Day 1 — Copper, and a stall

Event 20:46 UTC — the operator joined the server to watch, partway through this run, and made two infrastructure fixes while watching: a stalled move_to now clears its remaining waypoints instead of letting the character keep pushing into whatever blocked it, and the worker's camera now refreshes every 2 seconds instead of 4 times a second, after a spectator's connection kept dropping under the command traffic. Both fixes apply from the next run on — this run ran under the old behavior.

At 20:40 the Leader set milestone 002: copper-plate, quota 20 per 60 game seconds, budget 250 steps. The reasoning was explicit about why this one should be easy — the worker had just proven the inserter-free drill-on-ore, furnace-on-drop-position pattern on iron, at 29.8/60s with steps to spare. Copper is the same mechanic on a new patch, and copper plates carry a bonus: smelting them trips the electronics unlock, which gates inserters, labs, circuits and power poles — everything the campaign needs next. The briefing repeated the working recipe almost verbatim: place a burner drill directly on copper ore, read its drop_position back from the entity, drop a stone furnace there, fuel both with ~20 coal, build two pairs for margin, and top off the two standing iron pairs on the way.

What the worker did

claude-sonnet-5 took 16 of its 250 steps. It queried the drill, furnace and gear-wheel recipes, checked its own inventory (23 iron-plate, 4 stone already in hand from the last run), then mined 20 stone and — deciding to be generous — 160 coal in one swing, enough for four new entities plus topping up four existing ones. It crafted 4 stone furnaces and 2 burner mining drills from the iron plates on hand.

Step 6 is where the old move_to bug bit: walking to the first standing iron furnace to refuel it, the path stalled and the walk gave up after 30 seconds of no progress, throwing an exception mid-step. The worker didn't lose the step's earlier work — it had already extracted 50 backed-up iron plates from furnace 1 and fueled both furnace 1 and drill 1 before the walk to furnace 2 failed. It picked the thread back up next step, reached furnace 2 and drill 2 on a fresh get_entity call, and fueled both. Both iron pairs were refueled and destocked within two steps total, the stall costing nothing but one step's budget.

It then walked to the copper patch at (9.5, 57.5) — a patch the game reports as 3,480,000 in size, bounding box (7.5, 40.5) to (27.5, 62.5), far larger than anything mined on it yet — and placed the first drill directly on the ore, facing down. The drill reported its own position as (10.0, 58.0) and its drop_position as (10.5, 59.5); the worker placed the furnace exactly there and fed both 20 coal. The second drill, placed at (13.5, 57.5), hit the same stalled-walk exception while the worker tried to move to its drop_position before the furnace was placed. It recovered the same way: re-fetched the drill entity fresh, re-read drop_position (14.5, 59.5), and placed the second furnace there — losing one step to the stall, not the pair.

With both pairs fueled, the worker waited 15 seconds, reported the second furnace as still NO_INGREDIENTS because ore hadn't arrived yet but the drill as actively delivering, and called the idle check anyway, judging 20 plates per 60 seconds already in hand.

The idle check

121 game seconds, worker untouched. 61 plates counted — 30.3 per 60 seconds against a quota of 20. Verdict: AUTOMATED. Electronics, automation-science-pack and steam-power are now all researched; nothing is currently queued.

What's standing now

Four drill-furnace pairs total: two on iron near (-45, 86) / (-50, 86), two new ones on copper near (10, 58) / (14, 58). Game time at close: 1:24:13. The worker still personally carries 99 iron-plate, 4 stone, and 3 iron-gear-wheel — a standing stockpile for whatever gets crafted next without re-mining.

Cost: 16 steps of a 250 budget, zero pauses for usage, about $0.36 against the treasury. The run itself didn't fail at anything the plan asked for — the two walk-stall exceptions were harness friction the operator has now patched, not planning or mechanical errors, and the worker routed around both without losing either pair.