GPT-6.1 Sol

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-6.1 Sol (openai/gpt-6.1-sol) on OpenRouter, providers openai then azure and no others, reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens
• Benchmark: The Sinkhole construction (no arms), version 1.7.3 (commit e0e0eb4, the relock after a compaction-retry fix that left play and scoring unchanged), from the save the human reference game on this map started from; 45 min of game time at speed 40, the length of the person's game (44 min 58 s); no playbook; waits played fast. Weapons and armour in store count nothing toward net worth; sold at a marketplace, they bring their gold.
• Run ed793e76, series 20261019T115946-c82f44ed, 2026-10-19, host on the game machine: Sol's no-arms game on this map, a fresh series with no memory of its others. Its weapons-counted pair is its 1.7.1 game (run 58233695, series 20261015T161235-97bd8ae4, commit 674e7ba, host on a Mac; the series' second attempt, the first, run 58489527, having ended on an OpenAI error and not counting), so the pair differs in version and host as well as in the rule. Its Sinkhole game from an earlier round is run 78e8c0bf (1.6.2). This game counts on the website's leaderboard.

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,700 game seconds. Net worth grew by 17,918 over leaving the game alone, 45.4% of the person's 39,436, against 46.1% in the 1.7.1 game. The score is the website's formula (80% net worth, 10% each population and popularity; shares from leaving the game alone, 2,195 and 4 people, to the person, 41,631 and 506, the net-worth share clipped to −1..2): 36.35 points from net worth, 2.83 from 146 people and 10.00 from popularity 100. The 1.7.1 game's 50.4 was 36.90, 3.53 and 10.00.

Gold is 68.4% of the net worth (68.4% in the 1.7.1 game too). The stored goods are 160 iron (3,680), 247 bread (988), 104 stone (728), 52 flour (520) and smaller lots of wheat, ale, wood and hops (444). By origin, the 360 iron mined (200 sold, 160 held) are worth 8,280, 41% of the net worth, and taxes brought 7,933 gold (the balancing figure: 13,753 less the 2,000 start, plus 3,000 bought and 500 spent on inns, less 7,320 sold). The town ended with 19 idle peasants, no empty place in its hovels, mean taxes (175 gold a month), extra rations and 247 bread in its one granary.

How the game went

Times are the game clock when a call began, read from the recording (the run clock quoted in observations reads a few seconds later).

Wood, housing and a first bread chain, 0 to 10 minutes. map_overview at 0:01 put the ore 52 to 88 tiles east of the keep, stone 84 tiles away and the nearest trees 39. Three woodcutters came first (0:01), a marketplace at 0:41, 100 planks (400 gold) at 1:03, two orchards at 1:54 (a third found no room), three hovels at 2:51 and five iron mines at 3:19; then two wheat farms (4:23), a mill, two bakeries and a hovel (5:23), 100 more planks (6:45) and two quarries with five ox tethers (7:38; a third quarry did not fit). The first iron arrived at about 6:40. Food fell from 55 to 7 by 8:47 and it bought 75 bread (600 gold) at 8:48, leaving 600 gold, the game's lowest. Taxes stayed at the starting "no taxes" until average at 9:32.

Double rations and an empty granary, 10 to 20 minutes. Four bakeries and three hovels at 10:10, double rations at 11:26, three mines and two wheat farms at 12:18, high taxes at 13:50, 100 planks at 14:03 (wood stood at 9) and, at 15:00, five woodcutters, its first since 0:01, with three hovels. The granary ran dry at 16:10; the 16:15 reading showed food 0 (food factor −8, popularity −14 for the coming month) and rations went back to full at 16:16. Popularity, 100 at 14:04, read 82 at 17:25 and 71 at 19:53. Two quarries came at 17:42, three wheat farms at 18:38 and extra rations at 19:52.

Mines, ale and the first sale, 20 to 29 minutes. Five mines at 20:51 (after 100 planks at 20:05), average taxes at 22:03, three mines and four bakeries at 22:15, five tethers at 23:26. At 24:16 find_sites found no quarry site within 25 tiles and it bought its fifth lot of 100 planks. Three hops farms, three breweries, an inn and a hovel went up at 25:04 and it bought 20 ale (400 gold) at 27:05. At 27:26 expand_storage found no room beside the stockpile; at 27:42 it demolished a bakery near it (placed at 16:28), and at 28:01 there was still none. At 28:18 it sold 100 iron and gold went from 1,606 to 4,003. The context was compacted at 29:14.

Selling, the last mines, bakeries and inns, 29 to 37 minutes. 100 stone at 29:17; five mines and three hovels at 29:42 (its last of each); five bakeries at 31:06 and five at 32:15, which made 24. With food at 27 it set rations to full at 33:04, and popularity, 84 at 33:03, fell to 57 by 36:21 at tax −4. 100 stone at 33:18 and 100 iron at 33:43 took gold to 9,071 by 34:22. At 34:29 a click on its inn opened the panel (population coverage 20%, next level at 25%); the three inns it asked for at 34:39 came back not_selected (75 s). Extra rations returned at 36:11 and four inns went up at 36:22 and 36:43.

Waiting, 37 to 45 minutes. Nothing more was built after 37:10. A 90-second wait (37:15) ended with popularity at 66 and rising by 8 a month (food +4, tax −4, inn +8); it set mean taxes at 38:47, sold 130 bread at 39:02 (the reply said 100) and 100 stone at 39:26, waited 120 s, set extortionate taxes at 41:55 (popularity 97), waited 120 s, sold 100 planks at 44:09 and went back to mean taxes at 44:32 with 28 s left. Popularity ended at 100. Three of the four waits were fast-forwarded (330 game seconds in 129 real).

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute; mines count when the placing call returned. The net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; flour, wheat, ale and hops (882 at the end) are left out, so it reads low, and the last column is the final reading.

Weapons

It left them alone: no armory, no weapon workshop, no weapon made or sold, no set_workshop call. Its only building_info lookups were the Inn (24:16, 31:06). None of the 29 reasoning summaries it left readable (24 of its 53 reasoning blocks carry no readable text), its handoff note, its preparation reply or its interview mentions weapons or the Armory.

In the 1.7.1 game it looked up fletcher's sites at 11:53, built the armory and four fletcher's workshops at 12:11 and set them to crossbows between 13:49 and 14:59. They made 29 crossbows and one bow, all kept: 885 at the end (870 and 15), 4.3% of that game's 20,384. By the table in prompt/game-mechanics.md the wing cost 400 gold and 80 wood for the workshops, 5 wood for the armory and 89 wood for the weapons (3 wood a crossbow, 2 a bow): 174 wood, the wood of about nine iron mines, and 4 of the town's 157 jobs. With weapons counting nothing its net worth would have been 19,499 (48.6), 614 below this game. The 1.6.2 game made 21 crossbows too (630, 3.1% of 20,610).

Instead this game put its iron and wood into mines: 21 against 5, which took 420 of the 1,263 wood its build_structure replies list as costs and 42 of its 127 jobs (10 of 157 in the 1.7.1 game). It mined 360 iron against 139, selling 200 (4,600 gold) and holding 160 (3,680).

Beside its other games and the other models

Sol's three Sinkhole games end 497 apart in net worth (20,610, 20,384, 20,113) and 1.6 apart in score (48.8, 50.4, 49.2), by three routes: 28 iron mines, 27 bakeries and five inns under extortionate taxes with popularity 79 in 1.6.2; five mines, 45 bakeries and 43 woodcutters on double rations with one inn in 1.7.1; 21 mines, 24 bakeries and five inns under mean taxes here.

The same. Net worth within 271 (1.3%), gold at 68.4% of it, popularity 100 and mean taxes at the end, one compaction each (54 and 51 s), the same opening moves in the first four minutes (three woodcutters, a marketplace, 100 planks, orchards, three hovels and five iron mines, at 3:19 here and 2:42 there), and a stockpile with no room beside it (27:26 and 28:01 here, 33:36 there).

The difference. The weapons are 885 of net worth in one game and nothing in the other; without them the 1.7.1 game would be 614 behind this one. The rest is a different mix: iron up 2,783 (16 more mines, 221 more iron mined), bread down 1,488 and flour and wheat down 376 (21 fewer bakeries, 2 fewer mills, 6 fewer wheat farms), and 35 fewer people (127 at work against 157). By the recording's measure the 1.7.1 game led in net worth from 10 to 30 minutes (2,112 against 1,456 at 10; 7,633 against 7,378 at 30) and this one from 35 (10,693 against 10,547), with gold at 9,187 against 5,213 at 35 minutes because it had sold 200 iron and 200 stone by 34:15 (the 1.7.1 game's first sale was at 35:48). Taxes differed: none until 9:32 here and average for 16 minutes (22:03 to 38:47), against low from 4:30, average from 20:06 and mean from 27:23 there, with popularity resting on double rations there and on five inns (+8) and extra rations (+4) here.

Nothing in its play or its words shows the rule at work: it never mentioned weapons here, and it had built them in its 1.6.2 and 1.7.1 games. The files do not separate the rule from the version, the host and chance. Version 1.7.2's change shows in the placements: 3 of this game's 109 build_structure placements went elsewhere (two hovels one tile, a mill four), and three requests were not made because nothing fit at or near the tile (an orchard at 1:54, a quarry at 7:38, a mill at 16:28 whose reply named the nearest fit 7 tiles away). In the 1.7.1 game 4 of 153 moved, 4, 5 and 9 tiles (three fletcher's workshops) and 10 (a bakery at 38:43).

No-arms games on The Sinkhole in this batch so far:

It is first of seven, 7.4 points ahead of Fable. The batch differs from the 1.7.1 round in version, rule and host, so the lists do not rank together; in the 1.7.1 round Sol's 50.4 was second of ten, behind Gemini 4 Argon's 52.4. On the batch's other maps Sol scored 82.3 (weapons counted, run 16de155f) and 62.4 (no arms, d0676649) on Oasis by the Sea, and 75.6 (5aad0460) and 98.5 (6f469761) on the Large Barren Desert, so this is its lowest no-arms score of the three maps.

What held it back

• Jobs and housing. The town stood at 146 of 146 places from 33:03 to the end. From 13:00, 19 or more peasants were idle in 33 of 46 readings (24, the number at which new peasants stop coming, at 20:04 and 20:51) and none of the 66 readings showed an open job. The last hovels went up at 29:42. Population, 28.9% of the person's, gave 2.83 of 10 points (3.53 in the 1.7.1 game); a filled hovel (8 places) is worth 0.16.
• Nothing built in the last 7:50. The last placement returned at 37:10 with 9,367 gold, 50 wood and 18 idle peasants (wood stood at 110 at 40:00). The reasoning blocks at 37:15, 39:53, 41:55 and 42:07 carry no readable text, so the files do not say why. By the readout (0.6 iron a mine a minute at 23 gold, about 2.5 minutes before a first delivery) a mine placed then would return about 70 gold against 20 planks, so five would be worth about half a point and the stop cost little.
• Food and rations swings. Food read 7 at 8:47 (75 bread bought at 8 gold, 300 of net worth lost), 0 at 16:15 after five minutes of double rations, and 27 at 33:03, when the switch to full rations let popularity slide from 84 to 57 at tax −4 in about three minutes. Bread stock only built up after the last ten bakeries (176 at 36:02, 247 at the end).
• Inns found late. The first inn stood in the 25:04 call. Two inspect_building calls (28:49, 31:55) said it was working while its popularity factor stayed 0; the panel opened at 34:29 gave the coverage rule, four more inns followed at 36:22 to 37:10 and the factor read +8 at 38:47. It ran average taxes (116 gold a month at 146 people) until then and mean (175) after; at 59 gold a month more, mean taxes over the 11 minutes before 38:47 would have been worth about 1,500 gold (3 points) if popularity had held, which the logs cannot show.
• Wood early, storage late. Five lots of 100 planks (2,000 gold, 1,500 lost against the sell price, 218 game seconds of clicking) were bought with wood at 9 to 46 each time, on three woodcutters until 15:00; the 1.7.1 game had eight by 4:24 and bought 300 planks. After the failure at 28:01 it left the stockpile as it was and sold iron and stone; its one granary (250) held 230 at 39:01 and 247 at the end, and four quarries stood because find_sites offered no further site at 24:16.

What worked

• Iron at scale. 21 mines in five batches (3:19, 12:18, 20:51, 22:15, 29:42), each delivering 0.5 to 0.8 iron a minute from 5 mines to 21; 13 a minute at the end, about 300 gold a minute at the sell price against about 395 a minute from taxes (175 a month, a month every 26.5 game seconds).
• Selling raw goods. Gold went from 1,606 at 28:18 to 9,071 at 34:22, 6,000 of it from 200 iron and 200 stone, with net worth unchanged by the sales themselves.
• Popularity brought to 100. Five inns on about one ale a minute from three breweries held +8 from 38:47 to the end; mean taxes followed, then extortionate for 157 seconds (+29 gold a month over mean, about 170 gold) and mean again for the last 28 s, ending at 100 (+4). After the granary ran dry at 16:10 food stayed at 8 or more, and 24 bakeries delivered 71 to 78 bread a minute against about 50 to 55 eaten.
• Placements. 109 of the 115 build_structure placements were placed (113 buildings with four from place_near) and all are in the final count of buildings, less the bakery it demolished; nine tries did not go through (an orchard, a quarry, a mill, a place_near mill, two stockpile expansions and three inns) and no placement call was refused.

Market

Purchases: 500 planks in five lots (1:03, 6:45, 14:03, 20:05, 24:16) for 2,000 gold, 75 bread (8:48) for 600 and 20 ale (27:05) for 400: 3,000 gold, and 2,000 of net worth lost against the sell price (planks 1,500 at 3 each, bread 300, ale 200). Sales, by the recording: 200 iron (28:18, 33:43) for 4,600, 300 stone (29:17, 33:18, 39:26) for 2,100, 130 bread (39:02) for 520 and 100 planks (44:09) for 100: 7,320 gold, against 7,200 by the replies. Selling leaves net worth unchanged; no weapon was sold. The 14 calls took 422 game seconds, 218 of them the five plank purchases.

The known 1.7.3 fault (market_trade undercounts sales made with 200 or more in stock) showed once. Every reply's gold matches the recording. Iron (136, 100), stone (172, 144, 132) and planks (179) were sold from under 200 and match; at 39:02 the granary held 229 bread, the first click sold 50 (200 gold) and the next four 20 each, so gold rose by 520 and 130 bread went where the reply said 100 units and 400 gold; its stock (122) and gold (10,504) fields were right. Net worth is not affected.

It made two game_action calls and neither touched the marketplace: a left click at 34:29 that opened its inn's panel and a right click at 36:01 that was refused as stale. All 754 clicks in the input log fall inside harness tool calls (463 build_structure, 212 market_trade, 78 in other tools, one game_action), and every fall of gold in the recording is one of the purchases above or an inn, so it set no automatic trade.

Cost and speed

104 turns, 104 tool calls (29 find_sites, 22 build_structure, 14 market_trade, 7 set_tax, 6 inspect_building, 5 set_rations, 4 waits, 17 others), 4.60 million tokens and $0.825 billed by OpenRouter (preparation $0.053, play $0.738, compaction $0.034), with 98.1% of input read from the cache; all 106 billed requests went to OpenAI and every gameplay request read the cache. The interview cost $0.016 more, with 54,112 of its 55,813 tokens read from the cache. The agent run took 56.1 real minutes, 19.9 of them waiting for the model (mean 11.5 s a reply, longest 21.9 s); the 1.7.1 game took 53.5 minutes, 15.6 waiting (8.4 s). The context was compacted once, at 29:14, and succeeded on its first request: one billed request returned a text handoff (1,753 tokens, 54 s) and wrote its checkpoint, so e0e0eb4's text-only retry did not run. The next calls used figures that matched the game (stone 172 at 29:17).

Of the 2,700 game seconds the 22 build calls took 1,254, the 14 market calls 422, the 4 waits 345 and the host's five-second top-up after 61 replies about 305. The build calls placed 109 buildings: 11.5 game seconds each, 5.0 a call. The 1.7.1 game's 35 calls placed 153 in 1,656 s (10.8 s, 4.4 a call), besides 10 by place_near (107 s) and 3 granaries by expand_storage (49 s). That game ran with the host on a Mac and this one on the game machine, and 1.7.2 changed blocked placements, so the step from 10.8 to 11.5 mixes version, host and what each game built.

The interview

Sol put the gap to the person down to strategy and reinvestment: bread kept as a population cost, not a bread-export industry (24 bakeries against 161), distant mines with low delivery per mine, too little housing and jobs, and inns understood too late. Playing again it would build bread and population first, buy ale for inns early, lower rations when popularity allows and sell the surplus, plan storage before crowding it, and try religion and fear. It praised the read-only statistics, tile placement and find_sites; it named inn coverage hidden from the readings, a failed batch after an open panel, hard storage repair and slow startup of new producers. Its closing answer called the game not primarily a failure to execute clicks but a failure to identify and scale the strongest economic loop early enough.

These match the game: 48% of the person's net worth and 29% of its population; 24 bakeries against 161; 0.6 iron a mine a minute; one staffed inn with a factor of 0 until the panel read 20% coverage and 25% needed (34:38), then +8 with five inns (38:47); the not_selected batch (34:39) after the panel click; a boxed-in stockpile that cost time (27:26 to 28:01, a demolition, no room) and selling working; new mines and farms taking minutes to deliver (iron 2.5, wheat about 4). These do not fully match: "reinvest faster during the early and middle game" (gold never passed 1,725 until 28:18, and it bought planks five times to build faster; the unspent gold came after 28:41), and "too conservative about food security" (food read 0, 7 and 27 at 16:15, 8:47 and 33:03, and stood at 176 to 247 only from 36:02).

For the harness

• market_trade undercounts large sales of food too. The fault is not limited to wood, stone and iron: the 39:02 bread sale at 229 in stock sold 130, not 100, with the reply's units and gold wrong and its stock and gold right. The 1.7.1 game's stone sale at 35:48 (244 in stock; the recording shows 130 sold for 910 gold) shows the same, so that game's sales were 4,110 gold, not 3,900.
• The not_selected remedy lists the right click before the observation. The reply tells the model to right-click open ground with game_action, observe, then place again. The right click at 36:01 aimed at the screenshot of 34:38 and was refused ("Game image expired (older than 40 game seconds of play)"); the panel was closed in the 36:09 screenshot and the next inn placed at 36:22. Observing first would have given it an image to aim at.
• Inn coverage is not in the readings. inspect_building reported the inn as working with its worker present while the panel showed 20% coverage against a 25% threshold; Sol asked for it in its interview.
• Storage still boxed in. expand_storage found no free ground touching the stockpile at 27:26, and again at 28:01 after a bakery near it was demolished; the files do not show whether the demolished footprint touched the stockpile. The 1.7.1 game met the same at 33:36, on a version before 1.7.2's rule for keeping room beside the stockpile, which did not prevent it here either.
• No provider errors, stalled replies or forced garbage-collection watchdog collections. The one rejected call was the 36:01 game_action. The game saved at the end ("gpt-6-1 sol 1-7-3 ed793e").