Found 4 issues. The highest-impact fix gates LLM thinking behind the passive-state flag so commuting creatures stop burning 50-466ms/tick on ambient chats — this directly addresses tick budget overruns hitting 878ms. Second fix sorts POI candidates by distance in the soft-reroute path, breaking the Krymell’s Den gravity well that pulls all oscillating creatures to the same location. Third fix adds a 15-second minimum duration for explore tasks to prevent PairUp’s instant-completion recruitment chains.
Auto-Improver: Cycle #17
