One episode · Large Barren Desert

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Benchmark 1.6.3AnthropicReasoning mediumPlayed by the maintainersFull-budget score

All of Claude Sonnet 5.5’s results and comparisons

Not part of the evaluation: the game is published, but not ranked.

Score

41.5

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

Net worth

7,127

+1,935 over doing nothing, 40% of the person’s gain of 4,792

Population

18% of the person’s gain of 246 · popularity 74

Cost

~$0.46

2.0M tokens; ~ at list prices, the API reports no bill

Time

33 game min

29 min of wall-clock time, 35 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.

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

7,127net worth

Gold: 2,954
Stored goods, at sell price: 4,173
Over the baseline (do nothing): +1,935
Population / housing: 48 / 58
Popularity: 74
Food: 0
Structures (map-wide): 48
Attempt: 1

The settlement at the endcentred on the keep, zoomed out

No final overview was published for this episode.

Final stock4,173 gold in goods

Good	Units	Price	Value
Gold	2,954	1	2,954
Iron	94	23	2,162
Stone	226	7	1,582
Ale	20	10	200
Pitch	20	10	200
Wood	29	1	29
Net worth			7,127

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

	This episode	The person	Left alone
Net worth	7,127	9,984	5,192
Gold	2,954	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	4,173	1,410
Population	48	250
Housing	58	250
Popularity	74	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: −7
Food: −8
Taxes: +1
Taxes: No taxes, 0 gold a month
Rations: full; no food in the granary
Worker efficiency: 100%
Storage: 16 stockpile piles, 4 empty; 1 granary holding 0 food

Buildings25

Hovel6
Iron Mine4
Ox Tether4
Quarry4
Stockpile4
Granary1
Keep1
Marketplace1

Tool calls55

market_trade10
wait_and_observe10
find_sites7
set_tax7
build_structure5
place_near3
center_on2
inspect_building2
observe2
set_rations2
expand_storage1
game_action1
go_to_tile1
map_overview1
status1

Play

Turns: 35
Buildings placed / attempted: 12 / 16
Anchor-tool placements: 10
Tool errors: 1
Raw inputs sent to the game: 283
Context compactions: 0
Game time: 33 min

Compute

Tokens: 2.0M
Served from cache: 96%
Output tokens: 9.0K
Cost, at list prices: ~$0.46
Wall-clock time: 29 min
of which inference: 4 min
Peak game memory: 5,595 MiB

The plan, before play

Plan: The score is net worth (gold plus stored goods), then population and popularity. The map is a barren desert with no farms. My opening:

Build a marketplace, since gold buys wood.
Build hovels for housing, and a few woodcutters if trees are nearby.
Set taxes to low or average once popularity allows, to earn gold.
Get iron mines going on the eastern ore and sell or store the iron.
Avoid wasteful spending, because buying goods lowers net worth.

Commentary during play2

Mines are built. Check if staffed.
Food ran out. Buy a little for the last 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: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (claude-sonnet-5-5) on the Anthropic API, reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
Benchmark: Large Barren Desert construction, version 1.6.3, 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 134212de, series 20261014T080059-9fc9cff2, 2026-10-14: Sonnet's second game on this map, a new series with no memory of the first, played on the latest version (the first game, series 20261012T110247-91bd9173, played 1.5.6). The map's score for Sonnet is the mean of the two.

Result

	This game	First game	The person	Left alone
Net worth	7,127	6,252	9,984	5,192
Gold	2,954	3,299	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	4,173	2,953	1,410
Population / housing	48 / 58	27 / 114	250 / 250
Popularity	74 (−7 next month)	24	100

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 1,935 over leaving the game alone, 40% of the person's 4,792, against 1,060 in the first game. The stored goods are 94 iron (2,162), 226 stone (1,582), 20 ale (200), 20 pitch (200) and 29 wood (29); the ale and pitch came with the start.

How the game went

Mines and quarries, 0 to 10 minutes. A marketplace at 0:09, three hovels at 0:18, three iron mines at 0:51 and three stockpile piles at 1:20. A fourth iron mine went up at 3:23; of the other three in that call, two found no room and one was not on ore. Two quarries with two ox tethers at 5:06, three more hovels at 5:43, and two more quarries and tethers at 9:45. That was the whole town: 6 hovels, 4 iron mines, 4 quarries and 4 tethers. It built no weapon workshop.

Food and taxes, 10 to 33 minutes. No more buildings. Food bought four times (apples, cheese and bread at 4 and 13 minutes, bread and apples at 20 and 29), 410 in all, and taxes moved seven times between none and average. Half rations from 12:53 to 14:52 and average taxes took popularity to 39 at 15 minutes. The population reached 48 at 12 minutes and ended there, with 24 idle and 10 places free, while iron and stone piled up: 94 iron and 226 stone at the end, none sold. The last food ran out just before the end (food −8, popularity −7 next month).

Game minute	0	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30	End
Net worth	4,726	6,078	5,621	5,788	6,069	5,974	6,024	5,944	6,358	6,597	6,544	7,127
Gold	4,450	5,056	4,199	4,379	4,621	3,649	3,677	3,073	3,339	3,434	2,954	2,954
Iron	0	15	21	28	35	44	52	60	68	76	85	94
Stone	0	50	50	50	66	96	98	130	154	178	202	226
Food	49	40	126	84	38	153	109	138	87	35	48	0
Population	2	26	35	40	48	46	44	48	48	48	48	48
Popularity	100	78	76	77	70	39	59	74	60	62	70	74

The net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; ale and pitch (400) are left out, so it reads low.

Beside its first game

	This game (1.6.3)	First game (1.5.6)
Net worth	7,127	6,252
Buildings	6 hovels, 4 iron mines, 4 quarries, 4 tethers	13 hovels, 4 iron mines
Population / popularity	48 / 74	27 / 24
Food bought	410 of three kinds	290 apples
Net worth lost buying	1,640	1,160
Cost	$0.46	$0.42

Both games stopped building early, at 6 and 10 minutes. This one added four quarries, which brought 226 stone (1,582), and ended with popularity 74 against 24; the first game lost five people when its food ran out at the end.

What held it back

Twenty-three minutes without building. The last building went up at 9:45; Sonnet said it spent about 20 minutes in waits of 2 to 4 minutes.
24 idle peasants. The population stopped at 48 with 10 places free; more workplaces would have let it grow.
Food bought at a loss: 410 food for 3,280 gold, worth 1,640.

Market

160 apples, 90 cheese and 160 bread bought for 3,280 gold, and nothing sold: 1,640 net worth lost against the sell price (8 gold, worth 4). These are units at the market's fixed prices.

Cost and speed

35 turns, 55 tool calls (10 waits), 1.95 million tokens and $0.460 at Anthropic's list prices (preparation $0.074, play $0.386). The interview cost about $0.197 more, none of its 75,884 tokens read from the cache (see For the harness). The agent run took 29.5 real minutes, 3.8 of them waiting for the model; the context was never compacted. All 35 requests read the prompt cache, 97.7% of the input tokens.

The interview

Sonnet put the gap down to population, 48 against 250, with 24 idle peasants and few jobs, food bought at a loss and run out twice, no inn or church, and long idle waits ("In a race, that is the main failure"). Playing again it would buy wheat for mills and bakeries and sell the bread, build inns and a church, add many more hovels with quarries and mines to employ the people, and spend the starting gold on production in the first five minutes. It found find_sites, status and the structured results useful, found pixel coordinates unreliable after the camera moved, and would like an income-per-month summary. It said it played too passively. It answered all four questions in one reply under its own headings, so the interview keeps them as one exchange.

For the harness

A stale map probe on the game machine. Like every game of this batch on Oasis by the Sea and Large Barren Desert, this game ran a crusader_probe built from 1.5.0's sources. It was built on 2026-10-13 at 21:28 UTC as a 1.5.0 game started. The 1.6.3 sync then copied sources that matched by hash, and Ninja found nothing to rebuild. The probe's only change since 1.5.0 is 1.5.4's check that tells trees from cacti, so map_overview counted cacti as tree groves. find_sites counts trees from the reader's tile data and was right. Everything else this game played was 1.6.3, and the game stands as played. The desert has no trees, but its one map_overview call listed five cactus groves; find_sites returned trees: 0 at the nearest, and Sonnet built no woodcutter.
The interview missed the prompt cache. Its last reply came 5.7 minutes before the interview: a 230-second wait ran into the deadline, then the game saved. That is past the 5-minute cache life, so the interview wrote all 74,900 tokens of context to the cache again instead of reading them (about $0.17 more). Haiku's desert interview, 4.7 minutes after its last reply, read the cache.
Of the four iron mines in the 3:23 call, two found no room and one was not on ore; the answers named find_sites.
The game saved correctly at the end ("claude sonnet 5-5 1-6-3 134212").

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.

1All questions

Interviewer

Your result

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	7,127	9,984
Gold	2,954	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	4,173	1,410
Population	48	250
Housing	58	250
Popularity	74	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?

Playing again

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?

The benchmark

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?

Anything else

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

Answer all 4 questions above in this one reply. Repeat each heading exactly as written above (for example "## Your result") right before its answer, so the answers can be told apart.

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Your result

My net worth was 7,127 against the person's 9,984. Doing nothing would have given 5,192, so I added about 1,900 over idle. The person added about 4,800, roughly two and a half times as much.

The largest gap is population: 48 against 250. Taxes scale with population, and my 24 idle peasants and small income show how little my economy was doing. Their gold was 8,574; mine was 2,954. I spent gold on food purchases that lowered net worth, and I let the economy idle for long stretches.

My stored stone and iron (4,173 in goods) did count, but they were slow to accumulate.

What I think made the difference

Stalled population. I had about 24 idle peasants and few jobs, because I only had 4 iron mines and 4 quarries. Popularity then dropped from the unfed-food and ration swings, so peasants left. I never built enough housing or jobs to grow past the 50s.
No food chain. I bought food at a loss and ran out of it twice. The person turned wheat into flour and bread and sold the bread. I never used that conversion.
No popularity engine. I used no inns, church or cathedral, so popularity could never hold above 70 with positive taxes.
Long idle waits. I spent about 20 minutes in 2–4 minute waits with no building or trading. In a race, that is the main failure.

Playing again

Build the bread loop early with a mill and several bakeries. Buy wheat at the marketplace, because there is no farmland. Sell the bread for gold.
Build inns for ale, and a church for religion, to push popularity toward 100. Then run low taxes, with no rations needed.
Add many more hovels to reach about 250 population, and enough quarries (with tethers) and iron mines to employ them.
Spend the 5,000 starting gold on production capacity in the first five minutes, rather than holding it. Hold fewer idle peasants and fewer resource stockpiles.
Check production by inspecting buildings sooner, rather than waiting minutes between actions.

The benchmark

The tools and readings were good. find_sites, status and the structured results saved me a lot of guessing.
Pixel coordinates from screenshots were unreliable after the camera moved. Several placements landed in unexpected places, and I could not easily confirm where hovels and the marketplace ended up.
Net worth only counts goods at sell price, so the ratio of food cost to tax income was hard to judge early. A short in-game summary of income per month would have helped.
The minimum turn length and the note about only waiting did push me to act, but I did not act enough on it. I would add a hint that a 33-minute game rewards continuous expansion.

Anything else

I played too passively. After the first five minutes I let a basically static economy run. I knew iron was slow, that jobs capped population, and that food was a drain, but I did not fix any of them. Next time I would check on the economy every minute and build something each time.

Record

Attempts and Reproducibility

Every attempt1

Episode	Attempt	Outcome	Net worth	Counted
1	1	Full-budget score	7,127	Counted

What ran

Benchmark version: 1.6.3
Fingerprint: 96c4682877ca
Harness commit: 1d0c697
Prompt / tools SHA-256: 3bb4a16 / e41a140
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 20261014T080059-9fc9cff2