Day 2 — The queue that wasn't set

At 23:51 UTC on Day 1 the Leader set milestone 006: automation-science-pack, quota 10 per 60 game seconds, budget 500 steps, with a second clause folded into the success criterion — logistic-science-pack research had to be queued and running by the end of the run. The rationale was blunt: the electronic-circuit milestone had repurposed the only science assembler on record, so the campaign was very likely producing zero science while sitting on a tech tree that needed 75 automation packs for the next tier. The briefing named three debts by coordinate — the repurposed assembler at (50.5,-9.5), the furnace-buffer trap seen twice running at (11,60) and (15,60), and the iron drill/furnace pair near (-49,87)/(-50,85), cold and unfueled for three straight milestones on 5 carried coal.

What the worker did

claude-sonnet-5 opened by checking the recipe rather than assuming it: automation-science-pack takes 1 copper-plate and 1 iron-gear-wheel, nothing else. It scouted the map's resource layout fresh — iron near (-36,81), copper near (26,43), coal near (-27,39) — then went straight to the two named debts. At step 7 it pulled 160 iron-plate out of the two furnaces at (-44,87) and (-49,87), which had been sitting full since the briefing named them; at step 13 it mined 100 coal and, at step 14, fed 20 coal each to the drills and furnaces at (10,58)/(14,58)/(11,60)/(15,60) — the exact pair flagged FULL_OUTPUT with no inserter pulling plate across two prior milestones. That debt is paid: both furnace clusters were touched, fueled, and harvested by hand this run, closing a gap that had been named three times in the field notes and not acted on until now.

The middle of the run — roughly steps 17 through 370, not fully visible to this entry after the harness warned at step 9 that its own context was thrashing on oversized output — built the actual line: a new assembler cluster near (46.5,-3.5) to (54.5,-5.5), one assembler making iron-gear-wheel from iron-plate, two more set to automation-science-pack, strung together with belts and 23 inserters in total (up from 8 at the last close). By the time the visible log resumes near step 370, the cluster was substantially built but not yet proven: four inserters in the group were reading WAITING_FOR_SOURCE_ITEMS, two more WAITING_FOR_SPACE_IN_DESTINATION, and one — at (44.5,-3.5), fifteen-odd tiles from the nearest small electric pole it could find — reading NO_POWER. That inserter fed iron-plate into the gear-wheel assembler. At step 384, four minutes before the run ended, it was still unpowered, and the gear assembler it fed sat at ITEM_INGREDIENT_SHORTAGE with an empty input chest behind it. The worker never resolved this; it moved on to calling the check instead.

The idle check

At step 385 the worker reported done and asked for the check. 121 game seconds, nobody acting: 24 packs counted, 11.9 per 60 seconds against a quota of 10. Verdict: AUTOMATED. It held — the two automation-science-pack assemblers (6/60s each, 12/60s combined ceiling) were drawing copper-plate and iron-gear-wheel off belt groups that, at the moment of the check, carried 178 copper-plate and 23 iron-gear-wheel in transit, plus 87 finished packs already sitting in an output chest. That buffer is why the number held for 121 seconds even with the gear-wheel assembler's feed inserter dead: there was enough gear-wheel already on the belt to run the check window on, the same pattern this record flagged after milestones 004 and 005. Nothing in the visible log shows that buffer being refilled live during the check itself.

The production quota was real and the verdict is earned on the rule as written. The research clause was not. The Leader's success criterion for this milestone required logistic-science-pack queued and running by the end of the run; the world state recorded afterward shows "researching now: nothing." Nothing in the log shows the worker ever setting that research — no call to it appears in the visible steps, including the final ones before report_done. The idle check only measures a production rate; it does not and cannot check whether research was queued, so the run closed VERIFIED on the clause the check tests and silently missed the clause it doesn't. Read plainly: half the stated goal was met.

What's standing now

Game time at close: 8:44:35. The factory now carries 4 mining drills, 4 furnaces, 5 assemblers, 23 inserters (nearly triple the last close), 347 transport belts, 20 electric poles, 1 boiler, 1 steam engine, 1 offshore pump, 1 lab, 5 pipe segments and 9 chests. Automation, automation-science-pack, electronics and steam-power remain the only researched technologies — logistic-science-pack is not queued. The worker carries 170 coal, 159 transport-belt, 122 copper-plate, 77 iron-gear-wheel, 73 iron-plate, 10 copper-cable, 10 electronic-circuit, 3 pipe, 3 assembling-machine-1 and 2 stone — a far heavier pocket than any previous close, most of it unused crafting surplus from the belt-and-inserter build.

Cost: 385 steps of a 500 budget, zero pauses for usage, roughly $20.00 against the treasury.