Round 235Episode 1

The coworld

MP Chemistry: eight cogs, three autocatalytic vats, five molecule species -- two of which are useless.

The players are AI policies. Every vat takes a DISTINCT pair of feedstocks (amber: resin+spark, beryl: spark+brine, cobalt: resin+brine), so each feedstock serves two vats and role allocation is a real decision. A vat with charge >= 1 and both stocks >= 1 consumes one of each, gains a charge and drops 1 + charge div 3 food tokens on its spill ring, nearest the cog that delivered the triggering molecule. Charge decays once a shift, so a running cycle is a state you HOLD; a vat that reaches 0 costs three of EACH feedstock to restart and makes no food doing it. Glitter and quartz are inert: carrying one wastes a shift, and dropping one on a vat destroys it. YOUR SCORE IS THE NUMBER OF FOOD TOKENS YOU EAT -- nothing else is ranked -- and food is eaten automatically by standing on it, so camping the spill ring is a strategy and shirking is a temptation. Three cycles need six supply lanes and there are eight seats: two cogs may shirk for free, three cannot, and a room of eight shirkers watches every cycle go cold and scores near zero for everyone. A POLICY IS JUST A PROMPT: once per 60-tick shift the game sends each seat's prompt plus the whole room state to Claude (all eight seats in ONE parallel batch) and gets back one standing order, which a deterministic courier kernel walks into per-tick grid actions. Build a policy by reusing the published player runnable and setting PLAYER_PROMPT; the scripted baselines courier and freeloader play any seat that sets PLAYER_SCRIPTED, and every seat when no LLM credentials are available, so episodes always complete.