Normal browser play can strand every hammer in idle construction workers, preventing mineral surveying and tool-smith staffing. Four concurrent ordinary build orders are enough. A separate public-session reproduction from main cc702ac confirms the native-input observation.
Reproduction: rivalSession(2), ordinary player build orders for woodcutter44,53, stonecutter47,62, sawmill46,69 and forester29,51, with the normal rival policy. At5004 there are8builders carrying real hammers and zero free hammers. All four buildings are active. Lowering builderLimit from12 to2 succeeds, but after200ordinary ticks all8builders retain their tools. A normal geologist order is then refused because no hammer can equip it. Accounting is clean and created goods are unchanged. No world edits, extra stock or modified clocks were used. The captured state before lowering the cap and the full command receipt are retained locally.
Current source handles the cap only while assigning staff. Finished crews keep their profession/tool. The dismiss command intentionally supports only geologists, pioneers and thieves; adding a button alone would be a false fix. AI recovery can reclaim those specialists but cannot recover an idle builder hammer from this state.
Source correction should make the player staffing controls capable of returning surplus idle construction crew and their actual equipment to carrying. Preserve active work and pending cargo/jobs, ownership and normal physical tool recovery. Do not reserve magic tools, grant goods, relocate workers or add a client-only bypass.
Acceptance:
- The captured ordinary four-site opening can free an existing hammer through normal staffing control and equip a geologist or an actual tool-smith worker.
- Never interrupt busy crew, discard their cargo or steal another player's tools. Surplus crew may return after their current task finishes.
- Recovered tools are physical goods and conservation remains clean, including save/restore during recovery.
- Version any changed simulation behavior. Preserve exact profile0.11 saves/replays rather than silently changing their rules.
- Native browser controls exercise the recovery; public engine regressions, relevant lint/types/build and browser checks pass.
Fidelity boundary: the preserved revised manual documents percentage caps for builders/diggers and a carrier minimum, whereas the current engineering profile uses absolute crew limits. It does not establish the exact original reassignment cadence. Pinned occupation-menu source, SHA2566823c1be372ce3c6905d09753d867ecd637e6cd2c5bfa3e26ea5fd161be516bb. Original-executable observation issue18 remains open; do not claim Gold parity from an engineering recovery correction.
Refs #37, #50, #52, #76 and #4. No source fix has been implemented yet. Main #203 qualification is still running and must complete before another push.