The A5 waypoint stone matches reliably (65-91% when on screen). The real
failure mode is a stale curr_loc that lands the char off the stone, so
select_by_template("A5_WP") never matches. The old escalation (NPC anchors +
a 6-step directed sweep) then looped for 5+ minutes — the "stuck in town"
behavior seen in log/log.txt 2026-06-24 (08:28:48 -> 08:30 force-exit).
- Add a 45s hard wall-clock budget to open_wp; bail between anchors once past.
- Drop the directed sweep entirely: it never recovered in practice and was the
main multi-minute time sink. A failure now returns fast so the caller falls
back (buy at Malah / skip to stash) instead of stranding the bot.
- Also folds in the in-progress A5 repair-menu timing fix (wait_until_visible
instead of a too-short 0.2-0.3s peek).
- Add test/town/a5_open_wp_test.py covering fast-fail, quick-mode, and budget.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
