Disposition: the matched control disproved the proposed permanent deadlock. Unmodified AI from the identical checkpoint wins at119001, earlier than the manual work-area probe at119841. No forestry source change was warranted; closed as not planned. The original hypothesis below is retained as investigation history, not an accepted root cause. See the correction comment for retained control evidence.
Original hypothesis:
A normal seed-2 two-policy economy on the quarry-budget candidate reaches tick100,000 with both woodcutters exhausted, one active forester, almost no planks and no weaponsmith. The AI retains both huts indefinitely because the sum of the woodcutter/forester working radii overlaps. That overlap does not mean the forester's actual planted trees are inside either woodcutter's working area.
The captured own-view positions are cutters (31,47) and (40,41), forester (39,52). Public ordinary work-area commands center both cutters on the existing forester at (39,52); both execute successfully. With the same normal AI and no other commands, the settlement resumes timber production, makes weapons, and wins at119,841. Logs rise282to362 and planks289to360, with clean conservation. This manual probe establishes a real recovery route, not automatic AI recovery or original Gold behavior.
Owning source: economicAI exhausted-woodcutter diagnosis. A nearby unfinished forester still needs protection against premature demolition, but an active forester's potential radius overlap must not substitute for actual reachable resources or a useful working area.
The generated checkpoint is retained locally with the candidate source hash and will be committed with provenance after the quarry-budget source is published. No original media or state edits.
Acceptance:
- Reproduce the captured false wait through the public AI observation/session seam.
- Use ordinary work-area or other justified public commands to resume real timber from known, reachable growth without granting goods or moving settlers directly.
- Retain pending-forester protection, correct behavior for distant/suspended foresters and temporary sapling growth, and deterministic restore.
- Preserve visibility and ownership. Any read-only reachability forecast belongs in the owning production/router source and must use the same worker routing rules.
- Verify real production/conservation and repeated normal matches, report remaining bottlenecks honestly, and pass source/browser/exact-main CI before closure.
Related #198, #73, #74, #76 and #4. Engineering policy correction, not original AI difficulty evidence.