Day 1 — The first machine

Event 20:51 UTC — the operator switched off the in-game HUD and worker camera, mid-run, to diagnose a spectator connection problem. They draw on screen only and the agents never see them, so this had no effect on play.

Event 21:00 UTC — the operator switched the HUD and camera back on, having traced the earlier spectator drops to the operator's own Wi-Fi, not the server.

At 20:50 the Leader set milestone 003: iron-gear-wheel, quota 10 per 60 game seconds, budget 500 steps — the largest budget of the campaign so far, and for a reason. The worker had twice proven the drill-and-furnace pattern without needing the Leader to teach it anything new; repeating that would have told the record nothing. This milestone asked for something the world had never done before: electricity, a lab, a completed research, and a powered assembler fed and emptied by inserters — five mechanics in one run, any of which could have eaten the budget alone. The briefing was correspondingly dense: exact recipe costs for every component down to the automation-science-pack, the order to build them in, and an explicit warning that electric inserters do nothing outside pole coverage.

What the worker did

claude-sonnet-5 used 97 of its 500 steps. It opened by pulling plates from the standing furnaces rather than re-smelting — 190 copper-plate and 299 iron-plate in hand within five steps — hitting one walk-stall exception on the way to the second copper furnace (the operator's patch from the previous run held: it lost the step, not the plates already extracted before the failure). It queried every recipe it would need up front rather than trusting memory, a change from earlier runs, and it paid off once: a first attempt to craft the assembling-machine-1 before research completed threw a clean, named error — "requires automation technology" — rather than silently failing, and the worker simply reordered around it instead of guessing.

It hand-crafted an offshore pump, boiler, steam engine and the pipe run between them, mined coal and wood, and crafted small electric poles. It built a lab, powered it from the engine's pole grid, crafted ten automation-science-packs, loaded the lab, and set research to automation — then spent six steps simply sleeping in five- and fifteen-second stretches while progress ticked down from 10 packs to 0. Research complete at roughly 21:22, cumulatively unlocking automation, automation-science-pack, electronics and steam-power for the world.

The assembler went up next to the lab's pole grid, recipe set to iron-gear-wheel, and this is where the briefing's warning proved exactly right. The first inspection after placing both inserters and both chests showed the output inserter starved and, more pointedly, the input inserter reporting NO_POWER — it sat just outside the pole network the assembler itself was already drawing from. The worker diagnosed it from the entity status directly, ran one more connect_entities call from the nearest pole to the input inserter, and ten seconds later the same inserter read WORKING and the output chest held six gears with nobody touching anything.

Before calling the check, it topped up the boiler to 50 coal — but a wider sweep of the standing drills turned up three of them, the two copper pairs and one iron pair, sitting on NO_FUEL. The briefing had asked for this exact sweep ("top up ALL burner drills, furnaces and the boiler") and the worker ran it, but logged no fuel added to those three drills afterward before calling the idle check — they were not needed for this milestone's gear count, since the assembler ran on hand-carried and chest-stocked plate rather than fresh smelting, but it means some of the campaign's standing infrastructure went into this check cold.

The idle check

121 game seconds, worker untouched. 32 gears counted — 15.9 per 60 seconds against a quota of 10. Verdict: AUTOMATED. This is the first milestone the record has met with an assembling machine rather than a raw drill-furnace pair, and the first in which inserters and electric poles did any work at all.

What's standing now

Game time at close: 2:04:26. One offshore pump, one boiler, one steam engine, ten small electric poles, one lab, one assembling-machine-1, two inserters, two iron chests and three pipe segments, in addition to the four original drill-furnace pairs. Automation, automation-science-pack, electronics and steam-power are all researched; nothing is queued. The worker carries a substantial leftover stockpile — 141 copper-cable, 48 copper-plate, 42 coal, 21 electronic-circuit, 10 iron-plate, 6 gears, plus spare pipe, belt, pole, wood, stone and one more inserter — material for whatever gets built next without remining.

Cost: 97 steps of a 500 budget, zero pauses for usage, about $3.29 against the treasury. The plan held up end to end — power, research, and a fed, emptied, powered assembler all worked on the first attempt at each — with one loose thread: three fuel-starved drills left standing at the end of a run that was explicitly briefed to prevent exactly that.