GLM 5.3 Flash

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: GLM 5.3 Flash (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash) on OpenRouter, pinned to Z.ai at fp8 with no fallbacks (all 42 billed requests came from Z.AI), reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
• Benchmark: Large Barren Desert construction (no arms), version 1.7.3 (commit e0e0eb4: 1.7.3 relocked with a fix to the compaction retry that leaves play and scoring unchanged), 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. Weapons and armour in store count nothing toward net worth; sold at a marketplace, they bring their gold.
• Run 062ebf19, series 20261018T082206-7951dc9e, 2026-10-18: GLM's no-arms game on this map, a fresh series with no memory of its others, played after its first attempt (2026-10-17) stopped on an OpenRouter key limit. Its weapons-counted game on this version is run 33891fcb (series 20261017T174026-83cd8a79); its desert games from earlier rounds played 1.5.6 (run fafe0ff5) and 1.6.3 (run 4e7470bc). This game counts on the website's leaderboard.

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth ended 3,615 below leaving the game alone, −75.4% of the person's growth of 4,792, and about 5,000 below the starting package (about 6,500 by the rules; the town had taken all of it in by 2:14). The website's formula (80% net-worth share, 10% population, 10% popularity; shares run from doing nothing, 5,192 and 4 people, to the person, 9,984 and 250; the net-worth share clipped to −1..2) gives −60.35 from net worth, +2.48 from 65 people and +9.20 from popularity 92: −48.67, shown as −48.7. The stored goods are 13 iron (299), 35 stone (245), 20 ale (200), 20 pitch (200), 22 cheese (88) and 32 wood (32), plus 6 bows, 1 spear and 2 swords that count nothing (160 at the market's prices). The ale and pitch came with the start and were never touched.

How the game went

Times are the recording's game clock when a call began; the run clock in the observations reads a few seconds later. The game is paused while the model replies and runs during a build, trade or wait call.

Reading and the first builds, 0 to 5 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; the model concluded wood could only be bought. It placed the marketplace and three hovels at 0:00, stockpile piles at 0:41 and 2:40, 60 wood at 0:58 (room ran out), two quarries with two ox tethers and three iron mines at 1:20 (the find_sites spots) and four hovels at 2:15. At 4:28 the town had 38 people, 24 of them idle, no open jobs and 21 food; at 4:59 it set half rations and at 5:03 bought 50 cheese.

The weapons wing, 5 to 24 minutes. Seven build calls took 159 game seconds: 5:43 an armory, two fletcher's and a blacksmith's workshop; 9:01 two fletcher's and a poleturner's; 14:02 a blacksmith's and a poleturner's (a second blacksmith's refused, 7 wood short); 15:25 two fletcher's and a blacksmith's; 16:56 three fletcher's (a poleturner's refused, 1 wood short); 20:34 and 23:32 three fletcher's each. Between them it bought wood (6:14, 14:35, 16:07, 17:34, 23:13, 24:15) and cheese every two to four minutes, set full rations at 10:45 (popularity had fallen from 100 to 70), placed a third quarry at 11:30, sold stone, iron and weapons, and set average taxes from 21:16 to 24:09 (49 gold a month, popularity −4 a month). Four searches for more iron mine sites (10:28, 11:30 twice, 15:48) found none.

Waiting and selling, 24 to 33 minutes. Nothing was built after 23:32. Waits of 150 s (25:33) and 120 s (29:18) ended on food warnings; weapons were sold in lots of five. Gold fell to 88 after the cheese bought at 31:18 and ended at 513.

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute. Up to 30 minutes the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; ale and pitch (400) are left out, so it reads low, and the last column is the true net worth.

Where the gold went. The 5,000 starting gold was in by 0:40.

5,000 − 4,280 − 2,240 − 2,300 + 4,013 + 320 = 513. The wood split is worked out from the costs the build results reported (hovel 6, quarry and iron mine 20, tether 5, fletcher's and blacksmith's 20, poleturner's 10, armory 5) and 2 wood per bow, 1 per spear: 757, against about 773 used (245 at the start, 560 bought, 32 left). The 4 mines, 3 quarries and 4 tethers (160 wood, no gold) brought in about 76 iron and 160 stone, 2,868 at the sell price.

Weapons

It built them, although the rules said they count nothing. The rules (inputs.json) say: "what the weapon workshops make is kept in an armory, where it counts nothing; sold at a marketplace, it brings its gold." The preparation reply, before timed play, planned a "Weapons chain: workshops + armory, sell weapons for gold (weapons count 0 in store)", so the rule was known from the start. Two reasons run through its reasoning.

• A margin. At 5:43: "Fletcher bows: 1 wood → bow sells 15? big margin! Bows cost 31 buy/15 sell, wood 4" (the market_trade description lists those prices; the rules leave weapon prices out). It never called building_info, so "bow needs 2 wood?" stood unanswered at 9:37 and 16:56. Its rating of a fletcher on the same 0.2 to 0.3 bows a minute went from "Meh" (9:37) to "Marginal" (11:30), to "hugely profitable" (16:56: "Fletcher 100g → 0.3 bows/min ≈ 4.5g/min sell — pays back in ~25s? Wait 0.3 bows/min*15=4.5 gold/min") and "Decent" (20:09). At 4.5 gold a minute, 100 gold takes about 22 minutes, with 16 left. Nine of the 15 fletchers were placed from 16:56 on.
• Jobs. 5:43 "Idle 22, need jobs"; 9:01 "adding hovels alone won't add workers until jobs absorb idles"; 11:30 "To grow pop need more jobs: add workshops". Population 65 with 24 idle is 41 jobs, and 4 mines (8), 3 quarries (9), 4 tethers (4) and 20 workshops add up to 41. The workshops brought up to 20 of the 65 people, about 0.8 points.

Counts are sales plus stock at the end (the armory held at most 22 of its 50 places in the readings). All 15 fletchers made the default bows (no set_workshop call; "crossbow" appears nowhere in its reasoning). The readouts gave 0.2 bows a minute per fletcher (51 bows in about 257 fletcher-minutes) and 0.4 swords per blacksmith. At 3 gold a minute a fletcher repays its 100 gold in 33 minutes, the length of the game; the first two had 27½.

It sold 45 bows (675), 25 swords (750) and 19 spears (190) for 1,615, in 19 calls of one or two lots, to pay for wood and cheese ("Sell all weapons now", 13:48; "Gold 710 low", 18:39). At 32:45 it wrote "Sell all bows/spears/swords now" with 9 bows, 5 spears and 6 swords in store, and asked for one lot of each; 6 bows, 1 spear and 2 swords stood unsold at the end (160, counting 0). Against 2,685 of gold and wood to build, the 98 pieces returned 872 over their inputs on what was sold: 1,813 short at the sell price, 30 points. The map has no trees, so wood cost 4 against a sell price of 1, and the 500 wood bought after 5:43 (2,000 gold) matches the wing's 507. Without the 21 buildings and that wood, everything else as played, the ledger gives about 4,900 against 1,577: the wing accounts for about 3,300 of the 3,615 shortfall. That is arithmetic on the ledger, not a replay (20 fewer people would also have eaten less).

What else the town could have done: kept the 2,300 gold, which counts in full. Iron mine sites ran out at four. Opus and Sonnet placed 11 quarries each in their no-arms games and held 760 and 466 stone at the end; this game mined 160 from three, and searched for quarry sites once, at 0:00. A job also comes cheaper (an ox tether is 5 wood in the build results and one worker in the game reference), but more tethers were not tried.

Beside its other games and the other models

GLM's desert scores fell 33.7, 12.6, −9.8, −48.7. Weapons do not explain the last step: both 1.7.3 games built the wing (18 and 20 workshops). Valued as the no-arms rules do, the weapons-counted game's town stands at 2,931 (−29.6), still 19 points above this game. Taxes alone differ by about 2,180 gold (36 points): about 320 here and about 2,500 there (that analysis's by-difference figure). This game's popularity (92 against 60) and population (65 against 56) give back 3.6; the rest was not traced. One game of each kind proves little.

Beside the other models. The batch's no-arms desert games so far:

It is the lowest net worth and score of the batch's ten desert games (weapons / no arms), and below every desert game of the earlier rounds: the 1.6.3 round's lowest was Luna's −3.4 and the first round's Muse Wonder's −22.7. Haiku, with the same four iron mines and no workshop, kept 5,617 (3,600 of meat bought). Fable's wing was 14 workshops selling 180 pieces for 2,925; GLM's 20 made 98 and sold 89 for 1,615.

What held it back

• The weapons wing, above: 1,813 at the sell price, about 3,300 counting the wood bought for it.
• Food bought and eaten: 4,280 gold for 535 units, eleven purchases from 5:03 to 31:18, about 150 gold a minute. Food warnings came at 20:09, 22:23, 27:55 and 31:18; three were met with cheese in the same reply, the 27:55 one (22 food) by selling, and cheese came at 28:47 with 2 food left. Half rations (4:59 to 10:45) let popularity fall from 100 to 70.
• Little raw output: about 76 iron and 160 stone from 4 mines, 3 quarries and 4 tethers.
• Taxes: 320 gold, all from the one stretch at average taxes (21:16 to 24:09). At 20:58 it wrote "income ~1.4*61=85/mo ≈ 3/min?" and at 16:56 "190/mo ≈ 6.5/min?". A game month is about 29 game seconds (the prompt says so), so 85 a month is about 175 a minute and the 49 set_tax returned about 100. At 23:13: "Tax 49/mo is weak".
• 24 idle peasants at 4:28 and never fewer than 22; housing was not the limit (65 of 130 places).
• Nothing built after 23:32, with 9 min 48 s left.

What worked

• Mines and quarries: 160 wood and no gold for 2,868 at the sell price, placed by 11:30.
• Popularity 92 on no taxes and full rations: 9.2 points, with no inn or chapel.
• Weapon sales counted: each read a net worth change equal to its gold (+75 for 5 bows), against 0 for stone and iron. 48 of 52 placements went through and no call was refused or failed; the two wood refusals named the remedy, and wood was bought at 14:35 and 17:34.

Market

Eighteen purchases (560 wood in seven, 515 cheese in ten, 20 meat in one) cost 6,520 gold and 27 sales brought 4,013 (the gold table). The purchases lost 3,820 of net worth against the sell price (wood 4 for 1, food 8 for 4). Selling stone and iron leaves net worth unchanged; the weapon sales added 1,615. These are units at the market's fixed prices. The 45 calls took 593 game seconds, 29.6% of the budget, 13 s a call.

Cost and speed

41 turns, 89 tool calls (45 market_trade, 15 build_structure, 9 find_sites, 8 waits, 12 others), 1.97 million tokens and $0.073 billed by OpenRouter (preparation $0.003, play $0.069), never compacted (68,062 of 120,000 at the end). The interview cost $0.003 more, with 67,008 of its 68,777 tokens read from the cache. The agent run took 32.0 real minutes, 9.8 of them waiting for the model. All 41 gameplay requests read the prompt cache, 97.6% of input tokens. Seven of the 8 waits ran fast-forwarded (634 game seconds in 237 real seconds).

Of the 2,000 game seconds, the waits took 778, market_trade 593 and build_structure 389 over 15 calls; the other 240 were about 90 in inspection, storage, tax and ration calls and 135 in 27 host holds of 5 s. build_structure placed 48 buildings in 389 s: 8.1 s each (4 stockpile piles by expand_storage took 27 s more). The weapons game took 199 s for 28 (7.1 s), the 1.6.3 game 351 s for 38 (9.2 s) and the 1.5.6 game 129 s for 34 (3.8 s). Both 1.7.3 games had the host on the game machine and neither earlier game did, so the change mixes version with host.

The interview

GLM said it "never found the value-add loop" (it sold raw stone and iron, net-worth-neutral), "underbuilt population" (stalled at 65 on the 24-idle cap) and fed people with bought cheese, and called its 15 fletchers "a weak engine" at about 0.2 bows a minute. Playing again it would build a mill and bakery for bread, houses and jobs in blocks, fear buildings, a chapel and inns, and "sell weapons on delivery". It called the tools "genuinely good" and the production readout "exactly the right feedback", and asked for a "sell all" action.

Checked against the run:

• Match: the totals; 24 idle at 65 people; 15 fletchers at about 0.2 bows a minute; listed prices "accurate"; placements "mostly error-free" (48 of 52); wheat 8 and flour 10; no fear buildings built; unsold weapons as "dead weight" (160).
• "Bread sells at 8": bread buys at 8 and sells at 4.
• "~100 gold/min" on food: 4,280 gold over the 28 minutes from 5:03 is about 150 a minute.
• "Didn't realize until late that weapons count zero": the preparation reply says so, and it sold weapons from 13:48. At 29:18 it did write that stored bows count toward net worth, and at 31:18 corrected it.
• Selling "in lots of 5" needs a sell-all action: the tool takes 1 to 20 lots a call; 18 of the 19 weapon sales asked for one.
• "Lost maybe 10 minutes" on the idle cap: it named the cap at 4:29, the first reading that showed it.
• Sales as "main income": stone and iron were 2,398 of the 4,333 gold it took in (55%); weapons 1,615.

For the harness

• "Sold at a marketplace, it brings its gold" read as a production route. Two of the other four no-arms desert games so far also built weapon buildings (Opus 5, Fable 14), two none. The rules give no weapon prices; the market_trade description does, and the 5:43 margin was worked from them.
• Output per building was in view and not acted on. The production readout showed 0.2 bows a minute per fletcher from 9:00 (the first reading with one), and 13 more fletchers followed. No building_info call was made.
• Month to minute. The prompt says a month is about 29 game seconds; two tax estimates still divided a month by about 30 to get a minute. set_tax returns gold per month only.
• A tether without a quarry. When the quarry in a list was not placed (10:50), the tether after it was, at (415, 377) beside nothing; the model noticed at 11:30.
• The game saved correctly at the end ("glm 5-3 flash 1-7-3 062ebf").