Claude Sonnet 5.5

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. The drafter is the same model as the player.

• Model: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (claude-sonnet-5-5) on the Anthropic API, reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
• Benchmark: Oasis by the Sea construction (no arms), version 1.7.3 (commit b967c65), 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; weapons and armour in store count nothing, and weapons sold at a marketplace bring their gold; no playbook
• Run 1d0a2c40, series 20261016T194728-2f79fee8, 2026-10-16: Sonnet's no-arms game of the 1.7.3 batch, a fresh series with no memory of its other games. Its weapons-counted game (run 1fefeb89, series 20261016T192138-297b5b78) was played just before. This game counts on the website's leaderboard.

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 5,347 over leaving the game alone, 29% of the person's 18,293, against 6,612 (36%) in the weapons game. By the project website's formula (80% net worth, 10% each population and popularity, the net-worth share clipped to −1..2) the score is 31.4: 23.4 from net worth, 2.0 from population, 6.0 from popularity. The stored goods are 208 iron (4,784), 84 apples (336), 25 stone (175) and 107 wood (107); iron is 73% of net worth. The weapons game's 6,779 includes 240 in weapons, which counted there. The town ended with 15 idle peasants and 39 empty places in its hovels.

How the game went

Times are the game clock when a call began (the recording's clock; the run clock in the observations reads a few seconds later). The game is paused while the model replies.

The opening, 0 to 4 minutes. Its first call placed a granary and was rejected: one already stood. map_overview listed 8 trees 27 tiles from the keep and 42 trees 62 tiles away. At 0:33 it took wood to be scarce, placed two woodcutters on 8-tree spots, a hovel and an iron mine, and meant to lean on iron. Taxes went to high at 1:40 and popularity fell from 99 to 83 by 2:55, with 18 people in housing for 18 and 14 idle. A marketplace went up at 3:18, low taxes at 3:43, and 55 planks were bought at 3:55 (100 asked; the stockpile was full).

Mines and orchards, 4 to 13 minutes. An orchard, two mines and a hovel at 5:03, two stockpiles at 5:43, three orchards at 6:29, four mines and three hovels at 8:21. Two of those mines were not placed, one plank short each, with 981 gold in hand. Popularity fell to 46 by 10:45 and taxes went to none at 10:47; by 12:33 the population was 18, down from 26. At 12:35 it bought 60 planks, and at 13:10 placed a dairy farm, a seventh mine and a chapel (250 gold).

Waiting, 14 to 33 minutes. A wait of 99 s at 15:07, average taxes at 16:47 (popularity 59 to 47), the last three mines at 17:08, taxes back to none at 19:50, four hovels at 22:38 (housing 82), its last building. Then four waits (160, 80, 152 and 155 s) and tax changes: high at 26:12 (popularity 71 to 53 by 27:46), low at 27:48 (41 at 30:31), none at 30:33 (60 at the end).

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute. The net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them, which were all its stored goods.

Weapons

It left weapons alone. It built no armory and no workshop of any kind, made no set_workshop call, held no weapon or armour at the end and sold none. Its 22 replies and their visible reasoning never name a weapon, a workshop or the armory; neither do its preparation plan or its interview answers. The rules it read said that weapons count nothing in the armory and that sold at a marketplace they bring their gold.

Its other 1.7.3 game is the comparison. There it placed an armory and two fletcher's workshops (call at 14:47), which delivered 8 bows and 4 crossbows from about 17:46: 240 at the sell price, 3% of 7,832. The workshops and armory cost 200 gold and 45 planks, and the weapons took 28 planks (bows 2, crossbows 3): about 273 spent for 240 held. Together the workshops delivered 0.7 weapons a minute, 5 to 9 gold a minute each, against about 23 for an iron mine. That game ended 1,265 higher: iron +368, apples +396, wood +373 and weapons +240, less 112 in gold. With its weapons counted as nothing it would have scored 35.4, still 4.1 above this game; the weapons are about 1 of the 5.1 points between them.

Beside its other games and the other models

All four games rest on iron mines and apples, with no taxes at the end. The two earlier games bought 250 and 290 planks and held 56 and 61 iron at 12 minutes; both 1.7.3 games held about 20, and their tenth mines went up at 17:08 and 18:24. Neither built the bread chain. The 1.6.3 game built no weapons and scored 44.9, so weapons do not explain the fall to 36.5 and 31.4. With one game on each version I cannot tell the harness version from the model's own variation.

Among the other models' second games on this map (1.6.3), 31.4 would stand behind Gemini 4 Argon (68.0), GPT-6.1 Sol (54.6), Fable 5.1 (45.2) and Sonnet's own 44.9, and ahead of Opus (28.9), Luna (25.9), Muse Wonder (23.7), Haiku (21.8), Kimi K3 (20.9) and GLM (15.3). In the first round it would stand above Kimi (31.1) and Haiku (26.6) and below GLM (33.8). In this batch so far, Haiku scored 23.0 with weapons and 26.9 without; Sonnet 36.5 and 31.4, the other way.

What held it back

• Wood, then mines late, with gold unspent. Gold stood between 901 and 1,070 at every reading to minute 12, and it bought 115 planks in all. Five mines stood at 10:45, seven at 15:05, ten at 19:48; a mine costs 20 planks (80 gold to buy), and ten of them delivered 9.7 to 10.7 iron a minute (23 gold each at the sell price). Peasants waited: 11 to 14 were idle at every reading from 2:55 to 8:19.
• Taxes against popularity. Eight changes; readings under 50 at 10:45 (46), 19:48 (47) and 30:31 (41). After the first, people fell from 26 to 18. From 26:12 gold rose by 363 (802 to 1,165, 1.6 points by the formula) while people fell from 52 to a low of 38 (31:51) and ended at 43 (0.5 points) and popularity from 71 to 60 (1.1): about even.
• Nothing built in the last 10 min 42 s, with 802 to 1,165 gold and 59 to 107 wood in hand. Its last find_sites for iron was at 16:58 (three sites, all used); it never searched for a wheat farm, mill, bakery, quarry or inn. Its reasoning passed on the bread chain at 12:35 ("takes too long") and on a quarry and more woodcutters at 15:07.
• A fixed number of jobs. Population minus idle peasants was 28 at 26:11 and at the end, and open_jobs read 0 in every reading; if every mine was staffed (two workers each) they made 20 of the
  28. At 24 idle the game stops new arrivals, and the town held at 51 to 52 from 23:15 to 28:57.
• One product, one food. Iron is 89% of the goods. Apples were the only food eaten from 22:36; the variety bonus (+1) showed only in readings with two foods (6:27, 8:19, 16:46, 19:48).

What worked

• Ten iron mines: 208 iron (4,784), at about one a minute each, the best-paying building it had (orchards about 4 apples, 16 gold, a minute; woodcutters 2 to 6 planks).
• No hunger. Rations full all game; food 17 was the low (6:27), and apples replaced the opening bread by 10:45.
• Quick reaction to popularity warnings: taxes lowered at once after those at 19:48, 27:46 and 30:31; none at 30:33 lifted popularity from 41 to 60 by the end.
• Placement. All 30 placements reported as placed are in the final count (10 mines, 9 hovels, 4 orchards, 2 woodcutters, 2 stockpiles, marketplace, dairy farm, chapel). Six did not go through at first (granary, a hovel, three mines, the dairy farm); the mines and dairy farm were placed later. No call was refused, no model request failed, and the prompt cache held on all 22.

Market

115 planks bought for 460 gold, nothing sold: 345 net worth lost against the sell price (4 to buy, 1 to sell). The first purchase stopped at 55 of 100 ("no storage room"). Its reasoning at 10:47 and 12:35 spoke of selling iron; it sold none. The 23 lots of 5 took 91 game seconds (4.5% of the budget).

Cost and speed

22 turns, 46 tool calls (12 waits, 10 build_structure, 10 find_sites, 8 set_tax, 2 market_trade, 4 others), 1.11 million tokens and $0.321 at the profile's prices ($2 per million input, $10 output, $0.10 cache read, $2.50 cache write): preparation $0.077, play $0.244, no compaction (context about 64,000 of 120,000). The interview cost about $0.019 more, 62,552 of its 64,685 tokens read from the cache. The agent run took 20.9 real minutes, 1.6 of them waiting for the model; fast waits saved about 4.7. All 22 requests read the cache (97.0% of input tokens). Of the 2,000 game seconds, the 12 waits took 1,197 (60%), builds 474, set_tax 92 (8 calls), market_trade 91, expand_storage 33, find_sites 12. The weapons game cost $0.409 in 26 turns.

The interview

Sonnet put its net worth at "about a third" of the person's and called its economy "small and flat": stored iron, no growing chain, taxes swinging popularity, idle peasants (82 housing, 43 people), no mills, bakeries or wheat farms, and a slow start short of wood. Playing again it would spend the starting gold on wood at once, build bread and a church early, hold taxes steady, add jobs for idle peasants and sell iron and bread to fund production. It praised find_sites, tile placement and the text stats; it named reading in text mode, calls cut short "because of the minimum turn length", idle peasants while open_jobs read 0, and a scoring that favours compounding. It called itself "too passive".

Against the game: the one-third (34%), the iron, the building counts, no iron sold, no bread chain, 82 housing for 43, eight tax changes, waits up to 300 s, one inspect_building and "5 wood costs 20 gold" all match. It saw four images in the whole game, the last at 2:55, because each later wait set screenshot: false. Not matching: "20 or more idle peasants" holds only at 22:36 to 27:46 (20, 24, 24); the last two readings were 16 and 15. "No religion" is wrong: a chapel stood from the call at 13:10 and the religion factor read +2 at 19:48, 30:31 and in the result, though the interview never mentions it. "Very few buildings" by 10 minutes overstates (19 placements began by 10:00), though wood was short. The logs hold no minimum-turn note: seven replies that ran the game and ended without observe or wait_and_observe got a 5-second host pass, and the two waits that ended early (at 27:46 and 30:31) did so on popularity warnings. open_jobs is defined in its guide as places no worker has taken, so 0 meant every place was filled. Every reading already lists the popularity factors (tax −4, food +1, religion +2 at 19:48); net worth appears in no observation. "Sell iron and bread regularly and spend the gold" sits against its last 10 minutes, with up to 1,165 gold unspent.

For the harness

• The granary call. The rules' Start paragraph tells the model to place the granary, but this save starts with one, so the first call (14 game seconds) was rejected, as in its weapons game (0:01).
• No waiting note. The note after 3 game minutes of waiting without a build, trade, tax or ration change never came: tax changes reset it, and the longest run of waiting was about 160 s, though nothing was built for 10 min 42 s.
• The religion factor read 0 in six of eight in-game readings after the chapel and +2 in two; why is not in the logs.
• map_overview listed two groves (42 and 8 trees) and no cactus patch, so the stale probe of the 1.6.3 round did not touch this game.
• The planks refusals (8:21, 10:56) named until waits and market_trade as the remedy; it bought planks at 12:35 and never used an until wait.
• The game saved correctly at the end ("claude sonnet 5-5 1-7-3 1d0a2c").