sts2-bot/docs/research/07-run-log.md

07 — Run log

Results per run. Source of truth is the game's own history file:

~/Library/Application Support/SlayTheSpire2/steam/<steamid>/modded/profile1/saves/history/<ts>.run

That file records win, killed_by_encounter, seed, run_time, build_id, ascension, was_abandoned, and the full deck. It is the evaluation harness. Read it rather than instrumenting the bot.

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Run 001 — Ironclad, standard, ascension 0

Field	Value
Outcome	Loss
Killed by	ENCOUNTER.VANTOM_BOSS (Act 1 boss)
Floor reached	16
Seed	JUS59Z32HF
Run time	2017 s (33 min)
Game build	v0.107.1
Abandoned	no

Progress

• Cleared 15 floors.
• Beat an elite: Byrdonis, 81 HP, 17-damage attack, Territorial (+1 Strength each turn).
• Fought Nibbits, Twig Slimes, Leaf Slimes, Shrinker Beetle, Inklings, Mawler, Ruby Raiders (3-enemy fight), Vantom.
• Healed at rest sites at 43% and 24% HP.

Final deck (19 cards, 1 upgraded)

5× Strike (one at upgrade level 1), 4× Defend, Bash, Setup Strike, Inflame, Iron Wave, Rage, Stomp, Bludgeon, Battle Trance, Second Wind, Bloodletting.

Relics (3)

Burning Blood (floor 1), Gorget (floor 10), Vajra (floor 11).

Potions held at death — all three

POTION.EXPLOSIVE_AMPOULE   slot 0
POTION.STRENGTH_POTION     slot 1
POTION.ENERGY_POTION       slot 2

This is the headline finding. The combat brain had no potion logic, so the bot died holding an Explosive Ampoule, a Strength Potion, and an Energy Potion. The STS2MCP strategy notes state the principle directly: "Don't hoard potions. Dying with full potions is the worst outcome."

The run was lost on tactics, not on deck quality. The deck was reasonable for floor 16 and the relic set was functional.

Decision sources

Source	Count
code	141
jev	70
fallback	35
Lethal lines executed by code	33

Aggregate across 759 loop steps in 5 sessions.

Notable Jev calls

Situation	Jev chose	Confidence
Combat, 5 cards	Bash over Defend	0.85
Card reward	Inflame	0.28
Card reward	Rage	0.40
Card reward	Setup Strike	0.33
Map, 2 options	Shop	0.97
Map, 2 options	RestSite	0.88
Boss fight	Battle Trance, Bloodletting, Second Wind	0.62–1.00

Several card-reward margins were thin enough that the gate fell back to "take the first". Card reward is the weakest Jev decision in the current design.

Bugs this run exposed

Eight infinite loops or stalls, all now fixed. See 05-failure-modes.md. The most expensive were the right-to-left reward indexing and the silently-dropped potion reward.

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Baseline to beat

Metric	Run 001
Win	no
Floor	16
Act 1 boss reached	yes
Act 1 boss killed	no

Run 002 should be measured against this. The first question is not "does it win" but "does it get past Vantom, and does it die holding potions again".

Characters unlocked

Character	Status
The Ironclad	unlocked
The Silent	unlocked (after the NEOW_EPOCH reveal)
The Regent	locked
The Necrobinder	locked
The Defect	locked

progress.save recorded pending_character_unlock: "CHARACTER.SILENT" before the reveal, then Silent became selectable.

Seeded runs

Standard singleplayer exposes no seed, and run state carries no seed field. The seed is visible only in the history file, after the run.

Seeded modes exist but were not available until the first epoch unlock:

Mode	Seeded
standard	no
daily	yes (fixed per day)
custom	yes

For a reproducible evaluation harness, custom is the likely path. This needs verification — the mode screen appeared once and was not captured.

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Session 2 — potions, shops, treasure, events

Scoreboard

#	Win	Killed by	Seed	Time	Potions at end	Act reached
001	no	VANTOM_BOSS	JUS59Z32HF	2017 s	3	1 boss
002	no	BYRDONIS_ELITE	MJ4J25A3BH	688 s	0	1
003	no	SNAPPING_JAXFRUIT_NORMAL	HKLFARJJJQ	186 s	0	1
004	no	THE_INSATIABLE_BOSS	MLQ4KBZQWV	2235 s	2	2 boss

Run 004 reached the Act 2 boss with 11 relics and a 29-card deck. That is the best result so far and the first time the bot cleared an act.

Run 003 — the catastrophic event

Died to a normal encounter at 186 s. The cause was not combat:

[102] jev chose Keep Deciphering           conf=0.28
[104] jev chose Lose Everything            conf=0.49

The event offered "Keep Deciphering" and "Lose Everything". Jev picked "Lose Everything", which set the player's max HP to 1. Every subsequent state read then showed:

hp=1/1 (healthy)

The bot believed it was at full health, walked into a normal fight at 1 HP, and died. Two separate defects, both now fixed:

1. _hp_bucket bucketed by percentage only, so 1/1 was 100% = "healthy". Fixed: absolute HP <= 5 is always critical.
2. The event gate accepted a run-ending option at 0.49. Fixed with a stricter event gate plus a deterministic keyword safety net. See 05 and 02.

Run 004 — what the new decision loops did

Decision	Count	Notes
shop_purchase	6 in one shop	Lantern, Feel No Pain, Evil Eye, Salvo, Equilibrium, Headbutt
use_potion	2+	Fire Potion chosen by Jev at conf 1.00; two spent on lethal hits
claim_treasure_relic	2	Lucky Fysh, plus earlier Orichalcum and Bronze Scales
combat_confirm_selection	4	Hand-select now confirms instead of failing
event safety net	1	"uncertain (0.44); took safest option"

Gold went from 528 to 130 across Act 2, so the "never buy anything" gap is closed. Potions at death dropped from 3 (run 001) to 2 (run 004) while the run went a full act further.

Still open

• The bot still died holding 2 potions. The hard-need path only fires when the incoming hit is lethal; it does not yet spend potions on a losing attrition fight where HP is dropping every turn.
• Buying 6 items in one shop produced a 29-card deck. SHOP_BUY_THRESHOLD may be too permissive; deck dilution is a real cost.
• Card reward still falls back to "take the first" fairly often.

Recurring manual blocker

The Timeline epoch reveal blocked the menu again after run 004, this time with IRONCLAD2_EPOCH. The mod refuses to automate it. A human must reveal it before the next run can start. Expect this after most runs.

Comparing two arms requires ONE revision

A run is only comparable with another run collected from the same revision of the decision layer. brain.py, facts.py, jev.py and run.py decide how both arms behave, so a change to any of them — the fight-length projection, the lethal search, the state handed to Jev, the relic fix — invalidates every run collected before it. The old runs stay as history; they are not a baseline.

ab_card_skip.sh now enforces this instead of relying on discipline:

• it hashes the decision layer (brain.py facts.py jev.py run.py sts2.py) into a 12-character content hash, printed as code revision: <hash>;
• the hash is recomputed before every session, and the session line records it: --- jev 1/5 (attempt 1) rev=978485b6639a ---. Taking it once at startup would be worse than useless — $RESULTS is truncated when the run starts, so every row would carry the startup hash by construction and the mixed-revision warning could never fire;
• a session whose hash differs from the startup hash aborts the experiment (!! ABORT: the decision layer changed mid-experiment), skips the remaining arm, and still prints the report for whatever was collected;
• each attributed run is written as policy \t run \t hash in /tmp/ab_results.tsv, stamped with the revision that actually produced it;
• the report scores one revision — the one this invocation collected from — and prints a !! MIXED REVISIONS block when the file holds more than one, with a !! THIN SAMPLE warning under five runs per arm. It reads the same history directory the shell snapshotted, instead of a second hardcoded copy of that path (which silently reported "no runs recorded" for runs that existed).

A content hash, not a commit id: the decision layer is normally edited in place and uncommitted, so a commit id would not tell two revisions apart.

Verified in a sandbox with a stub run.py that edits brain.py between sessions: the abort fires, the remaining arm is skipped, and the collected rows keep the revision that produced them. A clean two-arm run stamps all four rows with one hash.

Rule: before interpreting any A/B number, re-run BOTH arms from the same revision. Runs already in /tmp/ab_results.tsv from before 2026-09-22 03:2x are pre-change and must be re-collected.

Note also that --steps must stay generous. A session that hits the step cap while the run is still going produces no run record at all, so a small step budget silently fills the sample with runs that died early.