GPT-6 Luna

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: GPT-6 Luna (openai/gpt-6-luna) on OpenRouter, providers openai then azure (no other fallbacks), reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens; all 77 billed requests (preparation, play and compaction) went to OpenAI
• Benchmark: Large Barren Desert construction (no arms), version 1.7.3 (commit e0e0eb4), from the save the human reference game started from; 33 min 20 s of game time (2,000 game seconds) at speed 40, close to the person's 33 min 33 s; no playbook. Weapons and armour in store count nothing toward net worth; sold at a marketplace they bring their gold, which counts. Commit e0e0eb4 is 1.7.3 relocked with a fix to the compaction retry that leaves play and scoring unchanged; the batch's first games record b967c65.
• Run ad127f80, series 20261018T125435-3c827f6b, 2026-10-18: Luna's no-arms game on the desert, a fresh series with no memory of any other game, played after its first attempt failed on an OpenRouter key limit on 2026-10-17. Its weapons-counted game on this version is run 8433f913 (series 20261018T120404-5a1fc1f7, played earlier that day); its desert games from earlier rounds are run f2a35309 (1.5.6, series 20261012T123257-cf634001) and run 04b070e6 (1.6.3, series 20261014T091943-e0b00398). This game counts on the website's leaderboard.

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth ended 663 above leaving the game alone, 13.8% of the person's growth of 4,792, and about 650 below the starting package (about 6,500 by the rules). 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 20.2: 11.1 from net worth, 3.0 from population and 6.1 from popularity; this game counts on the website's leaderboard. It is 14.5 above its weapons-counted game on this version, 23.6 above its 1.6.3 game and 25.7 below its 1.5.6 game. By the recording (gold, wood, stone, iron and food, plus the 400 of ale and pitch it does not log) the town stood under 5,192 from 8:33 to 29:42 and was lowest, about 3,900, at 17:05. The stored goods are 77 iron (1,771), 140 stone (980), 61 cheese (244), 58 apples (232), 20 ale, 20 pitch (200 each) and 4 wood; gold, iron and stone are 38%, 30% and 17% of net worth. The town ended with 24 idle peasants, 19 free places in its hovels and 119 food in two kinds.

How the game went

Times are game time; for a call, when it began (the recording's clock; the run clock in the observations reads up to two seconds later, by 57 readings compared).

The opening, 0 to 8 minutes. Its plan named quarries with ox tethers, iron mines, housing and jobs, and no weapons. At 0:01, after six find_sites answers, one 73 s call put up a marketplace, two hovels, a quarry, an ox tether (its target was blocked; placed two tiles away) and an iron mine. Three stockpiles went up at 1:30 and two granaries at 1:53, since the starting wood filled the stockpile; the starting stone and iron were in by 1:55. Low taxes at 2:08. At 2:37: three hovels, the chapel (250 gold), a second quarry and mine; the second tether found no room and was not placed. Food read 28 at 3:58: 100 apples (3:59) and 100 cheese (4:35). Idle peasants stood at 24 from 5:14. At 5:59: three hovels, two iron mines (four in all), a third quarry and two tethers. Its first mined iron reached the store at 4:18, its first stone at 8:17. At 7:48 it placed an armory, a blacksmith's workshop and a tether (see Weapons).

Quarries paid for with planks, 8 to 15 minutes. Planks came in four lots (65, 50, 75 and 25, 8:58 to 14:15) and went into eight more quarries, seven tethers and three hovels (eleven in all): five quarries stood at 10:27, seven at 12:05, ten at 13:38, eleven at 14:56. Compaction at 10:51. Population rose from 47 (8:35) to 78 (15:48).

Food, a church and taxes, 15 to 27 minutes. Food fell to 26 at 15:16 (100 cheese from 15:11, 100 apples from 16:03). At 16:41 it built a church (500 gold), its last building. Average taxes from 17:05, a 120 s wait at 17:16, the second compaction at 19:19, low taxes at 19:21 and average at 20:17, another 120 s wait at 20:28, 100 apples (19:31) and 100 cheese (22:29). Gold fell to 363 at 22:59; it sold 130 stone at 23:16 (910 gold) and 100 at 25:46 (700 gold). The 23:16 reply said 100 units and 700 gold; the recording shows 130 and 910 (the 1.7.3 market_trade fault: the game sells 50 a click from 200 in stock; the tool expected 20), so it sold 30 more than the 100 asked. Mean taxes (94 gold a month against 63 at average) ran from 23:36 to 25:33; popularity fell from 78 to 61 and stayed there. The last food came at 26:11 and 26:45.

The wait, 27 to 33 minutes. It waited 240 s from 27:39 and 60 s from 31:41, selling maces at 27:25 and 32:42. Nothing was built after 16:41.

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 400 low (the 30-minute figure is about 5,200).

Weapons

It built an armory and a blacksmith's workshop and sold what the workshop made. The rules (in the run's inputs.json) say weapons and armour count nothing in the armory and that, sold at a marketplace, they bring their gold. They list no weapon prices, but the market_trade description does (maces and swords 58 to buy, 30 to sell), and Luna's reasoning used them. The first weapons reasoning in its log is at 7:48, with 19 iron and 32 wood in store, about 22 peasants idle and no open jobs. It first put a sword at 58 (35 over its iron), then, at the sell price of 30, at 7 over the iron's 23, and in the same reply placed an armory (5 wood) and a blacksmith's workshop (20 wood, 200 gold). At 8:36 it set the workshop to maces; no reason for maces over swords is recorded (both sell at 30), and the readouts show no sword. The first mace was in the armory by 10:27, and every readout from then gave 0.3 or 0.7 a minute. Seven lots were sold: 1 (10:53), 2 (14:56), 1 (15:49), 2 (20:04), 2 (23:03), 3 (27:25) and 3 (32:42), 14 maces for 420 gold, each sale's net-worth change equal to its gold.

The buildings cost 200 gold and 25 wood; the 14 maces took 14 iron (one each, by building_info), worth 322 at the sell price of 23; the maces brought 420. Net worth ended 127 (2.1 points) below building none: 420 against 200, 25 and 322. A mace gained 7 over its iron. The model weighed a second workshop three times and built none: at 10:53 it counted a 29-minute payback on the wood alone, at 19:31 break-even at 32 weapons with the gold, and at 20:17 too little time left. The workshop used about a fifth of the 76 iron the mines delivered; per building it added 2 to 5 gold a minute over its iron (0.3 to 0.7 maces at 7), where a quarry delivered up to 13 (1.9 stone at 7, 19:17) and a mine up to 23 (1.0 iron). set_workshop and the sales took 75 game seconds, 3.7% of the budget. What else the 225 could have bought is open: five tethers (5 wood each), or an inn (100 gold, 20 wood), which its 10:28 reasoning had named as the use for the 20 ale in store; neither was built. The weapons-counted game put 1,500 gold and 381 wood into its wing, for 48 pieces.

Beside its other games and the other models

What separates it from its weapons game. Same model, save, version and day; this town ended 1,063 higher: +17.7 points from net worth, −3.2 from popularity and −0.04 from one person fewer. The two games' files differ here:

Purchases and iron are close, and taxes within 600; buildings and stone are not. The weapons game opened with an armory and fletchers at 2:18, reasoned at 3:08 that a crossbow was worth 28 over its wood, bought 500 planks at 4 and placed its first quarry at 6:49 and its second at 16:36. The no-arms game valued a mace at 7 over its iron, built one workshop, and put its wood into quarries, tethers and mines (355 of 456). Against the weapons game, gold is 484 higher here, iron 690, food 388, pitch 200 (sold there) and wood 4; stone is 98 lower, ale 80 lower and weapons 525 lower (counted there). Popularity differs too: the weapons game's chapel and inn, placed at 0:01, read +8 to +12 from 3:23 to 12:55 against taxes of −8 to −12; this town's chapel read 0 to +2, it had no inn, and it lost 17 points to mean taxes late. This town scores the same under either rule, since it holds no weapons: 20.2 against 5.7 (−3.1 with the weapons game's weapons at zero). Against the 1.5.6 game (45.9, no armory offered) the gap is stone again: 12 quarries and 39 tethers mined 480 against 320.

Six no-arms desert games of the batch are finished (GPT-6.1 Sol, Gemini 4 Argon and Muse Wonder are being played again after a key-limit failure on 2026-10-17):

Luna is third of the six by score and by net worth. The no-arms game beat the weapons-counted one for four of the six models (Opus +48.0, Luna +14.5, Fable +10.3, Sonnet +1.1) and lost to it for Haiku (−3.3) and GLM (−38.9). The three towns with 11 quarries held 760, 466 and 140 stone on 35, 12 and 11 tethers. Whether more tethers would have raised this town's deliveries the logs do not show: the model weighed more tethers at 15:49, built none, and inspected no quarry after 12:15.

What held it back

• Stone late and slowing. The first stone came at 8:17 and the eleventh quarry stood at 14:56. With 11 tethers for 11 quarries 83 to 106 tiles from the keep, deliveries ran 13 to 21 a minute from 19:17 to 27:39, then 13.3 (31:40) and 10.7 (32:41); the person's game ran 37 tethers for 13 quarries.
• Nothing built for 16 min 39 s. After the church at 16:41 the town placed no building, with gold between 363 and 2,636. The recorded reasons: no quarry or iron site left near the known deposits (find_sites at 15:49, the handoff at 19:19), wood at 4 a unit, and a second workshop that would not pay back in the time left (19:31, 20:17).
• Jobs set the population. Idle peasants read 24 from 15:48 with no open jobs and 19 places free, so people followed jobs (79 − 24 = 55 at work). At 15:49 it expected the church to add three jobs; population went from 78 to 79.
• Food and wood bought at 8 and 4. 7,260 gold of purchases lost 3,845 of net worth, 66% of the final value; there are no farms or trees.
• Mean taxes. Two minutes at level 7 cost 17 popularity (1.7 points) for about 31 gold a month more than average over four and a half game months (about 140 gold, 2.3 points); the reply that raised them has no recorded reasoning.

What worked

• Quarries and tethers early. Eleven of each (275 wood) mined 320 stone, 2,240 at the sell price, the largest of the goods the town made; the four iron mines (all the sites it found) mined about 76 iron, 1,750.
• Food in time. Rations stayed full, food never ran out (lowest 26 at 15:16) and the kinds eaten kept the food factor at +1 or +2. Selling stone paid for food without changing net worth.
• Low taxes while growing. Popularity read 90 to 100 until 16:40 while the population went from 2 to 78.
• Placement. 42 of 43 build_structure placements went through; three tethers were moved 2, 4 and 3 tiles and one found no room. The religion factor read +3 from 22:28.

Market

21 calls: 12 purchases and 9 sales, 225 clicks and 447 game seconds (22% of the budget, 2.0 s a click). Bought: 400 apples and 400 cheese in eight lots of 100 (3:59 to 26:45; 6,400 gold) and 215 planks in four (65, 50, 75, 25; 860). Sold: 14 maces (420) and 230 stone (23:16, 25:46; 1,610). The purchases lost 3,845 of net worth against the sell price (apples 1,600, cheese 1,600, planks 645); selling stone leaves net worth unchanged and selling maces adds their gold. Gold flow: 5,000 + 3,404 taxes (by subtraction) + 2,030 sales − 7,260 purchases − 950 buildings = 2,224.

Cost and speed

74 turns (the last, at 33:13, a 0 s wait), 140 tool calls (53 find_sites, 21 market_trade, 20 building_info, 12 build_structure, 9 waits, 25 others), 3.46 million tokens and $0.082 billed by OpenRouter (preparation $0.003, play $0.075, compaction $0.004). The interview cost $0.001 more, with 45,982 of its 47,664 tokens read from the cache. The run took 43.0 real minutes, 17.3 of them waiting for the model; all 74 gameplay requests read the prompt cache, 96.4% of the input tokens. The context was compacted twice, at 10:51 and 19:19. Each compaction was one request that returned its text handoff (26 s and 24 s; the context estimate was 67,338 and 73,199 of 120,000 tokens at the last request before), so neither needed the text-only retry that e0e0eb4 re-sized.

Of the 2,000 game seconds the 9 waits took 668 (six fast-forwarded: 630 of those seconds in 233 real seconds), build_structure 473, market_trade 447, the host's 41 five-second top-ups 205, and inspect_building, expand_storage, set_tax and set_workshop 152 together. build_structure placed 42 buildings in 12 calls: 11.2 game seconds a building (7 to 14 in the ten multi-building calls, 17 and 19 in the two single-building ones). On the same measure its weapons-counted game took 10.3 s (474 s for 46), its 1.6.3 game 7.0 s (230 s for 33) and its 1.5.6 game 3.6 s (248 s for 68, the count from that game's analysis). This game and the weapons game had the host on the game machine and the two earlier ones did not, so the rise mixes the version with the host's location.

The interview

Luna put its result well behind the person's: its value sat in raw materials, its economy made too little gold and carried too few people, and it had not seen that bought wheat could feed mills and bakeries. Playing again it would buy wheat and build mills and bakeries early, add housing and jobs, inns with ale, more religious and fear-factor buildings, keep the productive quarries and mines but not more, and consider no rations. It found the readings and tools useful, said the deposits near it ran out, and asked for a hint or example about making goods from purchased inputs.

Claims checked against the run:

• Match: 5,855 against 9,984; 79 against 250; gold 2,224 against 8,574; raw materials as most of the value (iron and stone 2,751 of 5,855); popularity above 50 throughout (61 at the end); no inn, fear buildings, wheat or mill; deposits running out (find_sites found no further quarry or iron site at 15:49 and 19:19).
• "Too much attention on quarries and mines": not borne out. They gave 3,990 at the sell price, more than any other good the town made, and the town built nothing in its last 16 minutes.
• "Expand housing": 19 places stood free; the limit was jobs (24 idle, none open).
• "Additional religious buildings": it had built a church at 16:41, and the religion factor (+3) was its largest positive one.
• Not testable here: the wheat and bread chain (no wheat traded, no mill; the rules give no yields, and the tool lists wheat at 23 to buy and bread at 4 to sell); no rations (half rations were weighed at 12:42 and 27:25, by its own reckoning at −2 and −4 popularity a month, and never set).

For the harness

• Weapon prices outside the rules. The no-arms rules leave out weapon prices, but the market_trade description (harness/server/model.ts at e0e0eb4) lists them, and the 7:48 reasoning used them.
• The first tethers. At 0:01 the tether's target (407,368) was blocked and placed two tiles away; at 2:37 a second found no room within 4 tiles and the result named (402,366), 5 tiles away, which the model did not use; its next two tethers came at 5:59 (one moved 4 tiles). The first stone reached the store at 8:17; the logs do not show which of these delayed it.
• A hidden panel. inspect_building at 5:15 on the tether tile (405,366) returned the quarry's panel with a warning that no click reached the hidden building, so that tether was never read; the other four inspections read their buildings.
• The last call, wait_and_observe for 0 s at 33:13, was answered "Session stopped while waiting" and logged as an error, the only one of 140.
• The game saved at the end ("gpt-6 luna 1-7-3 ad127f", 3,538,631 bytes in episode.json).
• Sales from 200 in stock. The 1.7.3 market_trade expects 20 a click; the game sells 50 (the 23:16 stone sale).