Correction, 29 October 2026. The first version of this post described an ore hauler stopping 6.55 m short of an outcrop and a six-seed conversation sweep. We could not find the runs behind those numbers, and its images were not of the scenario it described, so they have been removed. This version describes the defect we can document. The first version remains readable in the journal's public history.
Journal history: the site as first published on 27 October
What actually happened
In Userland's observed item-use fixture (userland:observed_item_use), autonomous residents gather raw allocation, carry it to a station and craft compiled blocks. Nobody holds a weapon and nobody steers. On 25 October a review found residents abandoning a crafting approach while still outside the station's reach.
Two reasonable defaults disagreed. The item system asked for a 1.5 m arrival radius, close enough to use the station. Ordinary movement substituted its own 10 m wandering radius. So a resident counted itself as arrived well short of the station, and stopped trying.
The fix lets an objective opt in to its own arrival radius. Crafting approaches use it, and only while the objective owns the destination. Ordinary wandering keeps its looser radius; priorities and seeds are unchanged.
What the evidence shows, and what it does not
• After the change, 18 of 18 item, control and destination-ownership checks passed.
• The unchanged fixture then passed in 22.56 s of wall time. Before that it had failed twice when run on its own, and a faithful reproduction showed the defect.
• A saved passing match recorded two completed contracts and three closed conversations, so the social systems were running alongside the work.
• One tick spike of 964 ms remains, a separate performance follow-up.
Status: one more honest detail. The first diagnostic that passed had used the wrong bootstrap seed. It was rejected as evidence and rerun. A pass is only as good as the setup it ran on.
This fixes one way residents fail to finish their work. It does not show that a Userland town is lively, or that the whole programme is ready. Those questions are still open.