One episode · The Sinkhole

Claude Fable 5.1

Benchmark 1.6.2AnthropicReasoning mediumPlayed by the maintainersFull-budget score

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

Model
claude-fable-5-1
Served via
Anthropic API
Max output
32,768 tokens
Played
16 October 2026
Score
31.5
Crusader Bench score on The Sinkhole: 0 is doing nothing, 100 the person’s game
Net worth
14,382
+12,187 over doing nothing, 31% of the person’s gain of 39,436
Population
98
19% of the person’s gain of 502 · popularity 49
Cost
~$2.89
2.3M tokens; ~ at list prices, the API reports no bill
Time
45 game min
41 min of wall-clock time, 43 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 Fable 5.1
  • Baseline (do nothing), final
  • A person's game, final

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

Videos and images stream from the dataset. Game footage © Firefly Studios, shared for non-commercial research.

Episode 1 · 45 min of game time, edited: actions at real speed, waiting fast-forwardedStreamed from Hugging Face

ScorecardFull-budget score

14,382net worth
Gold
4,450
Stored goods, at sell price
9,932
Over the baseline (do nothing)
+12,187
Population / housing
98 / 114
Popularity
49
Food
27
Structures (map-wide)
112
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 stock9,932 gold in goods

GoodUnitsPriceValue
Gold4,45014,450
Iron336237,728
Flour8410840
Pikes3718666
Wood1911191
Stone207140
Crossbows430120
Bread21484
Bows51575
Spears41040
Apples6424
Wheat3824
Net worth14,382

Beside a person’s gameThe Sinkhole, the same game time

This episodeThe personLeft alone
Net worth14,38241,6312,195
Gold4,45039,977
Stored goods, at the sell price9,9321,654
Population98506
Housing114506
Popularity4999

The person played The Sinkhole for 44 min 58 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 1189
Idle peasants
24
Popularity next month
±0
Food
+2
Taxes
−4
Religion
+2
Taxes
Average taxes, 78 gold a month
Rations
full; 3 foods eaten
Worker efficiency
100%
Storage
16 stockpile piles, 0 empty; 1 granary holding 27 food

Buildings76

  • Iron Mine17
  • Hovel13
  • Poleturner's Workshop10
  • Woodcutter7
  • Apple Orchard5
  • Bakery4
  • Dairy Farm4
  • Fletchers' Workshop4
  • Stockpile4
  • Wheat Farm2
  • Armory1
  • Chapel1
  • Granary1
  • Keep1
  • Marketplace1
  • Mill1

Tool calls123

  • market_trade23
  • find_sites21
  • wait_and_observe21
  • build_structure18
  • set_tax10
  • set_workshop10
  • place_near7
  • observe4
  • building_info3
  • expand_storage2
  • set_rations2
  • inspect_building1
  • map_overview1

Play

Turns
43
Buildings placed / attempted
62 / 66
Anchor-tool placements
8
Tool errors
1
Raw inputs sent to the game
606
Context compactions
1
Game time
45 min

Compute

Tokens
2.3M
Served from cache
95%
Output tokens
21K
Cost, at list prices
~$2.89
Wall-clock time
41 min
of which inference
6 min
Peak game memory
3,492 MiB

The plan, before play

My understanding: I have 45 game minutes on The Sinkhole free-build map, starting with 2,000 gold, 55 wood, 20 stone, 55 meat, 5 population out of 10 housing, with a granary and four stockpiles already placed. The score is net worth (gold + stored goods at sell prices) first, then population and popularity. No troops or defences.

Opening plan:

  1. First reply: map_overview + find_sites (free reads) to locate the nearby tree grove, oasis grass ring, stone and iron; then place 2–3 woodcutters by the nearest grove and 2 hovels, and a marketplace near the keep (buying wood early to accelerate construction).
  2. Food: apple orchards and dairy farms on the oasis ring near the granary for food variety (popularity) and stored value; expand granary as needed.
  3. Raw materials for value: iron mines on the ore patches (iron = 23 each, high value, no tether needed) and a quarry + ox tethers on the stone deposit; expand stockpiles ahead of filling.
  4. Hovels steadily to keep housing ahead of arrivals; keep popularity >50 and tax at low/average once food variety and ale allow; later an inn/brewery/hops and a chapel if time permits.
  5. Later: fletchers/poleturners with an armory to convert cheap wood into bows/pikes (15–18 value each), blacksmiths if iron is abundant.
  6. Near the end: ensure nothing is being bought wastefully, consider selling nothing (sales are net-neutral), and leave stockpiles with room so production continues to the last minute.

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 (drafted by Sonnet 5.5, checked by 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 Fable 5.1 (claude-fable-5-1) on Anthropic's API, reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
  • Benchmark: The Sinkhole construction, version 1.6.2 (commit 1e52aca), from the save "The Sinkhole start"; 45 min of game time at speed 40, the length of the person's game (44 min 58 s); no playbook; every wait played at speed 40 (fast waits came in 1.7.0)
  • Run c849942f, series 20261016T164759-e6519477, 2026-10-16: Fable's game in The Sinkhole's first round, on 1.6.2, the version the other models' first Sinkhole games used. It was played after its 1.7.1 game on this map (run 06cc59ca) as a fresh series with no memory of it.

Result

This game Its 1.7.1 game The person Left alone
Net worth 14,382 13,107 41,631 2,195
Gold 4,450 3,133 39,977
Stored goods, at the sell price 9,932 9,974 1,654
Population / housing 98 / 114 50 / 138 506 / 506 4
Popularity 49 (no change next month) 0 (−4 next month) 99 0
Score 31.5 23.1 100 0

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,700 game seconds. Net worth grew by 12,187 over leaving the game alone, 31% of the person's 39,436. The score is the project website's formula (80% net worth, 10% each population and popularity); the game counts on the website's leaderboard. It is made of 24.7 points for net worth, 1.9 for population and 4.9 for popularity, and is fifth of the ten models' first games on 1.6.2 (Gemini 4 Argon 69.4 first, Claude Haiku 5.5 8.0 last). The mean of Fable's two Sinkhole games is 27.3.

Of the 14,382, 7,728 (54%) is 336 iron from 17 iron mines, 4,450 is gold, 901 is the 50 weapons in the armory (37 pikes, 4 crossbows, 5 bows, 4 spears), 840 is 84 flour, 191 is wood, 140 is the 20 stone it started with, 84 is 21 bread and 48 is apples and wheat. Iron alone is worth 15.7 of the 31.5 points. By the recording's gold series, the 2,000 it started with became 4,450 through about 5,370 from taxes and 815 from sales, less 2,080 spent at the market, 1,400 on fourteen weapon workshops and 250 on a chapel. The town ended with 24 idle peasants and 16 empty places in its hovels.

How the game went

Times are game time: for readings, the host's clock (what the model's observation says); for calls, the start of the call in the recording, which agrees with that clock to within about 3 seconds.

Opening, 0 to 6 minutes. map_overview and three find_sites came before the first build call, which placed four woodcutters at the grove 39 tiles from the keep; a marketplace followed at 0:35 and two hovels at 0:51. It bought 100 planks at 1:10 (400 gold, 48 game seconds for 20 clicks) and placed four iron mines at 1:58: three on the ore field 52 tiles from the keep and one at (383,421). Three apple orchards (a dairy farm was not placed) at 2:41 and three hovels at 3:22. Food had fallen from 55 meat to 30 with 29 people at 3:56, when it bought 30 cheese and 30 bread (480 gold); it set average taxes at 4:44 with popularity at 100, and placed two dairy farms and two wheat farms at 4:53. The first iron reached the stockpile at 5:05. At 6:02: 43 people in 50 places, 24 of them idle, popularity 97.

Weapons, a mill and no mines, 6 to 16 minutes. After reading the cost of an armory and a quarry with building_info at 6:01 it bought 100 more planks (400 gold, 60 game seconds) and placed an armory beside the marketplace at 7:01, one fletcher's workshop at 7:24 (the second and two poleturner's workshops found no room there), three woodcutters at 8:00, three poleturner's workshops and a fletcher's at 8:36 (100 gold each) and a mill, a bakery and a hovel at 9:14. Gold fell to 534 at 9:13 and stood between 534 and 1,205 from 5 to 28 minutes. It set the three poleturners to pikes and the fletcher to crossbows from 9:56, and added orchards (one not placed, one moved 11 tiles) and, at 11:47, 25 meat (200 gold), two dairy farms and two hovels (one of them reported unverified; the housing figures show it was never built). Popularity fell from 100 to 81 by 11:47 as the foods eaten fell from four to two. No iron mine was placed between 2:31 and 13:39, although wood stood at 125 to 178 from 8:36 and five mine sites had been listed at 0:03. At 13:39 its reasoning called mines the best value by far, "roughly 23 gold worth of iron per minute for just 20 wood", and it placed seven (an eighth had no open side). At 15:19 housing was full (66 of 66) and popularity 66.

A chapel, taxes and the last mines, 16 to 22 minutes. Low taxes at 16:39 (popularity 58, falling 4 a month with one food eaten). A chapel found no room beside the keep (16:04), so it was placed with find_sites at (350,460) in the call of 17:45, with five iron mines and two bakeries; the 250 gold went at 18:52. No taxes from 19:50, to wait for the chapel's effect. The context was compacted at 20:34. The 17th and last mine went down at 20:52; a search for more around (400,439) found nothing within 25 tiles (21:06), and at 21:13 its reasoning called the iron mines "tapped out". It made no iron search after that. At 21:13 it placed two fletcher's workshops, a poleturner's workshop and a hovel (300 gold); expand_storage for a second armory found no free ground around the first (22:17).

Workshops, then waiting, 22 to 45 minutes. Average taxes again at 22:24, three poleturner's workshops and a hovel at 23:48, and three more with a hovel at 26:33, done at 27:05: the last placements of the game. The population reached 98 at 27:19 and stayed at 97 to 98 to the end. After that it changed taxes, sold weapons, bought cheese, set workshops (31:24), failed to expand the stockpile (35:16) and waited in waits of 30 to 120 game seconds.

Game minute 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 End
Net worth 2,415 1,713 1,484 2,125 2,888 3,751 5,637 8,043 10,109 14,382
Gold 2,000 1,127 613 912 994 669 1,163 1,986 3,143 4,450
Iron 0 0 18 34 64 113 169 229 285 336
Stone 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
Food 55 86 48 49 60 73 83 108 24 27
Population 6 39 53 65 80 95 98 98 98 98
Popularity 100 99 88 68 53 57 61 52 72 49
Iron mines placed 0 4 4 11 16 17 17 17 17 17

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute. Before the end the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; flour (about 800 at 40 minutes, 840 at the end) and weapons (901 at the end) are left out, so it reads low. Its lowest point was 1,374 at 9:17, and the starting 2,415 was passed again at 16:26. The iron delivered in each five minutes was 0, 18, 16, 30, 49, 56, 60, 56 and 51.

Taxes against popularity

Taxes started at none (level 3). It changed them ten times, between none, low, average and once mean. The set_tax replies give each level's popularity factor (none +1, low −2, average −4, mean −8 a month) and the gold a month it brought at the time.

Set at Level (factor; gold a month) Popularity then 3 min later Gold taken in the spell Reading and note
4:44 Average (−4; 30) 100 93 about 1,040, to 16:48 −1 a month at 6:02 (food +3). Popularity first fell below 100 at 4:53 and was 58 at 16:39
16:39 Low (−2; 42) 58 53 about 320 −4 a month with one food eaten
19:50 None (+1; 0) 53 66 35 Chapel paid at 18:52; no religion factor until 23:48
22:24 Average (−4; 73) 67 55 about 480 Its reasoning said "raise tax slightly to 4"; the call set 5
25:25 Low (−2; 56) 55 62 about 290
27:39 Average (−4; 78) 62 61 about 1,010 Longest spell (5 min 50 s); popularity 63 when it took effect, 53 at the end
33:29 Low (−2; 58) 54 56 about 450 Reading of 33:30: no religion factor, cheese out (food +1)
36:39 Average (−4; 78) 57 75 about 450 Extra rations on from 35:58 (+4): +3 a month at 39:09
39:09 Mean (−8; 117) 75 55 about 575 Rations back to full in the same turn: −4 a month at 41:16
41:16 Average (−4; 78) 58 50 about 660 A later change to low (reasoning of 43:04) was not made

Spells are counted from the moment each reply came back, when the level took effect (a call takes about 10 game seconds), so each starts a few seconds after the time in the first column. They add to about 5,300 gold; payments that landed in the same frame as a purchase make that about 60 low. Average taxes brought about 3,630 gold in 27 minutes, low taxes about 1,055 in 8.6, mean taxes 575 in 2.1 and the one payment at none 35.

After 16:39 popularity stood between 50 and 76 until the last 27 seconds, when it read 49 (from 44:33). The food factor was as large as the tax factor: the readings give +3 a month for four foods eaten, +2 for three, +1 for two and none for one, and +4 more for extra rations. Taxes brought about 5,370 gold over the game, worth 10.9 points at the formula's weights; the popularity between 49 and 100 is worth 5.1. What the changes between low and average swapped was about 20 gold a month (78 against 58 at 98 people) for 2 popularity points a month.

Three things in the log:

  • Cheese for variety. Of the 85 units of cheese it bought (680 gold, below), each purchase kept a third or fourth food in the granary for several minutes (the first 30 units lasted from 4:20 to about 15:19, the last 20 from 34:28 to about 39:09); the food factor read +2 with cheese in stock and +1 without in the readings of 31:24 and 33:30.
  • Two changes that did not follow the reasoning. At 22:24 it wrote "raise tax slightly to 4" and set level 5, and popularity fell from 67 to 55 in the next 3 minutes. At 43:04, with popularity 53 and 1 min 56 s left, it wrote that it would set taxes to 4 "for a small late popularity bump"; the turn's calls were a pike sale and a 120-second wait. Low taxes are +2 a month against average, up to 9 points over the 4.4 months left, 0.9 of a point.
  • Mean taxes at 39:09. Popularity was 75 and rising 3 a month. The call set mean taxes and, in the same turn, full rations. Of the 7 points a month that took off the monthly change (+3 to −4), 4 were the tax. In the 126 seconds it stayed on mean taxes (to 41:27) it took in 575 gold in five payments, about 185 more than average taxes would have (5 × 78), 0.4 of a point; 4 points a month for 4.75 months is about 19 points of popularity, 1.9 points of score. Popularity read 58 at 41:16 and 49 at the end.

The bread chain

It built two wheat farms (placed by 5:43), one mill (9:14) and four bakeries (9:14, 15:18 and two at 17:45), and no inn or brewery. The 1.6.2 readings carry no production figures (the readout came in 1.7.0), so what it baked is not known; the stocks say the following.

  • Flour outran the bakeries. It was first in the stockpile by 11:47 (9). At 15:19, with flour at 27 and bread at 6, its reasoning noted flour piling up and it placed a bakery; at 17:46, with flour at 39, "flour is piling up" again, and it placed two more. Flour kept rising, to 62 at 29:23 and 84 at the end: three stockpile piles of 32, worth 840 net worth at 10 a unit, against 4 a unit for the bread it makes.
  • Bread grew from about 22 minutes. Granary bread (the 30 units bought at 4:20 and 20 at 17:14 included) was 0 at 16:37, 25 at 17:46, 10 to 12 until 22:25, 28 at 23:48, 49 at 29:23, 71 at 36:39 and 21 at the end.
  • It was eaten, not sold. No bread was sold; the only bread trades are the two purchases. Under extra rations from 35:58 the granary's food fell from 99 (36:39) to 53 (39:09) while bread fell from 71 to 47, and the granary at the end holds 21 bread and 6 apples, 27 food of 250 room.

Beside its other game and the other models

Its other Sinkhole game, on 1.7.1 (run 06cc59ca, 23.1), is a different town with one thing in common: both ended on exactly 336 iron, seven full piles (25 mines stopped at 44:36 there, 17 here at 44:22).

This game (1.6.2) 1.7.1 game
Iron mines / iron 17 / 336 25 / 336
Quarries / stone 0 / 20 3 / 220
Food 5 orchards, 4 dairy farms, 2 wheat farms, 1 mill, 4 bakeries 12 orchards, 2 dairy farms
Weapons 14 workshops, 100 made, worth 1,616 at the sell price 4 fletcher's workshops, 30 bows (450)
Chapel 1 none
Taxes taken in about 5,370 2,533
Population / popularity at the end 98 / 49 50 / 0
Turns / tool calls 43 / 123 48 / 75
Cost of the game $2.889 $2.751

That game ended in a collapse (taxes raised at 32:42 with the food running out, popularity 91 to 0, 61 people gone). Here food never fell under 21 (39:51), popularity never under 49 and nobody left. Net worth is 1,275 higher: gold +1,317, goods other than iron and stone +1,358, stone −1,400. Of the 8.4 points between the scores, 5.9 are population and popularity.

The ten models' first games on 1.6.2, by score (Claude Opus 5.5 played the round twice; its second game, 37.4, with 16,193 net worth, 144 people, popularity 62, 26 mines and no taxes, is left out):

Net worth Gold Population Popularity Iron mines Bakeries Quarries Taxes at the end Score
Gemini 4 Argon 30,996 25,454 246 62 30 56 4 Extortionate 69.4
GPT-6.1 Sol 20,610 14,557 183 79 28 27 4 Extortionate 48.8
Muse Wonder 15,781 5,534 136 82 22 8 4 Low 38.4
Claude Sonnet 5.5 16,810 10,777 83 68 16 4 0 High 38.0
Claude Fable 5.1 14,382 4,450 98 49 17 4 0 Average 31.5
Claude Opus 5.5 13,921 1,157 147 48 22 1 4 Low 31.4
GPT-6 Luna 11,177 1,764 108 52 27 1 0 Average 25.5
Kimi K3 9,164 2,356 91 52 4 6 1 Average 21.1
GLM 5.3 Flash 5,084 1,992 78 79 4 1 2 Low 15.2
Claude Haiku 5.5 3,312 1,716 37 51 0 0 0 None 8.0

Fable is fifth by net worth, gold and score, sixth by population and ninth by popularity. Sonnet 5.5 built a similar town (16 mines, 4 bakeries, a mill, 5 wheat farms, a chapel and an inn, no weapons workshops), ended on High taxes (−6) with food +2, religion +2 and the inn +2, popularity 68, and had 10,777 gold against 4,450, 2,428 more net worth and 6.5 more points. The two best games built bakeries in number (56 and 27, with 9 and 4 mills and 17 and 7 wheat farms), 8 and 5 inns, ran double and extra rations and ended on Extortionate taxes (344 and 256 gold a month), with 25,454 and 14,557 gold; Fable built no inn. Six of the ten built one to four quarries; Fable, Sonnet, Luna and Haiku built none.

What held it back

  • Nothing built after 27:05. It had 618 gold then. In the next 18 minutes taxes brought about 3,260 gold and sales 815, and gold ended at 4,450, 31% of the net worth. The population, which rose from 74 at 17:46 to 98 at 27:19 as it added six mines, two bakeries and nine workshops, did not move again: it stood at 98 of 114 with 24 idle (24 in 17 of its 30 readings, every one from 23:48), the cap the game reference in its prompt describes ("New peasants stop arriving while 24 stand idle at the campfire: each job that takes one of them lets another come"). Its reasoning gave its grounds: at 21:13 the iron mines were "tapped out", and at 29:23 the workshops "barely break even now" and with idle peasants capped there was "not much left to optimize". Still open in its own logs: a stone field of 361 tiles 84 tiles from the keep, which its opening plan named ("a quarry + ox tethers") and building_info described at 6:01, never built (stone stayed at 20; in its 1.7.1 game three quarries delivered 220 stone, 1,540 net worth, 3.1 points); a fourth iron field it never searched (below); inns and ale, which its reasoning skipped at 11:47 and 16:39; and the 84 flour that four bakeries had not used.
  • Taxes against popularity. The ten changes kept popularity between 50 and 76 from 16:39, near the 50 below which peasants leave. By the arithmetic above, the last two decisions cost points: mean taxes at 39:09 took about 1.9 points of score in popularity for 0.4 in gold, and the late change to low taxes (reasoning of 43:04) was never made.
  • Storage. The 16 stockpile piles all held a good from 35:16 (empty piles: 6 at 29:23, 4 at 31:24, 3 at 33:30, 0 at 35:16); at the end 7 held iron, 4 wood, 3 flour, 1 stone (20 of 48) and 1 wheat (3 of 32). Both expand_storage calls found "no free ground touches it on any side" (armory at 21:59, stockpile at 35:16); the remedy offered selling or demolishing, and it sold but never demolished. The game reference in its prompt says "leave room beside it to expand", and its opening plan said to "expand stockpiles ahead of filling"; its first stockpile expansion came with no empty pile. The armory (50 weapons) read full at 43:04 and again at the end.
  • Mines late, then capped. Five mine sites were listed at 0:03 and four mines stood by 2:31; seven went down at 13:39–15:07, five at 17:45–19:33 and one at 20:52. A mine delivered about 0.7 iron a minute (the 16 to 17 gave 56 to 60 in each five minutes from 25 to 40 minutes, 51 in the last). Iron filled its seventh pile at 44:22 (336) and nothing arrived in the last 38 seconds, about 7 iron (160 net worth, 0.3 of a point); mines beyond these would have needed free piles. The three nearest listed ore fields held 3, 5 and 6 of the mines and an unlisted cluster near (381,419) the other 3; the fourth listed field, 132 tiles at (341,575), 130 tiles from the keep, was never searched.
  • A weapons wing near break-even. 14 workshops cost 1,400 gold and 180 wood to build; by the prompt's wood per item they used about 180 wood more, and made 100 weapons worth 1,616 at the sell price (below): about 144 less than their cost of 1,760. Two of the ten poleturner's workshops stayed on their default, spears (value 10, against 18 for pikes), one because set_workshop was never called for it and one because it failed (below); three of the four fletcher's workshops stayed on bows (15, against 30 for crossbows).
  • Plan and notebook unused. update_plan and notebook_write were never called (plan and notebook empty at the end), so only the handoff of 20:34 crossed the compaction. It said 13 iron mines while listing 16 tiles, and the next reasoning (20:38) doubted its mines: a find_sites, an inspect_building (the mine was staffed, 2 of 2) and 14 game seconds.

What worked

  • Iron. 17 mines delivered 336 iron: 54% of the net worth, 63% of the growth over leaving the game alone, 15.7 of the 31.5 points. At the end they delivered about 11 a minute, about 250 net worth a minute, against about 4 weapons a minute (about 65) from 14 workshops.
  • Food and popularity held. Food never fell under 21 (39:51), popularity never under 49, nobody left, and the population stayed at 98.
  • Extra rations. From 35:58 they added 4 a month. With taxes back at average from 36:50, popularity rose from 52 (35:16) to 76 (39:32), +3 a month in the reading of 39:09, while the granary fell from 100 to 34. It ended them at 39:34.
  • Backing out. It cut taxes at 58 (16:39) and 53 (19:50); none at 19:50 took popularity from 53 to 67 in 154 seconds.
  • The chapel. Religion read +2 in 9 of the 13 readings from 23:48 to 43:04 and in the final one, for 250 gold once; one tax step (average to low) is the same 2 points a month and costs about 20 gold a month at 98 people.
  • Placement. Of 78 placements asked (66 in build_structure, 12 in place_near), 70 were placed (62 and 8; 2 of them by the tile-map retry, a hovel 2 and 5 tiles and an orchard 11 and 11 tiles away); 7 were not placed and one was unverified, all with a remedy, and the final count of every building type equals what was placed (the unverified hovel was not built). It worked from find_sites tile targets and saw nine images in the game.
  • Weapons sold to keep the armory open. It read 46 of 50 at 33:30 and sold 15 weapons in the next minute; the armory first read full at 43:04, and 100 weapons were made in all (Market).

Market

Bought: 200 planks in two 100-plank trades (1:10 and 6:01: 800 gold, 48 and 60 game seconds for 20 clicks), 85 cheese (680 gold), 50 bread (400) and 25 meat (200). That is 2,080 gold for goods worth 840 at the sell price: 1,240 of net worth (2.5 points) went at the moment of purchase, and the food was then eaten and the planks built with. The tool's own report counted 70 cheese and 1,960 gold. Six cheese orders, for popularity (variety, above):

Order at Asked The tool reported The recording's gold series
3:56 6 lots (30 units) 6 lots, 240 gold 6 drops of 40 (4:08 to 4:18)
16:48 4 lots "a purchase did not show in the reader within 5 seconds": none 1 drop at 17:00, food up by 4
22:35 4 lots the same: none 1 drop at 22:47, food up by 5
24:33 3 lots 3 lots, 120 gold 3 drops (24:46 to 24:52)
27:48 3 lots 1 lot, the same note 2 drops (27:59, 28:01), food up by about 5 each
34:08 4 lots 4 lots, 160 gold 4 drops (34:19 to 34:26)

A lot is 5 units at 8 gold. The clicks of the three stopped orders had bought, so the game charged 3 lots (120 gold, 15 units) the tool did not count. Its handoff recorded one such order as not registered and "retry if needed"; it retried none of the three.

Sold: 50 weapons for 715 gold and 100 planks for 100, nine weapon trades in six turns (29:23, 33:29, 36:39, 39:09, 41:16, 43:04), mostly "to free up armory space" in its reasoning, and planks (20 at 35:44, 40 at 37:20 and 40 at 41:41) to make room for iron. Selling leaves net worth unchanged (every reply says netWorthChange 0). The 23 market_trade calls took 510 game seconds, 19% of the 45 minutes.

Weapon (sell price) Workshops ending on it Made Sold In the armory Worth
Pikes (18) 8 poleturner's 42 5 for 90 37 756
Spears (10) 2 poleturner's, others until set 29 25 for 250 4 290
Bows (15) 3 fletcher's 20 15 for 225 5 300
Crossbows (30) 1 fletcher's 9 5 for 150 4 270
All 14 100 50 for 715 50 1,616

"Made" is what is in the armory plus what was sold. The first three poleturner's workshops were set to pikes at 10:06 to 10:26 and five more from 31:51 to 32:56; the poleturner's workshop at (375,455) was never targeted and the one at (379,459) answered not_a_workshop at 31:42 (a hovel drawn over it) and was not retried. The fletcher's workshop at (367,445) was set to crossbows; the three others made bows.

Cost and speed

43 turns, 123 tool calls (23 market_trade, 21 find_sites, 21 wait_and_observe, 18 build_structure, 10 set_tax, 10 set_workshop, 7 place_near, 4 observe, 3 building_info, 2 each expand_storage and set_rations, one each map_overview and inspect_building), 2.27 million tokens and $2.889 at the profile's prices (preparation $0.389, play $2.403, compaction $0.097), the highest of the eleven first-round games logged (Claude Opus 5.5's two games cost $2.47 and $2.64). Play was 19,733 output tokens ($0.99), 2.07 million tokens read from the cache ($0.52), 71,729 written to it ($0.90) and 100 uncached. The interview cost $0.821 more. The agent run took 41.4 real minutes, 5.8 of them waiting for the model; the context was compacted once (17 seconds). The 21 waits used 854 game seconds, 32% of the 45 minutes; the acting calls took 1,713 (63%): the 18 build_structure calls 775 (43 seconds on average; 30 to 84 for the calls of three or four placements), the 23 market_trade calls 510, 10 set_workshop 132, 7 place_near 130, 10 set_tax 102 and 2 expand_storage 46. The rest, about 100 seconds, passed between calls, five times as the host's 5 game seconds after a turn without a screenshot.

Providers and the prompt cache

Every request went to Anthropic's API and none failed; all 43 gameplay requests read the prompt cache, 96.7% of the input tokens (2,073,597 read, 71,729 written, 100 uncached). The first read the 28,968 tokens the preparation request had written; the compaction request at 20:34 read 70,609 and wrote 2,377, and the first request after it read 29,512 and wrote 3,838. The interview request came 373.9 seconds after the last gameplay reply, outside the cache's 5 minutes: it read nothing and wrote 61,173 tokens, $0.76 of its $0.821, against $0.102 in the 1.7.1 game, where it came 129.5 seconds after. The runner's log has the run complete at 17:30:43 and the game saved at 17:35:03 (4 min 20 s); the interview began as the save ended.

The interview

Fable put the gap to the person down to scale and compounding: it called its own play a linear, conservative accumulation game against the person's loop of cheap input, sold output, more buildings and more people. It said it would reinvest instead of sitting on gold, go all in on the bread chain and sell the bread, build inns and ale early and spend the popularity on lower rations rather than taxes, scale iron mines and quarries harder, skip the chapel and the weapons workshops, and use water pots as job sinks. It praised build_structure by tile, find_sites, expand_storage and the stats JSON, and complained that a workshop's 100-gold cost was not obvious, that expand_storage failed with no warning, that find_sites "only searches 25 tiles", that market purchases did not always register and that the compaction cost continuity; it asked for per-building production rates and for a clearer early hint that selling and reinvesting is the dominant strategy.

Several claims do not match the run:

  • "I stopped at 14 mines because find_sites showed no more nearby; I should have used map_overview to find other deposits." It built 17 mines (its handoff said 13 and listed 16 tiles), and it called map_overview once, at 0:00. That overview listed four ore fields: three of them held 3, 5 and 6 of its mines, and a cluster near (381,419) that the overview does not list (it shows the four largest) held the other 3; the fourth listed field, 132 tiles at (341,575), was never searched.
  • "find_sites ... told me 'no more iron' when there was plenty elsewhere." The reply it acted on (21:06) said "Nothing fits within 25 tiles of (400, 439)" and pointed to map_overview and tile searches. Its six iron searches were at 0:03, 13:39 (two), 17:45, 20:38 and 20:52; none came after 21:06. "Plenty elsewhere" rests on that one listed field; whether mines there would have fitted or delivered from 130 tiles away is not in the logs. Later searches for fletcher's and poleturner's workshops listed iron-ore spots at (388,423) (21:13) and (396,439) (23:48), but they were not mine searches. By 35:16 iron was also limited by storage (above).
  • "the 100-gold workshop cost wasn't obvious until placed". The game reference in its prompt lists the Fletcher at 20 W + 100 G and the Poleturner at 10 W + 100 G. Its reasoning at 8:36 listed only wood costs, and "Workshops are 100 gold each" came at 9:56, after four were placed.
  • "market purchases sometimes didn't register". In the game they did: the tool's report was wrong for three cheese orders (Market, above).
  • "I never addressed the housing/jobs loop aggressively" and "Build hovels in large batches early so the 24-idle cap never binds." The cap is on jobs, not housing: at 6:02 it had 43 people in 50 places with 24 idle, and the rules say it lifts as jobs take idle peasants. From 17:45 to 26:33 it did add jobs (six mines, two bakeries, nine workshops; its reasoning at 23:48 cites the idle peasants), and the population followed, from 74 to 98, then stalled once it stopped.
  • "Skip the chapel-for-tax approach and the weapons workshops; they were low-return for the time left." The workshops were near break-even (above). The chapel gave +2 a month in most readings for 250 gold once, the same as a tax step that costs about 20 gold a month.
  • "The context compaction mid-run cost me continuity." It did, once: the handoff's wrong mine count (above).

The rest checks out: 4,450 gold and 9,932 in stored goods; no quarry or ox tether ("Quarries plus oxen I skipped entirely"); find_sites searching 25 tiles around a given tile; both expand_storage failures; cheese bought repeatedly (six orders) and taxes changed ten times; 24 idle peasants.

For the harness

  • Fable's games were the first played with the host running on the game machine itself; that changes nothing the game plays.
  • A market check that stopped after a click that had worked. In 1.6.2 market_trade waits for a reader sample showing exactly the stock and gold change of each click and stops when none shows within 5 seconds. Three cheese orders (16:48, 22:35, 27:48, of 23 calls) stopped that way after clicks that had bought: 0, 0 and 1 lots reported, 1, 1 and 2 bought. The 1.6.3 changelog describes the cause (food the town was eating and part of the month's taxes in the same sample) and counts a purchase from 1.6.3 when the stock rose and the gold fell in one sample.
  • Storage boxed in. Both expand_storage calls (armory 21:59, stockpile 35:16) were refused for want of free ground. A rule that keeps a spot beside the stockpile free came in 1.7.0 and was corrected in 1.7.2; the changelog says the correction is not yet tried in the live game.
  • map_overview lists the four largest ore fields. A cluster near (381,419) held three of the 17 mines and was not listed; the list is still capped at four.
  • set_workshop and a building drawn over another. The call at (379,459) opened a hovel ("Another building is drawn over this one; give a pixel on its body from a screenshot"); the model did not retry, and the workshop stayed on its default, spears. The poleturner at (375,455) was never targeted.
  • Readings it lacked. The religion factor was left out of the factors when it was 0 (changed in 1.7.0), so the readings of 25:26, 33:30, 35:16 and 36:39 could not tell a chapel at 0 from none, and at 33:29 the model took the absence as "religion gone". There were no job or production figures (open_jobs and the production readout came in 1.7.0); the model twice wondered whether its buildings were staffed (20:38, 26:22) and asked for production rates. The monthly change was 0 at 43:04 and at the end (food +2, tax −4, religion +2) while popularity fell from 53 to 49 in the last 1 min 56 s, about a point every 30 seconds; the factor behind that is not itemised.
  • The interview missed the cache because the end-of-run save took 4 min 20 s (above); 1.7.0 types the save's name in one request instead of about 100 keys.
  • A little over the budget at the end. From the tick the save was loaded at (2,109) to the final reading (83,302) the game ran 2,706.4 game seconds for a budget of 2,700: 6.0 seconds passed between the load and the first pause, and the budget counted from there (the final reading is 2,700.4 seconds after the first recorded frame).
  • No refused calls or stalled replies; 43 requests, none failed. The game saved correctly at the end ("claude fable 5-1 1-6-2 c84994", in this folder).

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 45 min 44 min 58 s
Net worth 14,382 41,631
Gold 4,450 39,977
Stored goods, at the sell price 9,932 1,654
Population 98 506
Housing 114 506
Popularity 49 99

Leaving the game alone for the same time ends with a net worth of 2,195.

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

Claude Fable 5.1

My 14,382 is about six times the "leave it alone" baseline but barely a third of the person's 41,631. The gap is mostly scale and compounding: I treated the run as "build a sensible town, store goods, tax moderately," while they ran an exponential engine. Their bread chain (31 wheat farms → 19 mills → 161 bakeries) turned cheap oasis wheat into a flood of bread that was sold rather than eaten, which both funded more construction and drove population to 506 (five times mine), which in turn staffed 38 iron mines and 10 quarries. My economy stalled around 98 people with 24 idle — I never addressed the housing/jobs loop aggressively and spent too many minutes with gold sitting unused (I ended with 4,450 gold and 9,932 in stored goods, i.e. I hoarded rather than reinvested). I also wasted gold on late workshops that barely paid back, bought cheese repeatedly to prop up popularity, and oscillated taxes, whereas they skipped taxes entirely and got popularity from inns, religion and then spent it on zero rations and fear factor for 130% efficiency.

2Playing again

Interviewer

How the person played, as they describe it:

  • Early on they built a few inns and kept buying ale for them, which raised popularity by about 8 points. They spent those points on cutting the food rations to none, so the food could be sold instead of eaten.
  • They planted wheat farms and apple orchards and built a bread chain: mills ground the wheat into flour, bakeries baked it into bread, and the bread was sold at the marketplace.
  • They built iron mines and quarries, and by the end a large number of iron mines. A few blacksmiths turned iron into swords, which they think made little difference.
  • Taxes stayed at none most of the time. Religion added popularity, which let them run the fear factor at 3 so that the workers worked faster.
  • The bread made the population very large. Water pots (60 gold each, three workers) gave jobs to more of it.

Their settlement at the end, read from the game:

  • 506 people in 62 hovels, with no free housing and 16 idle; popularity 99, rising 3.
  • 161 bakeries, 19 mills and 31 wheat farms; no apple orchards were left.
  • 16 inns, with ale in the stockpile and no brewery or hops farm.
  • 38 iron mines and 10 quarries with 29 ox tethers; 7 woodcutters.
  • 9 blacksmiths, an armory holding 1 sword, and 24 water pots.
  • A church and a cathedral, and 105 bad things (48 burning stakes, 21 stretching racks, 12 stocks, 9 gallows and others), which made the workers 130% efficient.
  • No taxes and half rations of bread only. The monthly popularity factors were food −4, taxes +1, fear −3, religion +3 and inns +6.
  • 39,977 gold and 1,654 in stored goods: a net worth of 41,631.

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

Claude Fable 5.1

  • Reinvest continuously: never sit on more than a few hundred gold while there are idle peasants or buildable farmland. Build hovels in large batches early so the 24-idle cap never binds.
  • Go all-in on the bread chain from the first minutes: many wheat farms on the oasis ring, mills and far more bakeries than feels reasonable, sell bread at the market and plough gold back into mines, quarries and more farms.
  • Build inns and buy ale early for popularity, then cut rations to none/half and sell food instead of feeding it; use the popularity headroom for fear factor (faster workers) rather than for taxes.
  • Scale iron mines and quarries much harder (I stopped at 14 mines because find_sites showed no more nearby; I should have used map_overview to find other deposits). Quarries plus oxen I skipped entirely.
  • Skip the chapel-for-tax approach and the weapons workshops; they were low-return for the time left.
  • Use water pots as cheap job sinks when idle peasants cap arrivals.

3The benchmark

Interviewer

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

Claude Fable 5.1

The tooling was good: build_structure with tile targets, find_sites, expand_storage and the stats JSON removed almost all pixel-hunting, and text-only waits kept the loop cheap. Things that got in the way: the 100-gold workshop cost wasn't obvious until placed; expand_storage for armory/stockpile failed because of surrounding buildings and I had no easy way to see that coming; find_sites only searches 25 tiles so it told me "no more iron" when there was plenty elsewhere; market purchases sometimes didn't register. The context compaction mid-run cost me continuity. I'd like a tool that reports per-building production rates or a "what is bottlenecked" summary, and a clearer early hint that selling food/goods for reinvestment is the dominant strategy, since the instructions framed selling as merely net-neutral.

4Anything else

Interviewer

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

Claude Fable 5.1

The main lesson is strategic, not mechanical: the game rewards an exponential loop (cheap input → sold output → more buildings → more people) and I played a linear, conservative accumulation game. The benchmark fairly exposed that difference; the person's description of their play is a very useful reference for what "growing the economy" actually means in this game.

Record

Attempts and Reproducibility

Every attempt1

EpisodeAttemptOutcomeNet worthCounted
11Full-budget score14,382Counted

What ran

Benchmark
The Sinkhole construction
Benchmark version
1.6.2
Fingerprint
6cc0c0162262
Harness commit
1e52aca
Prompt / tools SHA-256
43ab27e / e41a140
Menu guide
Images 118089d
Save
The Sinkhole start
Game time per episode
45 min
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 20261016T164759-e6519477