,583	3,667	4,056	3,904	4,056	4,399	5,183	7,427
Iron	0	15	23	31	40	3	11	8	7	3	4	1
Stone	0	50	50	50	66	14	24	48	96	60	84	31
Food	49	139	97	70	170	150	40	52	56	82	69	0
Population	2	28	46	59	63	80	91	97	101	103	106	106
Popularity	100	92	65	76	92	99	83	62	52	58	64	53

Up to 30 minutes the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; pitch and ale are left out, so it reads a little low. During long waits a row repeats the last reading.

Beside its first game

The two games built nearly the same town: thirteen quarries, four iron mines, 33 and 34 tethers, sixteen hovels and 106 people, both stopped by 24 idle peasants. They differ in what they spent:

	This game	Its first game
Food bought	1,100 for 8,800 gold	1,550 for 12,400 gold
Wood bought	400	450
Goods sold	607 stone, 99 iron, 20 pitch, 24 wood, 9 ale for 6,840 gold	390 stone, 50 iron for 3,880 gold
Net worth lost to purchases	5,600	7,550
Taxes	high, mean or average most of the time; extortionate 15:31 to 22:29	extortionate or above most of the time
Rations	extra from 6:42, full from 25:21	double most of the time
Chapels	1 (and a maypole)	3

Both fed the town from the market, the habit that sank the first game; this one bought 450 fewer food, fed it at extra rather than double rations, and sold its stone and iron as it came in rather than storing it. With one game each, the other models' places on this map rest on single games too; Muse Wonder's two games, 4,383 net worth apart, show how far one model's games can spread here.

Market

400 wood, 290 apples, 290 cheese, 280 bread and 240 meat bought for 10,400 gold; 607 stone, 99 iron, 20 pitch, 24 wood and 9 ale sold for 6,840: 3,560 gold net, and 5,600 net worth against the sell price (4,400 on food at 8 gold, worth 4, and 1,200 on wood at 4, worth 1). Selling at the sell price leaves net worth unchanged. These are units at the market's fixed prices; a trade's own reported gold change includes any tax that lands during it.

Cost and speed

70 turns, 177 tool calls (11 waits), 3.49 million tokens and $2.096 billed by OpenRouter (preparation $0.098, play $1.816, compaction $0.182). The interview cost $0.053 more, with 51,828 of its 55,386 tokens read from the cache. The agent run took 40.9 real minutes, 13.7 of them waiting for the model; the context was compacted twice (44 seconds). Every one of the 70 requests read the prompt cache.

The interview

Wonder called the game "a solid improvement over doing nothing" but well behind the person, and its town "a one-dimensional raw-materials economy with a hard ceiling": the quarry deposit filled, four iron mines fit, and each new peasant cost food bought at the market, so its late game was "sell ~50 stone, buy ~100 food, repeat". It named the same missed moves as its first game: a bread chain on bought wheat, rations at none with inns and a church and cathedral for popularity, the fear factor, and housing to match the jobs. On the benchmark it said replies and trades used a lot of game time, that production yields and the effect of its chapel and maypole could not be learned, that compaction lost some of its reasons, and that the rules' framing nudged it toward raw materials. It was pleased that the final sell-off "worked as intended" and that the run ended "with no starving collapse"; the sale left net worth where it was, and the granary was empty at the end.

For the harness

The run played on its round's version from a worktree at 1.5.6 (commit 9c34b50); it records version 1.5.6 and that version's fingerprint. Its host started with this checkout's round-preload.ts (the prompt cache key), and the run overlay ran from this checkout, fed by the runner.
Two iron mines were off screen at 5:06 and found no room at 5:22; an inn found no room by the keep at 6:44 and was placed by tile at 6:58; one of three quarries at 11:44 did not fit; a tether at 29:03 was off screen.
A stone sale at 29:52 sold nothing.
The game saved correctly at the end ("muse wonder 1-5-6 14b9e8").

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 33 s
Net worth	7,667	9,984
Gold	7,427	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	240	1,410
Population	106	250
Housing	138	250
Popularity	53	100

Leaving the game alone for the same time ends with a net worth of 5,192.

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

Muse Wonder

I see it as a solid improvement over doing nothing (7,667 vs 5,192 net worth), but clearly well behind the person (9,984), and the gaps in population (106 vs 250) and popularity (53 vs 100) are even larger than the gold gap. My economy worked — quarries, iron mines, ox tethers, taxes, and repeatedly selling stone and iron did grow net worth — but it was a one-dimensional raw-materials economy with a hard ceiling: the quarry deposit saturated, I could only place 4 iron mines, and every additional peasant was a net cost because I was buying food at retail prices and feeding everyone extra, then full, rations. The person's economy scaled because each worker in a bakery chain generated far more value than a quarryman, and because they weren't spending their income feeding the population at all. My late-game was mostly treading water: sell ~50 stone, buy ~100 food, repeat. Theirs compounded.

The biggest specific mistakes I made: I never considered importing raw inputs for processing (only "no farms" registered, so I dismissed the whole food chain); I spent 250 gold on a chapel that never produced a measurable religion factor; I kept rations at extra/full for most of the run, which was my single largest expense; and I treated popularity as something to defend with food rather than build with inns, religion, and fear factor.

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, and so did inns.
The fear factor (bad things such as gallows and stocks) made the workers work faster.

Their settlement at the end, read from the game:

250 people in 30 hovels, with no free housing; popularity 100.
95 bakeries and 12 mills, and no wheat farms.
11 inns, which reached everyone with ale, and no brewery or hops farm.
13 quarries and 7 iron mines with 37 ox tethers; no woodcutters.
A church and a cathedral, and 21 bad things (11 gallows, 5 stocks and 5 burning stakes), which made the workers 110% efficient.
Low taxes and no rations. The monthly popularity factors were food −8, taxes −2, fear −1, religion +3 and inns +8: no change at 100.

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

Muse Wonder

Almost everything about the core strategy would change:

Build the bread industry first, not last. Marketplace immediately, then mills and bakeries clustered near the stockpile/granary, buying wheat continuously so bakeries never idle. Bread made from bought wheat is apparently the highest-value conversion available, and it scales with workers rather than with a fixed ore deposit. I'd aim for dozens of bakeries, balanced against mill capacity by watching wheat/flour/bread inventories.
Set rations to none and taxes low. This is the insight I most missed: with no rations, the population costs almost nothing to feed, and the −8 food popularity can be fully offset. I spent hundreds of gold a month on food that mostly just disappeared.
Buy popularity instead of earning it with food: multiple inns with bought ale (+8), a church and cathedral (+3 religion, done properly rather than one chapel), reaching 100 popularity so immigration never stalls.
Use bad things deliberately. I avoided fear-factor buildings assuming popularity was precious; in fact 21 bad things cost only −1 monthly popularity while pushing worker efficiency to 110% — a free 10% on the entire economy.
Scale housing to the jobs: 250 people in 30 hovels with everyone employed, instead of my 106 people with 24 permanently idle. More workers in bakeries means more bread, more sales, more everything.
Keep quarries/iron/ox tethers as a secondary income stream (their 13 quarries, 7 iron mines and 37 tethers show I also under-built there — I'd re-examine iron mine placement, since they fit 7 where I found 4), sell surplus continuously, and expand stockpiles aggressively so 95 bakeries never block on storage.

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?

Muse Wonder

What helped most: the read-only reader tools (status, get_inventory, market_trade with its net-worth reporting) made the economy legible in a way screenshots alone never would; find_sites and tile-based build_structure removed most placement frustration; and set_tax/set_rations returning exact monthly figures let me run real experiments (switching from extra rations/tax 7 to full rations/tax 5 measurably improved margins).

What got in my way:

Time pressure from the harness itself. Every reply ran at least 8 game seconds and actions consumed whole game months (a market round could jump the calendar by a season). Combined with the 8-action cap, simple trade cycles ate a large fraction of the 33 minutes. Bigger trade batches (lots cap at 20) and cheaper observation would help.
Opaque mechanics. I had no way to learn production conversion yields (how much bread one flour makes), why my chapel produced no religion factor after ten months, whether a maypole did anything, or why marketplace prices fluctuated (some sales returned well above the stated price). I made expensive decisions — the chapel, the rations policy — essentially by guessing.
Context loss. Compaction mid-run meant re-deriving state from a handoff; several early decisions and their rationale were lost.
The instructions were honest about routes to growth but the playbook's framing ("food surplus: food beyond what the population eats is stored value") and the map description emphasising quarries/iron nudged me toward raw materials and feeding people, and away from the import-and-process strategy that actually wins. A hint that processing bought inputs can be profitable would level the field without giving away the whole strategy.

Overall I found it a genuinely good benchmark: a real game, a clear scoring function, and tools that mostly let me act on intentions rather than fight the interface.

4Anything else

Interviewer

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

Muse Wonder

Two reflections. First, the most interesting moment of the run was discovering the strategy space was bigger than my model of it: "no oasis, therefore no food economy" felt like a deduction but was actually a failure of imagination — the marketplace decouples production from local resources, and "no rations" decouples population from food costs. Both loopholes were visible in the tools I had (set_rations lists "none" right there); I just never stress-tested my assumptions against them.

Second, my endgame liquidation (selling all stone, iron, wood and ale in the final minutes) worked as intended and the run ended cleanly with popularity above 50 and no starving collapse — I'm reasonably pleased with the execution of my strategy, even though the strategy itself was second-best. If I played again I'd spend the first five minutes experimenting with one mill and one bakery before committing to anything, because ten minutes of quarrying taught me less than one production cycle would have.

Thank you — it was an enjoyable problem to lose at.

Record

Attempts and Reproducibility

Every attempt1

Episode	Attempt	Outcome	Net worth	Counted
1	1	Full-budget score	7,667	Counted

What ran

Benchmark version: 1.5.6
Fingerprint: bb6e73f95223
Harness commit: 9c34b50
Prompt / tools SHA-256: ad97396 / 76cbfd6
Menu guide: Images 118089d
Save: Large Barren Desert 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 20261013T125243-bbf6d292