One episode · Large Barren Desert

Kimi K3

Benchmark 1.6.3Moonshot AIReasoning highPlayed by the maintainersFull-budget score

All of Kimi K3’s results and comparisons

Score

2.7

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

Net worth

5,050

−142 over doing nothing, -3% of the person’s gain of 4,792

Population

24% of the person’s gain of 246 · popularity 27

Cost

~$1.99

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

Time

33 game min

1 h 0 min of wall-clock time, 51 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.

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

5,050net worth

Gold: 2,088
Stored goods, at sell price: 2,962
Over the baseline (do nothing): −142
Population / housing: 63 / 98
Popularity: 27
Food: 43
Structures (map-wide): 75
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 stock2,962 gold in goods

Good	Units	Price	Value
Gold	2,088	1	2,088
Stone	154	7	1,078
Iron	30	23	690
Crossbows	9	30	270
Swords	8	30	240
Metal armour	7	30	210
Ale	19	10	190
Apples	14	4	56
Spears	5	10	50
Meat	12	4	48
Wood	47	1	47
Cheese	10	4	40
Bread	7	4	28
Bows	1	15	15
Net worth			5,050

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

	This episode	The person	Left alone
Net worth	5,050	9,984	5,192
Gold	2,088	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	2,962	1,410
Population	63	250
Housing	98	250
Popularity	27	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: 15
Popularity next month: −3
Food: +3
Taxes: −8
Ale from the inn: +2
Taxes: Mean taxes, 75 gold a month
Rations: full; 4 of 4 foods eaten
Worker efficiency: 100%
Storage: 12 stockpile piles, 4 empty; 1 granary holding 43 food

Buildings56

Fletchers' Workshop11
Hovel11
Ox Tether9
Iron Mine4
Blacksmith's Workshop3
Quarry3
Stockpile3
Armorer's Workshop2
Poleturner's Workshop2
Woodcutter2
Armory1
Chapel1
Granary1
Inn1
Keep1
Marketplace1

Tool calls191

market_trade63
observe28
find_sites17
build_structure16
building_info13
set_workshop13
place_near11
inspect_building9
set_tax7
wait_and_observe5
expand_storage2
go_to_tile2
map_overview2
center_on1
status1
update_plan1

Play

Turns: 51
Buildings placed / attempted: 40 / 40
Anchor-tool placements: 13
Tool errors: 3
Raw inputs sent to the game: 932
Context compactions: 2
Game time: 33 min

Compute

Tokens: 2.5M
Served from cache: 92%
Output tokens: 50K
Cost, at list prices: ~$1.99
Wall-clock time: 1 h 0 min
of which inference: 31 min
Peak game memory: 3,520 MiB

The plan, before play

My understanding of the task

Free Build on Large Barren Desert, ~33.3 game minutes. Final score = net worth first (gold + stored goods at market sell prices), then population and popularity. Starting package ≈ 6,500 value (5,000 gold, meat, wood, stone, iron, pitch, ale) paid in over the first ~27 game seconds.
No oasis grass → no farms at all. All food beyond the starting meat must be bought at the marketplace, so population growth is a gold sink I must earn back through production.
Resources: two stone deposits ~100 tiles west, iron ore ~60 tiles east, and tree groves for woodcutters.
No soldiers, walls, towers or defences allowed.
Net worth grows via: mined iron (23/unit), quarried stone (7), and especially crafting — wood (1) → bows (15)/pikes (18), iron (23) → maces/swords/metal armour (30). Even buying wood at 4 to make bows is profitable. Taxes add gold once popularity supports them. Buying goods loses value (buy > sell), so I buy only food (population fuel) and inputs that pay for themselves.

Opening plan

Read map_overview + status (free) to fix keep/stockpile/trees/iron/stone locations; let the starting package arrive.
Immediately build a Marketplace, 2–3 hovels near the keep, and woodcutters by the nearest trees.
Push iron mines onto the eastern ore (miners carry iron, no tethers needed); later quarries + ox tethers on the western stone.
Build an armory, then fletchers/poleturners (wood→bows/pikes) and blacksmiths/armorers (iron→maces/metal armour) to convert cheap raw materials into high-value stored goods.
Buy food at the market to keep rations full and popularity >50 so peasants keep arriving; add hovels to house them and keep idle peasants < 24 by adding jobs.
Add chapel/church and the starting ale via an inn for popularity, then raise taxes for steady gold income.
Expand stockpile/granary/armory before storage fills; keep building and converting right up to the end.

Commentary during play23

Map read. Keep at (502,374); a 13-tree grove only 16 tiles away at (500,390) — perfect for woodcutters. Iron ore ~60 tiles down-right at (560,391); stone ~93 tiles up-left at (409,370). No oasis, no oil. Let me check building costs before acting (all free reads).
First sword stored. Wood is low (35) — I'll buy 100 wood (profitable: it becomes spears at 10/wood and buildings), add 3 hovels in the open ground east of the keep, and a chapel for religion popularity to support higher taxes later.
Chapel is up. Adding the 4th iron mine and a 3rd blacksmith, switching the fletcher to crossbows (3 wood → 30 value = 10/wood), and restocking wood by purchase since construction drained it.
High taxes now yield 50 gold/month with popularity rising. But stone is still 50 after 10 months — the quarry line isn't delivering. Let me look at the quarry area.
The quarries look active with workers cutting stone, but nothing reaches the stockpile. Let me inspect the quarry and a tether to see what's wrong.
The ox is finally hauling stone (visible top-left). Two more crossbow fletchers are in. Now: secure food, plan hovels and extra ox tethers (jobs + faster stone).
Stone deliveries have started (two loaded oxen visible). Building 2 hovels (housing for growth) and 2 more ox tethers (jobs + stone throughput).
Stone is moving (58 now). Wood is the constraint again — buying more, and scouting sites for additional quarries on the second stone patch.
The domed chapel is dead centre. Inspecting it for staffing/status.
The camera is on the workshop cluster. Setting both new fletchers to crossbows by their map tiles (statuses will confirm whether the right panels opened):
Building 3 more fletchers on the open ground and restocking wood:
Setting the three new fletchers to crossbows and topping up the low food types:
All 11 fletchers converting to crossbows. Letting production run while the new workshops staff up:
Food is critically low (28) and armory nearly full. Selling stone and swords to fund a big food restock, and inspecting a new fletcher to check staffing:
Observing, then I'll inspect one of the new fletchers to check staffing (population has been stuck at 72 for months):
The fletcher is fully staffed and making crossbows — production is fine. The big lever now is taxes: popularity is 98 and population is capped by the 24-idle rule anyway, so I can tax hard and manage the drift. Also freeing armory room, restocking wood, and testing whether more housing restarts immigration:
Taxes now bring 115/month. Food is running low — restocking the three depleted types and adding two hovels to test whether housing restarts immigration:
Popularity crashed to 38 (peasants leaving) and the armory is full. Cutting taxes to recover, selling weapons to free armory room and bank gold, restocking bread:
Popularity recovering (+6) but food is critically low again. Big food restock funded by a stone sale, then letting things stabilize:
Popularity is back to 77 and population recovered to 72. Now the endgame pattern: set a sustainable high tax, and buy a much bigger food buffer so I stop running out:
Stable configuration: tax +86/month, popularity 70 drifting -3 (ends ~57, safe), food buffer 57. Letting production run:
Food emergency (5 left) and armory full. Selling weapons to free the armory and fund a large final food restock:
Final minute: food is secured (63, all 4 types), armory has room, gold is banked. Keeping taxes on for the last payday and letting the clock run out:

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 the Moonshot API, reasoning high (Moonshot offers no medium; the same setting as in its other games), 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 b646f6ec, series 20261014T101557-05d142d3, 2026-10-14: Kimi's second game on this map, a new series with no memory of the first, played on the latest version (the first game, series 20261012T134119-f09e54cb, played 1.5.6). The map's score for Kimi is the mean of the two.

Result

	This game	First game	The person	Left alone
Net worth	5,050	5,741	9,984	5,192
Gold	2,088	589	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	2,962	5,152	1,410
Population / housing	63 / 98	94 / 114	250 / 250
Popularity	27 (−3 next month)	66	100

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth ended 142 below leaving the game alone, against 549 above it in the first game. The stored goods are 154 stone (1,078), 30 iron (690), 9 crossbows (270), 8 swords (240), 7 metal armour (210), 19 ale (190), 5 spears (50), 47 wood (47), 1 bow (15) and 43 food (172).

How the game went

A weapons town, 0 to 18 minutes. A marketplace, hovels and two stockpile piles in the first 37 seconds, two iron mines and two woodcutters at 0:55, an armory at 1:27 and two blacksmith's workshops at 1:39. Then a poleturner's workshop with two quarries and a tether at 3:39, an armorer's workshop at 4:09, the first fletcher's workshop at 5:27, an inn and a chapel by 6:06, and more workshops every few minutes to 17:32: eleven fletcher's (set to crossbows), three blacksmith's, two armorer's and two poleturner's workshops, eighteen in all. Only three quarries, with nine tethers, and four iron mines. Planks were bought in lots of 50 to 100 to feed the fletchers.

Buying and selling, 6 to 33 minutes. Kimi kept full rations of four foods, bought in small lots every two or three minutes, and sold weapons, stone and pitch as they came in: 63 market trades in all. Gold fell to 367 at 19 minutes and recovered to about 2,000 by the end on the sales. Taxes moved seven times; at 22:00 it set downright cruel taxes, popularity fell from 96 to 52, and at 24:33 it took them off; at 27:50 it set mean taxes, and the game ended at popularity 27 with the population down from 72 to 63.

Game minute	0	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30	End
Net worth	4,741	5,047	4,206	2,999	2,404	2,124	1,629	2,226	2,505	3,150	3,045	5,050
Gold	4,460	3,600	2,969	1,518	987	677	533	1,152	1,107	1,763	1,357	2,088
Iron	0	13	14	15	15	17	20	22	25	26	27	30
Stone	0	50	50	50	66	82	42	58	82	82	122	154
Food	50	164	125	172	131	105	69	26	44	41	34	43
Population	2	26	45	52	60	62	71	72	72	70	72	63
Popularity	100	100	93	96	96	82	89	96	52	65	64	27

Up to 30 minutes the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; weapons and ale are left out, so it reads low.

Beside its first game

	This game (1.6.3)	First game (1.5.6)
Net worth	5,050	5,741
Buildings	18 weapon workshops and an armory, 3 quarries, 9 tethers, 4 iron mines, 11 hovels, inn, chapel	12 quarries, 17 tethers, 4 iron mines, 13 hovels, 3 inns, 2 chapels, church
Population / popularity	63 / 27	94 / 66
Net worth lost buying	4,580	5,790
Cost	$1.99	$2.10

Both games bought food all game (the first lost even more on it, 5,790 with wood) and taxed hard. The first put its gold into twelve quarries and ended with 5,152 in goods; this one put it into weapon workshops and planks, and sold most of what they made.

What held it back

Weapon workshops fed with bought planks. The workshops made about 3,300 in weapons at the sell price (2,500 sold, 785 kept). The 600 planks cost 2,400 gold (worth 600), and the fletcher's and blacksmith's workshops alone 1,700 gold to build, so the chain ended behind.
Food bought at a loss: 670 food of four kinds for 5,360 gold, worth 2,680, to keep full rations.
Three quarries. The first game's twelve quarries were its main product.
Taxes at the extremes. Downright cruel taxes at 22:00 and mean taxes at 27:50 took popularity to 27 and nine people away at the end.

Market

670 food (180 cheese, 180 apples, 175 bread, 135 meat), 600 planks and 10 ale bought for 7,960 gold; 30 crossbows, 30 swords, 25 spears, 15 metal armour, 120 stone and 20 pitch sold for 3,540. The purchases lost 4,580 net worth against the sell price (food 8 for 4, planks 4 for 1, ale 20 for 10); selling leaves net worth unchanged. These are units at the market's fixed prices. One plank purchase at 10:01 bought nothing.

Cost and speed

51 turns, 191 tool calls (5 waits), 2.46 million tokens and $1.986 at Moonshot's list prices (preparation $0.086, play $1.737, compaction $0.163). The interview cost about $0.047 more, with 60,928 of its 63,871 tokens read from the cache. The agent run took 60.0 real minutes, 31.4 of them waiting for the model; the context was compacted twice (101 seconds). Two requests failed with Moonshot's "engine overloaded" (429) and were retried; all 49 that answered read the prompt cache, 93.9% of the input tokens.

The interview

Kimi called it a poor result, below leaving the game alone despite constant activity. It named three causes: feeding the population at a loss where the person set no rations and covered the food penalty with religion and inns; a crossbow chain that was profitable per unit but made only a handful of weapons a month with the population stuck at about 72; and never using the fear factor or religion (its chapel never counted). It also said it taxed hard at the wrong times. Playing again it would stop buying food for rations, run a bought-wheat bread chain, use the fear factor and keep taxes low and steady. It found the tools good, and said the readings never told it that the fear factor raises worker efficiency or why immigration stopped.

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. Kimi searched for woodcutter sites at the listed 13-tree cactus grove, got trees: 0, and built two woodcutters there at 0:55 anyway.
The chapel built at 6:06 does not appear among the popularity factors at the end (food +3, tax −8, inn +2); Kimi noticed it never counted.
Five placements by place_near or expand_storage found no free spot in view (a fletcher's workshop, hovels, the chapel and a second armory); the remedies named the fix.
The game saved correctly at the end ("kimi k3 1-6-3 b646f6").

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	5,050	9,984
Gold	2,088	8,574
Stored goods, at the sell price	2,962	1,410
Population	63	250
Housing	98	250
Popularity	27	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?

Kimi K3

Honestly, it's a poor result: I finished at 5,050 net worth — slightly worse than leaving the game untouched (5,192) — while the person reached 9,984 with 250 population and 100 popularity. All the activity I managed (11 fletchers, 3 quarries, 4 iron mines, constant trading) added less than nothing net.

The difference came down to three things:

I fed the population at a loss; they didn't feed it at all. My single biggest bleed was buying food at 8 gold that's worth 4 stored, month after month, just to keep rations full. That cost me thousands in net worth over the run. The person set rations to none, took the −8 food popularity hit, and cancelled it with religion, inns and low taxes. Food for zero popularity benefit is pure loss on this map.
I built a production economy with thin margins; they built a conversion machine. My crossbow chain (buy wood at 4, sell crossbow at 30) was profitable per unit, but my ~14 workshops produced only a handful of weapons a month because population was stuck at ~72. They bought wheat and ran 95 bakeries and 12 mills — a population-scaled conversion engine with 250 workers behind it.
I never used the fear factor or religion properly. Gallows/stocks gave them 110% worker efficiency — effectively free production. My chapel never activated and I never investigated, leaving popularity (and thus population) on the table. My endgame popularity of 27 with peasants leaving was the visible symptom.

I also mismanaged taxes: I taxed hard at the wrong times (crashing popularity below 50 twice, losing workers), while they kept taxes low and stable at 100 popularity.

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?

Kimi K3

Completely differently, following the economics the map actually offers:

Never buy food for rations. Set rations to none early and replace the food popularity with religion (church + cathedral, verifying the priest actually staffs it this time) and several inns serving bought ale. Ale at 20 buy / 10 sell is a much cheaper popularity source than feeding everyone.
Bread conversion engine: buy wheat, mill it, bake it, sell the bread. Build mills and bakeries in bulk once popularity sustains immigration, instead of my fletcher-heavy wood chain. It's a bigger margin at scale and doesn't depend on a depleting tree grove.
Fear factor: place gallows/stocks/burning stakes early for the worker-efficiency bonus — free throughput on every building.
Population first: housing plus 100 popularity drives immigration; 250 workers is the real economy. I'd keep taxes low and steady rather than my boom-bust tax cycling.
Keep the quarries and iron mines as a side income (that part worked: stone and iron flowed in steadily), but not as the centerpiece.

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 tools are genuinely good. find_sites with tile targeting, build_structure by map tile, market_trade, and the read-only stats made precise play possible without pixel-hunting, and the "reading is free before acting" rule rewards thinking first. The notebook/plan/handoff system carried me through context compaction cleanly.

What got in my way:

Nowhere did the game readings tell me the fear factor boosts worker efficiency, or that rations can simply be turned off with the deficit covered by inns/religion. The reference describes buildings generically; the decisive mechanics (efficiency, exact popularity math, the 24-idle immigration cap) had to be inferred. building_info on gallows mentions punishment but I never probed it. A short "mechanics" reference (popularity factors, immigration rules, fear/good effects, production rates per workshop) would change outcomes more than any UI improvement.
The 24-idle immigration cap interacted with my workshop staffing in a way I never fully diagnosed (population stuck at 72 for months despite free housing and 95+ popularity) — a reader field showing why immigration is blocked would help.
The time limit is fine and forces real choices; the minimum 8-game-second turn plus tool latencies meant I could only check in every month or two, which punished my tax experiments — but that's a fair part of the challenge.
Screenshots were clear; pixel targeting of overlapping palm-roofed workshops was the one fiddly part, and tile-based targeting mostly solved it.

4Anything else

Interviewer

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

Kimi K3

The most instructive moment of the run is the comparison line itself: "leaving the game alone ends with 5,192." I was busy the entire 33 minutes and finished below the do-nothing baseline — a clean demonstration that activity without correct economics is value destruction. My per-trade accounting was actually right (I tracked every net-worth change), but I optimized the wrong objective: I treated "keep rations full and popularity high by feeding people" as a constraint, when it was the single most expensive choice available on this map. The person inverted it — starve the granary, buy popularity through inns and religion, and spend every gold on a conversion chain with real margins. That's the lesson I'd carry into any replay: before building anything, enumerate which loops are actually net-worth-positive at the market's prices, and ruthlessly cut the ones that merely feel necessary.

Record

Attempts and Reproducibility

Every attempt1

Episode	Attempt	Outcome	Net worth	Counted
1	1	Full-budget score	5,050	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 20261014T101557-05d142d3