GPT-6.1 Terra

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 Terra (openai/gpt-6.1-terra) on OpenRouter, served by OpenAI or Azure (no other fallbacks; all 140 billed requests, 1 preparation, 137 gameplay and 2 compaction, were billed to OpenAI), reasoning medium, output limit 32,768 tokens; released on OpenRouter and played on 2026-10-26. Costs are what OpenRouter billed (list prices $1 per million input tokens, $5 output, $0.05 cached, $1.25 cache write, half of Sol's). Its thinking parts are reasoning summaries, not the full reasoning; 75 of its 137 replies carry one.
• Benchmark: Oasis by the Sea construction (no arms), in which weapons and armour in the armory count nothing toward net worth and bring their gold if sold at a marketplace; version 1.7.3 (commit 55bcc41, 1.7.3 relocked: it adds a retry for a reply cut off by the provider closing the connection ("terminated"), with the game paused; what the model plays is unchanged). No inference_retry event appears in events.jsonl or logs.jsonl and no request failed, so the retry did not fire. From the save the human reference game started from; 2,000 game seconds (33 min 20 s) at speed 40; no playbook; host on the game machine. Kimi K3.1 Pro's games played this commit; the other models' 1.7.3 games played earlier ones.
• Run 189029b2, series 20261026T193628-78e07a58, 2026-10-26: game 2 of GPT-6.1 Terra's six, a fresh series with no memory of any other, valid on its first attempt. Game 1 (this map, weapons counted, run 8b331985) was played earlier that day; games 3 to 6 (the desert and the Sinkhole, each with and without arms) followed it. All six games were played on 2026-10-26 (game 6 ended just after midnight UTC, on 2026-10-27).

Result

A full-budget score: the run used all 2,000 game seconds. Net worth grew by 11,502 over leaving the game alone, 62.9% of the person's 18,293. By the website's formula (80% net-worth share, 10% population, 10% popularity; shares from doing nothing, 1,220 and 4 people, to the person, 19,513 and 202) the score is 63.7: 50.3 points from net worth, 8.1 from population (160 of the person's 198 people above the 4 at the start) and 5.3 from popularity. This game counts on the website's leaderboard. episode.json records arms_counted: false. The stored goods are 240 iron (5,520), 197 bread (788), 103 stone (721), 17 wood and 1 apple; the 33:16 reading lists no crossbow. Gold is 44.6% of net worth, iron 43.4%. The town ended on high taxes (164 gold a month) with 24 idle peasants and no open jobs, 22 free housing places, full rations, 198 food and 6 of 16 stockpile piles empty.

How the game went

Times are the recording's game clock when a call began; the run clock in the observations, the source of the idle, housing, popularity and production readings quoted, reads a few seconds later. The game is paused while the model replies.

Opening, 0:00 to 12:00. After a map overview and five site searches, the first build call (33 s) placed three woodcutters, an orchard, an iron mine and one of two hovels (the other lacked wood); the marketplace came at 0:37, 100 planks at 0:50. Iron mines went up in threes at 1:27, 4:21 and 5:04: ten, all it ever placed. Taxes went from none to average at 3:00; popularity fell from 100 (3:03) to 70 (9:00) and it set low taxes at 8:03. On the recording's count net worth was under the do-nothing 1,220 from 0:59 to 7:50 (low 899 at 4:17). A chapel (250 gold, religion factor 0) came at 6:49 with its first ox tethers, a wheat farm, mill and bakery at 8:11 (a second bakery refused near the signpost), a second wheat farm at 9:53, and a church (500 gold, religion +1) at 12:01, which left gold at 79, its low. It never added another farm.

Three demolitions, 12:20 to 12:48. The church call had also placed two hovels 4 to 5 tiles from where it asked, (392,351) and (382,347), taking housing from 82 to 98 with 54 food for 78 people. Its reasoning summary at 12:20 spoke of "planning to remove two hovels to slow population increase and stabilize food supplies"; its 14:25 handoff says housing "was deliberately reduced from 98 to 82".

Housing is from the readings at 12:21, 12:31, 12:42 and 12:54; wood and gold are the recording. Between 12:14 and 13:03 wood changed only by two steps of +3 (12:25, 12:47), each at the end of a call that clicked: half of a hovel's 6 wood. The gold steps are monthly payments (+46 at 12:23, +47 at 12:50, 27 s apart like all the others); no refund in gold shows, and the reply gives no refund figure. After the covered reply it picked a different hovel, so the town ended with one new hovel in place of an old one and housing back at 82. Population stood at 82 of 82 from 13:06 to 15:08 (2 min 2 s) with 6 idle and no open jobs; food rose from 54 to 66, and to 83 by 15:41.

Fletchers, 12:53 to 19:58. It sold 30 iron for 690 gold (12:53), placed an armory and three fletcher's workshops at 13:03 (three more at 16:15 and 18:36), five woodcutters (14:38) and seven bakeries (14:59, 17:04), and set extra rations (16:07), average taxes (17:22) and high taxes (19:58).

Jobs by ox tether, 20:06 to 26:14. Open jobs read 0 in all 48 readings from 19:15, and idle peasants rose from 1 (19:04) to 24 at 21:33, the number at which new peasants stop arriving. Its summary at 20:41 said so ("If I don't act, they won't come beyond 24"). From 20:06 to 25:49 it placed 34 of its 43 ox tethers (5 wood, one worker each) with 8 hovels and 5 bakeries; at 23:57 it wrote of buying wood to "convert the ox, which would give me additional population". Population rose from 117 to 164 (26:14). Mean taxes came at 25:41, and its last build call, five tethers, at 25:49.

The last 7 minutes, 26:14 to 33:20. Population stayed at 164 with 22 housing places free. It built only a granary (29:52). Rations went to full (26:11), taxes moved 6, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6 (26:43 to 32:35), and it bought 50 cheese (26:28) and sold 130 stone (27:59) and crossbows (29:42, 32:26). Gold rose from 2,347 to 5,672; popularity fell from 94 to 53.

Each column is the last reading at or before that minute. Before the end the net worth row counts gold, wood, stone, iron and food (at 4) as the recording logs them; flour and wheat are left out, so it reads a little low against the End column, the game's figure.

Without weapons

The rules it was given say weapons and armour sit in the armory "where it counts nothing; sold at a marketplace, it brings its gold", and bar only soldiers and defences. It built an armory and nine fletcher's workshops anyway, all set to crossbows, to sell them, and it knew the rule: its first reply planned to "avoid military construction"; at 12:53 its summaries weighed selling weapons ("I might break even if I invest in enough Fletchers") and read "no arms" as "I can't recruit soldiers or build defenses, but I can have weapon workshops"; its 14:25 handoff says "stored weapons count zero" and to "sell armory goods regularly".

In net worth, with wood at its sell price of 1, that is −410: 1.8 of the 63.7 points. Each sale raised gold by 150 in the recording (the 29:42 step of 314 also holds a 164 payment), and no crossbow stood in the 33:16 reading. The workshops made 0.1 to 0.2 crossbows each a minute (production readout), against its summary at 16:15 of a "payback period of 7 minutes"; nine set_workshop calls took 94 game seconds. Each workshop is also a job, nine of the 140 working people (164 less 24 idle); I did not estimate what those were worth. Sol built none; Luna built an armory and seven poleturner's workshops and sold 70 spears for 700 gold (each sale agrees with its recording).

Beside its other games and the other models

Games 3 to 6 (the desert and the Sinkhole, each with and without arms) were played after this one. Over the three maps its scores are Oasis 62.4, desert 58.7 and The Sinkhole 62.4, and its overall score, the mean of the three maps, is 61.2: third of twelve, behind GPT-6.1 Sol (69.7) and Gemini 4 Argon (65.6); on The Sinkhole alone it is first of twelve (Sol 49.8, Argon 49.7). The two Oasis games are 2.6 points apart: the no-arms game has 492 more net worth (+2.2 points), 32 more people (+1.6) and 12 less popularity (−1.2). By item the 492 is gold +1,820, bread +564, wood +12, iron −713, stone −98, weapons −945 (counted in game 1) and flour, apples and cheese −148.

Terra is second by score, net worth, population and gold, tenth by popularity, first by turns (Luna 132) and seventh from the lowest by cost. It is 22.5 points behind Argon (4,668 net worth, 27 people) and 1.3 above Sol. Its map score on Oasis, the mean of its two unrounded game scores, is 62.4: third of twelve, behind Argon (76.8) and Sol (72.3) and 21.5 above Kimi (40.9); the others' map scores are the mean of their two games.

Against Sol's 12,591 the 131 is gold +888, iron +897 (240 against 201) and bread +92, offset by stone −1,022 (103 against 249), flour −490 and wood −234. On the recording's count Terra was ahead at every three-minute column from 6:00 to 30:00, by 240 to 1,437 (about 880 at 30:00 with Sol's 56 flour added); Sol's last 3 min 20 s added about 2,900 against Terra's 2,142.

What held it back

• No farm after 9:53. All 30 farm-site searches from 11:19 to 23:25 found nothing. map_overview at 24:52 still listed five farmland patches (1,325 tiles) and no grove: its 21 woodcutters had cut the groves (50 trees at 0:00, 19 at 15:35), some placed to clear room for farms (14:25 handoff). The logs do not show what blocked the sites.
• Jobs ended at 25:49. Population stood at 164 for 7 minutes with 22 places free while gold rose from 2,347 to 5,672. At 28:11 its summary said it could "create more jobs with wood tethers, but I don't really want to sacrifice crossbows for that"; wood stood at 48 and planks cost 4 gold. I did not estimate what jobs would have earned.
• Tethers made jobs, not stone. Four, then five quarries mined 208 stone in all: 16 a minute from 12:00 to 15:00 with 8 tethers, 5 to 13 a minute in the later three-minute windows with 8 to 43. Quarry-site searches at 12:20, 12:53, 17:04 and 26:51 and five iron-mine searches from 6:34 to 26:51 found no site.
• Wood ended. The readout (last 3 minutes) gave 60 a minute at 22:47, 21 at 24:52 and 0 in every reading from 25:50. It bought 360 planks for 1,440 gold, 4.7 points of net worth.
• Popularity. It held 92 to 95 from 20:00 to 26:14 on high taxes (factor −6) against extra rations (food +5). Mean taxes (25:41, factor −8) took the monthly change from 0 to −2 and full rations (26:11, food factor +5 to 0) to −7 (readings at 25:42, 26:12, 26:20); the cheese restored +2 for about 3 minutes. It ended 41 points down (4.1 score points) while the 16 payments in those minutes brought 2,365 gold (10.3 points); a payment was 98 at low taxes and 164 at high, with factors −2 and −6. Food fell from 172 (24:34) to 112 (26:20) on extra rations, then rose to 198; the logs do not show whether they were sustainable.
• Religion. The chapel and church cost 750 gold (3.3 points) for a religion factor of +1.

What worked

• Iron. Ten mines placed by 5:04: 270 iron mined (240 held, 30 sold), 43% of net worth.
• Taxes. 6,212 gold in 69 monthly payments, 4,400 of it after 20:00.
• Population. 164 people, 28 more than Sol, in 22 hovels, with 43 tethers among the jobs.
• Placement. 139 of 150 buildings asked were placed in 27 build_structure calls; 5 of the 11 misses lacked wood, and each came with a remedy. Every placed building is in the final count.
• Food. It never fell below 40 after 3:00 and ended with 198, 197 of it bread.

Market

360 planks (100 at 0:50, 80 at 4:03, 50 at 6:34, 30 at 14:26, 100 at 24:52) cost 1,440 gold and lowered net worth by 1,080 against the sell price. 100 cheese (24:07, 26:28) cost 800 and lowered it by 400; none was left at the end. It sold 30 iron for 690 (12:53), 25 crossbows for 750 and 130 stone for 910 (27:59). The gold ledger closes: 1,000 start

• 6,212 taxes + 2,350 sales − 2,240 purchases − 1,650 for chapel, church and workshops = 5,672 (the 26:36 payment counts as 196: it shows as +156 beside a 40-gold click).

Against the recording every reply agrees except the stone sale. At 27:59 it sold with 201 in store: the reply says 100 units for 700 gold, but stone fell from 201 to 71 and gold rose by 910, 130 units, the known undercount for sales from 200 or more in stock; the reply's stock (71) and gold (3,694) are right. Paydays fell inside the 6:34 plank call (+40) and the 26:28 cheese call (+196); both bought all they asked.

Cost and speed

137 turns, 256 tool calls (128 find_sites, 27 build_structure, 23 building_info, 14 market_trade, 12 wait_and_observe, 11 set_tax, 10 inspect_building, 9 set_workshop, 3 demolish_building, 19 others), 6.59 million tokens and $0.754 billed (preparation $0.026, play $0.705, compaction $0.022); the interview added $0.007. Of the play cost, cache reads were $0.309, cache writes $0.276 and output $0.120 (23,981 tokens, 59% reasoning). The run took 49.9 real minutes, 21.0 of them waiting for the model (median reply 8.7 s, longest 24.8 s); Sol's took 38.7 and 13.5, Luna's 55.0 and 26.3. Against Sol's $0.721 it used 55% more tokens (6.59 against 4.25 million) at half the list price, and cost 4.6% more. 103 replies held one tool call and 34 held three to seven (33 read-only); 8 screenshots reached the model.

The cache miss at request 52. All 137 gameplay requests but one read the cache (96.5% of input tokens; 97.6% without it). Request 52 (12:53, after four site searches) read 0 and wrote 70,496 tokens: $0.0897 against $0.0059 and $0.0060 for requests 51 and 53, about $0.084 more (my estimate, for a cache read of its 69,737-token prefix), 11% of the run's cost. It follows no compaction: those came before requests 59 and 103, which each still read 14,441 tokens from the cache with the history rewritten. The log shows one hash each for the system prompt and the tools (run.json); no compaction yet and 3 screenshots in context (the image cap is 16); a prompt 762 tokens larger than request 51's, in line with the 724 to 1,234 added in requests 46 to 54; every ordinary request but this one reading all but 3 tokens of the previous prompt, request 53 exactly the 70,496 that 52 wrote; and 19.6 s between the two requests' starts, so no expiry. An edited middle of the history would still have read the 14,441-token head, as the post-compaction requests did, so a read of 0 points to the provider not serving the prefix from its cache. The log holds no request bodies, so I cannot compare the bytes sent: I found no change and cannot say why the provider missed.

Two compactions (14:25 and 24:51; 22.1 s and 17.8 s, $0.011 and $0.012) cut the prompt from 76,100 and 70,858 tokens to 25,539 and 25,275.

Of the 2,000 game seconds, build_structure took 733 over 27 calls (median 27 s, longest 45 s), the 12 waits 410 (five ran fast-forwarded), the 82 default passes after acting calls without a screenshot 419 (21%), market_trade 115, inspect_building 115, set_workshop 94 and the rest under 35 each; find_sites and building_info took none. It placed 139 buildings of 150 asked, 5.3 game seconds per building placed. Terra's other games, by map: Oasis with weapons counted placed 118 of 127 in 35 calls and 637 s (5.4); Large Barren Desert, 123 of 123 in 24 calls and 537 s with weapons counted (4.4) and 131 of 133 in 24 calls and 556 s without (4.2); The Sinkhole, 256 of 269 in 38 calls and 1,853 s with weapons counted (7.2) and 239 of 253 in 39 calls and 1,624 s without (6.8). The measure depends on map, model and host, so it is not set beside other models.

The interview

It put the gap down to the person's larger, faster bread economy with purchased wheat against its own iron, taxes and smaller bread chain, adding that it had "invested heavily in ox tethers despite weak observed stone deliveries", lost its trees, and called its late judgement that buying wheat might lose money too confident. Playing again it would test the wheat-to-bread chain early, build religion earlier, try fear-factor buildings, reserve room for farms, watch trees and stop adding tethers without proof. It praised the read-only statistics and site searches and asked for direct input, conversion and transport measurements.

These match the game: 19,513 is 53% above 12,722; fewer people and less popularity; 15 bakeries against 57; 43 tethers and 5 to 16 stone a minute; no trees from 24:52; the three-minute production window; the 28:11 summary judging that buying flour or bread would lose money (it never bought wheat); and no fear-factor building was ever looked up. Not mentioned: the weapons venture (9 workshops, 25 crossbows), the demolitions, the 24-idle cap that held population at 164 for the last 7 minutes, and that the tethers were also its jobs (23:57 summary), so "stop adding tethers" is incomplete. Its chapel and church read 0 and +1.

For the harness

• Unclassifiable miss. events.jsonl records no request body or prefix hash, so a lone full miss such as request 52 cannot be told from a changed prefix.
• Farm sites. 30 empty searches while map_overview listed 1,325 farmland tiles; game 1 had 39 and 1,311.
• Signpost. A bakery at (450,362) (8:11) and a hovel at (399,334) (22:07), both listed by find_sites, were refused as too close to the signpost.
• Demolition. The covered reply worked and named a remedy; no reply states a refund.
• Granary. The rules' Start paragraph says to place the required granary; the save has one, and its first summaries noticed and placed none.
• Garbage-collector stalls. The host logged three times (1:10, 5:04, 14:25) that the game's garbage collector had stalled for 20 s and the reader forced a collection; I did not trace their effect on game time.
• The game saved at the end ("gpt-6-1 terra 1-7-3 189029", recorded in episode.json).