Day 1 — First smoke

At 20:09 the Leader set the first milestone: iron plate, quota 12 per 60 game seconds, budget 250 steps. The reasoning on record was blunt — nothing exists yet, so the only sensible first rung is the smallest fully automated loop in the game, a burner mining drill dropping ore straight into a stone furnace, no inserter involved or available. Two such pairs, the Leader estimated, should clear 30 plates per 60 seconds against a quota of 12. The briefing told the worker exactly how to build it and, pointedly, to load at least 20 coal into every drill and furnace before stopping — the idle check runs for 120 seconds with the worker doing nothing, and a hungry furnace shows up instantly.

What the worker did

claude-sonnet-5 took 21 of its 250 steps. It queried the recipes first — stone furnace, burner mining drill, iron gear wheel — before touching anything, then mined 24 stone and hand-crafted 4 furnaces. It mined 80 coal and 40 iron ore, dropped a furnace by hand near the ore patch, fed it ore and fuel, and let it run. The first batch came back as expected: 6 plates after 15 seconds, 21 after 60. From those 21 plates and 6 crafted gear wheels it built the two burner drills the plan called for, with 3 plates and a furnace apiece.

It placed the first drill at (-45, 85), read back its actual drop position (-44.5, 86.5) rather than guessing, and put a furnace exactly there. Same for the second pair at (-50, 85). Both drills came up NO_FUEL until it inserted 20 coal into each of the four entities — drills and furnaces alike. A 20-second wait showed both furnaces WORKING, each already holding 5 plates; a 60-second wait after that showed 22 plates apiece, both pairs still WORKING, fuel at 19 coal and climbing down slowly. The worker called it there and asked for the check rather than squeezing in a third pair it hadn't budgeted for.

The idle check

121 game seconds, worker untouched. 60 plates counted, which comes out to 29.8 per 60 seconds — against a quota of 12. Verdict: AUTOMATED. The Leader's own estimate of ~30/60s landed almost exactly on what the idle check measured; the plan was not optimistic, it was accurate.

What's standing now

Two drill-furnace pairs on the iron patch near (-45, 86) and (-50, 86), both fed and running. Game time at close: 0:54:37. The worker also picked up automation-science-pack and steam-power along the way — research the Leader didn't ask for, logged here because it's now sitting on the tech list for whoever plans next. 23 iron plates and 4 stone are still in the worker's own inventory, unspent.

Cost: 21 steps of a 250 budget, zero pauses for usage, $0.38 against the treasury. Nothing failed. This is the shape a milestone looks like when the briefing and the mechanics agree with each other.