PokeAgents trial run archive

Date: 2026-08-18 America/Chicago

Run: embodiment-ec40ffac-19be-48c5-ad63-27075a2af99e

Hosted session: ses_e14ccfa45a09c8b092b20fd49c3c8b60

Environment: live hosted pokemon-firered

Evidence status: complete for every durable run trail found on the host; scrubbed of operator, Discord, filesystem, and player identifiers. ROM, state bytes, framebuffer bytes, full room/voice transcripts, and audio remain excluded by policy; bounded interjections that reached a play turn remain in its causal journal.

Verdict

This was a productive 65-minute run. Clankie completed FireRed's introduction, named himself and his rival, chose Charmander, beat Gary, won three wild battles, reached Viridian City, collected Oak's Parcel, and correctly began the return to Pallet. The service, hosted body, semantic observations, action path, watch surface, and voice delivery all remained live until an orderly SIGTERM stopped play at the next turn boundary.

The run also isolated four Clankie-owned feedback failures. Structured navigation refusals dropped their actionable coordinates, an unverified route stop was called an NPC, unsuccessful A presses could be mistaken for ambient screen changes, and a positionless battle retired a valid route objective. Each now has a focused regression check. The remaining generic hosted map names come from PokeAgents and require separately scoped work in that repository.

Run outcome

The evaluator's coherence score is 0.4266. That metric penalizes intent/action drift but does not erase the concrete milestones above; both are retained in the evidence rather than collapsed into one quality score.

What the run exposed

1. Hosted refusal detail stopped at the body seam

Fourteen walk_to actions were rejected. The PokeAgents refusal included facts such as nearestOpen and map bounds, but the free-play error translator only carried detail found after an em dash. The hosted body emitted JSON with no such suffix, so the mind received only “that tile is a wall or obstacle.” Turn 140, for example, lost the answer that (17,16) was the nearest open tile to the rejected Route 1 target.

The hosted body now appends protocol refusal detail in the same bounded suffix the free-play loop already reads. The formatter covers budgets, bounds, nearest open/reachable tiles, unsupported exits, and available menu entries.

2. An unknown route stop was invented as an NPC

The hosted action result uses blockedBecause: "state_changed" when a planned step fails without a classified cause. Clankie's effect formatter treated every unknown value as an NPC. During the return from Viridian, turns 276–282 called three adjacent westward stops “hidden blockers” even though the decoded occupants listed nobody on those tiles; directional terrain is one plausible cause, but the trace does not prove it.

Only a verified npc, battle, or transition is now named. An unclassified stop keeps its cause unknown and directs the player to compare the occupants before choosing another approach.

3. A house was pursued as the Pokémon Center

Turns 173–255 held the objective heal at the Viridian Pokemon Center for 17m 34.9s. Clankie first entered the Trainer School, corrected course, then entered generic map firered-map-5-0 and assumed it was the Center. Its decoded occupants placed nobody behind the north counter, while direct interactions read dishes, a TV, Speary the Spearow, and cooking smells. He nevertheless made 23 A-button interaction actions around that counter before abandoning the objective.

Two feedback gaps reinforced the bad premise:

• an A press with unchanged semantic state could report “screen changed though the decoded state did not,” which made ambient animation sound like evidence of an interaction;
• the mind knew occupants omitted furniture, but did not have the explicit inverse: if an expected person is absent, furniture cannot secretly be that person.

An overworld A press that opens no dialog, menu, or battle now says exactly that, even when the frame digest changes. The mind prompt also states that a person is never scenery and tells the player to leave or gather new evidence when the expected person is absent.

4. A battle retired the correct route objective

Turn 301 retired deliver Oak's Parcel to Pallet Town while the position was unavailable during a recurring Pidgey battle state. After the battle, turn 306 recreated the objective as deliver Oak's Parcel in Viridian, even though the actions continued south toward Pallet.

Objective staleness now requires a current overworld position. Battles, transitions, and other positionless interruptions preserve the standing route objective.

Remaining external weakness

Hosted Viridian locations arrive as generic identifiers such as firered-map-3-1 and firered-map-5-0. That ambiguity helped the false room identity persist. The authoritative fix belongs in PokeAgents' map metadata or observation adapter; hard-coding FireRed identities in Clankie would create a second, drifting map catalog. No PokeAgents files are changed in this archive.

Evidence flow

The Clankie embodiment id joins play, lifecycle, launch, and service records. The independent PokeAgents ses_... id is taken from V2 world provenance and joins the host action journal and checkpoint receipts. These ids are different by design.

Evidence index

Use the shared read-only archive viewer to browse the manifest, filter the 315-turn causal timeline, inspect captured images, and search every raw archived source. Browsers do not allow the viewer to fetch local evidence from a file:// page, so launch its dependency-free localhost server:

pnpm testing:view docs/testing/2026-08-18-pokeagents-trial-run

Then open http://127.0.0.1:4173. To verify the server's routing, MIME types, HEAD handling, and traversal protection:

pnpm testing:view docs/testing/2026-08-18-pokeagents-trial-run --check

The checked-in archive is about 4 MiB. It contains no screenshots because the durable play trail stores framebuffer hashes, not frame bytes. It contains no generated narration wording or PCM because those are intentionally not logged. Later runs capture bounded milestone and terminal screenshots beside the play journal; this archive's collector verifies their hashes, copies them with the scrubbed evidence, and the viewer presents each frame on its causal turn.

Debug log

1. At 23:15:15 CDT, the hosted FireRed session started. The first voice join failed; the retry succeeded. The first watch request raced admission and failed, then succeeded after the voice stay became active.
2. Clankie completed the introduction and lab sequence, chose Charmander, and beat Gary. He then won two Rattata battles on Route 1, reaching level 7 and learning Ember.
3. He reached Viridian, explored the Trainer School and the house mistaken for the Center, then entered the Mart and received Oak's Parcel.
4. He navigated south, worked around several unclassified route stops, won a Pidgey battle, and continued toward Pallet. A final Rattata battle was in progress when shutdown arrived.
5. At 00:20:27 CDT, SIGTERM requested shutdown. Play stopped at the next turn boundary and wrote a summary; the matching lifecycle event records stopped, not a crash or lease lapse.
6. Archive tracing found that a hosted play uses two session ids. The collector now derives the PokeAgents id from V2 provenance rather than assuming the play-journal header contains it.
7. Focused regression tests cover refusal detail, unknown route-stop wording, no-op A interactions, expected-person absence guidance, and route-objective preservation through positionless battles.

Rebuild and evaluate

The collector uses only Node's standard library and the repository's existing evaluator:

node docs/testing/2026-08-18-pokeagents-trial-run/flows/collect-run-evidence.mjs \
  ~/.local/state/clankie/gba-play/2026-08-19T04-15-15-707Z-embodiment-ec40ffac-19be-48c5-ad63-27075a2af99e.jsonl

pnpm --filter @clankie/play gameplay:evaluate-journal -- \
  ../../docs/testing/2026-08-18-pokeagents-trial-run/evidence/01-play-journal.jsonl \
  --events ../../docs/testing/2026-08-18-pokeagents-trial-run/evidence/02-lifecycle-events.jsonl \
  --voice-receipts ../../docs/testing/2026-08-18-pokeagents-trial-run/evidence/03-voice-receipts.jsonl

Recollection assumes the raw trails still exist under ~/.local/state/clankie, ~/.clankie, and ~/.pokeagent-mmo, plus working Clankie and PokeAgents checkouts at ~/dev/clankie and ~/dev/pokeagents. The journals do not record the exact source revision that launched each process; the captured Git heads are later snapshots and are not represented as stronger evidence.