Field notes from the wasteland.
A rule-based pilot plays the real Fallout from three books of cards: the game’s manual, a walkthrough, and pages it writes itself. No neural network in the loop that decides. A goal is allowed only if a page in force licenses it, and every decision records which pages those were. This is one session: what it learned, how it got unstuck, what broke, and what it still cannot do.
Research prototype. Simulation and games only. Not a certified safety system. What is a fail-first model? →
The session in numbers
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Live play | 1.26 h |
| Decisions | 9,025 |
| Experience | 1,040 → 1,755 |
| Deaths | 1 |
| Cards the pilot has | 4,829 |
Three books of cards
Every page is a card with its page receipt. The manual licenses goals. The walkthrough supplies the plan. The third book is the pilot’s own, written from its memories and rewritten at start, on every death and on every find.
| Book | Cards | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Game manual | 2,250 | Pages in force for the situation license goals: fight, loot, talk, leave. |
| Walkthrough | 2,289 | 79 steps from its instructions. 173 rules from its “If” sentences, 17 checkable against the game. 103 items placed by its tables. |
| The pilot’s own guide | 14 | What killed it, what its words did, quests it set aside, and where it found things. |
One decision’s card trace
One adaptation, end to end
Vault 15 needs a rope on an elevator shaft. The pilot had set both rope steps aside. Some links in this chain were repairs to the system made during the session; they are marked, because the claim is about the system and the system was being repaired as it ran.
- Pilot. On Vault 15’s buried level. The shaft step is set aside, “not carrying Rope”. The rope step is set aside, “not found in Shady Sands”.
- Repair. A loot step may go back for a thing its map remembers. The map had a rope noted on Shady Sands East, never walked to.
- Pilot. The rope step comes back on its own: a new fact it rested on. New plan: get a rope in Shady Sands, from the walkthrough’s items table, page 64.
- Repair. With no exit grid, a ladder counts as a way out, and the game’s own walk takes the pilot to it.
- Pilot. Climbs out of the buried level and crosses the desert.
- Pilot. Two random encounters, one with a radscorpion. Fights, heals, rests, saves. Experience 1,040 to 1,555.
- Pilot. The noted rope is gone. It gives the spot up, searches a remembered bookcase, and finds a rope there. The shaft step comes back: “new carried known”.
- Death. Junktown. Someone else’s fight broke out. The pilot counted every townsperson of another team as an enemy, attacked a caravan teamster 14 hexes away, and the town’s guards killed it.
- Repair. An enemy is one that fought the pilot, a teammate of one, or a creature in a fight. Bystanders stay bystanders.
What it learns, and where that goes
From failure
A death is kept as a pattern: the goal, armed or not, who, how near, how hurt, how outnumbered, and the level. A pattern the evidence condemns vetoes its goal and becomes a page of the pilot’s guide, in force only where that pattern holds. A step that cannot be done is set aside with its reason and comes back when a fact that reason rests on changes.
From success
Where it found things: the map, the level, the hex, and what held it. The walkthrough’s table says “Rope · Shady Sands”; the pilot’s page says which bookcase. That knowledge survives a reload, and on that map the page is a card in force that licenses looting: a card the pilot wrote.
Learning on against learning off
Same save and dice, 12 minutes each, one run per arm. Read it as a lean, not a result.
| Measure | Learning on | Learning off |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths per hour, memory carried over | 15 | 80 |
| Deaths per hour, memory empty | 30 | 80 |
| Experience gained, memory carried over | 250 | 0 |
| Maps reached, memory carried over | 3 | 1 |
What broke, and what pins it now
Nineteen faults were found in one session: ten in live play and nine in an independent code review. Each fix has a test that fails when the fix is removed, and that was checked by removing each one.
- An old lesson from before levels were counted voted looting down everywhere.
- Loot steps never went back for things the map remembered.
- Leaving was impossible on a level whose only way out is a ladder.
- “If you don’t have…” was read as “if you have…”.
- A rule’s errand in another town outranked the guide’s own next step.
- A rope earns no experience, so finding it was never saved.
- From the desert, the guide restarted at its first chapter.
- Lessons still steered with learning switched off.
- Conversations survived a reload that undid them.
- Bystanders in someone else’s fight were treated as enemies.
Status, honestly
- It plays the real game, follows the walkthrough chapter by chapter, and recovers from being stuck when a new fact appears. It does not finish the game.
- It cannot barter, pick locks, use skills or manage a companion. The last chapters need all four.
- 156 of the walkthrough’s 173 rules stay advice: they turn on stats, skills or armour the pilot cannot read yet.
- On one large Junktown map its explorer keeps aiming at spots it cannot reach.
- The measurements are one run per arm, on one save, by the people who built it. None has been replicated.
The Atari result, both numbers → · VDSG, the military Peel → · Fail-First Models (PDF) ↓