Root causes from the 2026-06-09 session (51 games, 45 failed):
- Act desync: add TownManager.detect_current_act() and
Bot._verify_town_location(); every maintenance/end-run retry and
fallback now verifies the physical act instead of hardcoding town
starts. open_wp/go_to_act self-heal act mismatches. Never run A1
pathing when travel to A1 failed.
- NPC dialogue: poll action buttons up to 2.5s after click instead of
a single-frame check (premature retry click was closing the dialog).
- Stats integrity: log_end_game skips duplicate calls (phantom 0s
"successful" games were resetting the consecutive-fail breaker);
clear stale failure reason at game start; set chicken flag before
bot.stop() so chickens are no longer labeled "Bot stopped".
- Repair: prefer in-act Larzuk over cross-act Halbu trip (Halbu
detection failed 100% last session and desynced the act state).
Documented as Bugs 9-12 in CLAUDE.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>