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: Large Barren Desert 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 23ed5efd, series 20261017T153025-ea988d2f, 2026-10-17: Sonnet's no-arms game on this map in the 1.7.3 batch, a fresh series with no memory of any other game. Its weapons-counted game (run 0c031388, series 20261017T151105-82dddbd3) 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 1,215 over leaving the game alone, 25% of the person's 4,792, against 1,256 (26%) 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 28.7: 20.3 from net worth, 2.9 from population, 5.5 from popularity; this game counts on the website's leaderboard. The 5,192 of leaving the game alone leaves out the part of the starting package that waits for storage room (about 1,150 at the sell price). This game made room at 0:45 and took it in, so against the whole package (about 6,500 by the rules) it ended about 100 lower.

The stored goods are 466 stone (3,262), 88 iron (2,024), 20 ale, 20 pitch, 12 bread and 5 wood: stone and iron are 83% of net worth, and 416 of the stone and 73 of the iron were mined.

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 opening, 0 to 4 minutes. map_overview at 0:00 listed stone 83 to 106 tiles west of the keep, iron ore 57 to 69 tiles east, and no trees, farmland or oil. A marketplace went up at 0:03, three hovels at 0:13, high taxes at 0:31 (undone at 1:53, after popularity fell from 100 to 81) and two stockpiles at 0:45, which let the rest of the starting package arrive. Three iron mines went up at 0:58 on the three sites find_sites gave. At 1:20 two more find_sites calls came back empty and a call for three more mines placed none; two more tries at 2:01 failed too, and it asked for no iron mine again. At 2:12 it placed two quarries and two ox tethers on the western stone, and at 3:36 bought 100 bread; of three hovels asked for beside the keep, one fit.

Quarries and food, 4 to 15 minutes. Average taxes at 4:33 (36 people, 21 idle), two quarries and two tethers at 4:35, 100 planks at 4:56 (wood was 61), four hovels at 5:31. A popularity warning ended a wait at 6:53 (84 to 73) and taxes went to low; the idle count reached 24 there. The first stone reached the stockpile at 7:29. More quarries and tethers followed at 7:19, 11:33 and 14:10 (eleven quarries, twelve tethers in all), with 60 planks at 13:56, and food at 9:11 to 9:42 (100 bread, 50 apples, 50 cheese). The last buildings were two hovels at 14:40 (housing 90). Gold stood at 4,000 or more until 9:18.

Waiting, 15 to 33 minutes. It built nothing after 14:59. Taxes went to none at 17:29, with 100 bread, 40 apples and 40 cheese from 17:32. A 200 s wait ended at 21:31 with the note that it had only waited for 3 game minutes, and the context was compacted straight after. A 240 s wait ended at 25:32 on a food warning (21 in the granary for 75 people): half rations at 25:32, 80 bread at 25:36, 35 more at 27:15. Popularity then fell from 95 to 53 (warnings at 27:15, 28:48, 30:21, 31:54); full rations came back at 31:54, and the game ended on popularity 55 and 12 bread.

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute. The net worth row leaves out ale and pitch (400), so it reads low until the End column.

Weapons

It left weapons alone. It built no armory and no weapon workshop, made no set_workshop call, held no weapon or armour at the end and sold none. None of its 27 reasoning blocks and one line of text, its preparation plan, the compaction handoff or its interview answer names a weapon, a workshop or the armory. The rules it read said that weapons count nothing in the armory and that sold at a marketplace they bring their gold; the tools offered the Armory and set_workshop, as in the weapons game.

It built no armory in its weapons-counted game either, so the 1.1-point gap (28.7 against 27.6) is not about weapons. In all four desert games in the table (1.5.6, when no Armory was offered; 1.6.3; the two 1.7.3 games) it built no weapon workshop, so weapons do not explain its scores moving from 21.0 to 41.5 and back to 27.6 and 28.7. Opus's no-arms game, by contrast, placed an armory and five workshops and sold 35 pikes and 10 suits of metal armour for 930 gold.

Beside its other games and the other models

Its two 1.7.3 games built opposite towns, four iron mines and no quarry with 32 people against three mines, eleven quarries and 75, and ended 41 apart in net worth: this one holds 2,912 more in stone, 2,595 less gold, 276 less in iron and 130 less in wood. With one game on each version I cannot tell the harness version from the model's own variation.

In the 1.6.3 round on this map, 28.7 would stand fifth, behind Sol (98.3), Gemini 4 Argon (51.3), Opus (43.3) and Sonnet's own 41.5, and ahead of Haiku (20.1) and the four below; in the 1.5.6 round, above Haiku (26.6), Sonnet (21.0), Kimi (19.4) and two of Muse Wonder's three games, and below GLM (33.7) and the rest. Among this batch's no-arms games so far it is second: Opus 67.1, Sonnet 28.7, Haiku 15.6, Fable 11.6. From weapons to no arms Sonnet moved +1.1, Haiku −3.3, Fable +10.3 and Opus +48.0. Opus's no-arms game (net worth 8,808) also had eleven quarries, but with 35 ox tethers, 13 hovels and 4 iron mines, and ended with 760 stone (5,320) against 466 here; the person's game had 13 quarries, 37 tethers and 7 iron mines.

What held it back

• Three iron mines, none after 1:18. Five more placements failed (1:20, 2:01), find_sites found nothing within 25 tiles of (560, 395), and it never searched for iron again. By the game's own readouts a mine brought 0.8 to 1.0 iron a minute from 6:53 (18 to 23 gold) and a quarry 0.9 to 2.4 stone from 9:11 (6 to 17), and a quarry needs three workers and a tether.
• A slow start with gold in hand. Gold stood at 4,000 or more until 9:18. Quarries went up in five steps from 2:12 to 14:10, each followed by a wait of 60 to 150 s, and wood was bought only twice. The first stone arrived at 7:29, five minutes after the first quarries.
• Jobs capped the town. 24 idle peasants at every reading from 6:53 (23 at 13:56). 75 people less 24 idle is 51, the staffing of 11 quarries (33), 12 tethers (12) and 3 mines (6) by the game reference's table. New peasants stop arriving at 24 idle; the town reached 75 at 16:12 and stayed. The next 18 min 21 s after the last placement (14:59) held no building, with 2,750 gold at 15:00, 3,006 at 17:29 and 1,588 from 18:11 to 25:32.
• Few tethers, no way to see the piles. Eleven quarries on deposits 83 to 106 tiles from the keep had twelve tethers. The reference says stone piling up at a quarry means more tethers; in the readings it had, the production readout counts deliveries and inspect_building shows workers, and its last image was at 4:55.
• Food bought at the buy price. 595 units for 4,760 gold, 78% of the 6,068 gold it held, worth 2,380 at the sell price, with 12 bread left. 75 people ate about 27 food a minute on full rations (129 to 21 in the wait that ended at 25:32) and 13.5 on half (92 to 50, 28:48 to 31:54). Its mined stone and iron (4,591) and taxes (1,068) paid for the food and planks (5,400) with 259 to spare.

What worked

• Storage freed at 0:45, so the starting stone, iron, pitch and ale (1,095 at the sell price) reached the stockpile by 1:19.
• Quarries as jobs. At 4:33 its reasoning named the 24-idle cap and it added quarries and tethers for workers; the town reached 75 people against 32 in the weapons game, and the mined stone (2,912) is 45% of the final net worth.
• Taxes back to none at 17:29: popularity rose from 58 to 95 by 25:32. It never went under 50 (low 52 at 31:56).
• Half rations, by my count, paid by the formula. The 6.3 minutes at half rations saved about 80 food (about 650 gold at 8 each, about 11 points through net worth if bought) and cost about 40 points of popularity at the end (4 points of score).
• Reliability. 32 of 37 build_structure placements went through, no call was refused, no model request failed, and the prompt cache held on all 33 requests.

Market

415 bread, 90 apples, 90 cheese and 160 planks bought for 5,400 gold (5,000 at the start and 1,068 in taxes made 6,068, leaving 668), nothing sold: 2,860 net worth lost against the sell price (food 8 to buy, 4 to sell; planks 4 and 1). The start's 245 wood and the 160 bought make 405; the buildings cost about 400, and 5 were left. The 11 trades took 159 game seconds (8% of the budget). At 25:32 its reasoning spoke of selling stone for gold; it sold nothing. Its last purchase began at 27:15.

Cost and speed

33 turns, 64 tool calls (15 waits, 11 market_trade, 10 build_structure, 8 find_sites, 5 set_tax, 15 others), 1.83 million tokens and $0.500 at the profile's prices ($2 per million input, $10 output, $0.10 cache read, $2.50 cache write): preparation $0.079, play $0.396, compaction $0.025 (one, 13 s, at a context estimate of 77,454 of 120,000). The interview cost about $0.016 more (41,397 of 43,334 tokens read from the cache). The agent run took 19.4 real minutes, 2.9 of them waiting for the model; fast waits saved about 9.6. All 33 requests read the cache (96.8% of input tokens). Of the 2,000 game seconds, the 15 waits took 1,468 (73%), build_structure 210 and market_trade 159.

build_structure placed 32 buildings in 210 game seconds, 6.6 s each (37 asked for, 5.7 s each). By the same count its earlier desert games took 5.2 s (1.5.6, 4 placed) and 9.6 s (1.6.3, 12 placed), and the weapons game 22.1 s (4 placed of 17 asked, 89 s). Both 1.7.3 games ran with the host on the game machine; none of Sonnet's earlier games did (they ran on the Mac).

The interview

Sonnet put its 6,407 against the person's 9,984 and said its play added only about 1,200 over idling. It named a small economy (11 quarries and 3 iron mines, "roughly 90 gold-equivalent per minute"), taxes at zero, a population stalled at 75 of 90 with 24 idle, and food bought at a loss, against the person's 30 hovels, bakeries, inns and churches. Playing again it would spend the 5,000 gold in the first minutes on hovels, quarries and mines, mill and bake bought wheat, add inns and churches, tax once popularity was high, and try the fear buildings. It praised find_sites, build_structure and the text-only waits, named iron-mine placement, the compaction handoff and the cost of buying food as what got in its way, and said it played too passively in the second half.

Against the game: the 1,215 over idling, 75 of 90 with 24 idle, the 11 quarries and 3 mines, taxes at none for 57% of the game and about 1,500 gold idle (1,588 for 7 min 21 s from 18:11) all match. Not matching: the 90 gold-equivalent a minute is the 11:33 reading, with six quarries; with eleven the readouts gave 128 to 244 and the stockpile gained about 190 a minute from 17:29. Taxes brought 1,068 gold (18% of the gold it held), not almost none. Every market_trade result gave the cost of buying food (netWorthChange −400 for 100 bread). The mine failures had reasons: each of the five results named no_free_spot_nearby, two an access cause and one the ground ("must be built on Iron ore"); what was missing was a spot that worked. Its last iron attempt (2:01) came 19 minutes before the compaction, whose handoff recorded the failures. "Bread sells for more than the wheat and flour cost" cannot be checked: the run never priced wheat or flour, no wheat farm can be built here (no grass), and the rules list wheat at 8, flour 10 and bread 4 at the sell price.

For the harness

• Iron mines. All nine desert games listed so far in this batch have 3 or 4 iron mines (Haiku 3 and 4, Sonnet 4 and 3, Opus 4 and 4, Fable 4 and 4, GLM 4), against the person's 7, though map_overview lists 123 ore tiles in four deposits. The logs do not say whether more fit.
• The waiting note fired at 21:31 (3 game minutes), 25:32 (7) and 31:54 (4). The model acted after the second and third (rations, bread) and built nothing.
• The interview reply came with four #### headings and the second question's text in place of "Playing again", so the host kept it as one answer.
• map_overview listed "Tree groves: none on this map", so the stale probe of the 1.6.3 round did not touch this game. The game saved correctly at the end ("claude sonnet 5-5 1-7-3 23ed5e").