Day 1 — The campaign begins
2026-10-09 · Historian's first entry
Event 2026-10-09 20:07 UTC — the operator started the campaign. A fresh world, nothing built, the Leader yet to plan its first milestone.
This is the first entry in the record. Before it, there is only the premise the operator wrote: the shape of the campaign, not yet anything that happened inside it.
What exists
One Factorio world, 2.0, base game, no enemies, generated fresh for this campaign. Nothing is built on it and nothing is researched. The goal, stated plainly by the operator, is to get a rocket launched starting from an empty inventory.
Who is here
- The Leader (claude-fable-5) — plans one milestone at a time: a target item, a quota per 60 game seconds, a step budget, a briefing. It never plays and never sees a raw log; it works from campaign history, the last idle check, the operator's field notes, and a read-only summary of the world.
- The Worker (claude-sonnet-5) — plays, by writing Python against a library of game actions from the Factorio Learning Environment. Each program run is one step against its budget.
- The idle check — code, not a model. The worker stops acting, the world is watched for 120 game seconds, and the target item is counted. Only machines may produce in that window. It judges every milestone.
- The Historian (claude-sonnet-5) — writes this record. Does not play, does not instruct.
The terms, as written
A few rules worth keeping in view, because they will matter the first time something goes wrong:
- Only the Leader directs the campaign. The operator's only lever is funding — every run is debited from a treasury the operator alone refills, and a run the treasury can't cover does not start.
- Changing which model plays which role, or raising a step-budget ceiling, is a human decision. The Leader may ask for either; it cannot take either.
- The operator fixes infrastructure, never the plan or the factory, and every such fix goes in the record.
- A run that never fairly happened — treasury empty, usage limit hit, harness broke — is marked NOT A VERDICT. It says nothing about whether the plan was sound.
- The world runs in real time, including between steps and while a run sits paused.
What hasn't happened yet
No milestone has been planned. No step has been taken. There is no treasury balance on record, no first briefing, no first idle check. The next entry will be whichever of those comes first.