run_pindle had a 100% failure rate, and worse, was reporting success while doing
nothing. Five root causes, found by recording the client and replaying the pather's
own matching against the captured failure frames.
1. a5_red_portal.png was the only MASKED template in a5_town/ (4-chan, 60.9% opaque)
because a hover tooltip had been baked into the capture and hidden with alpha.
That routed it to cv2.matchTemplate(TM_CCOEFF_NORMED, mask=...), which OpenCV only
supports for TM_SQDIFF/TM_CCORR_NORMED — hence 0.50-0.60 scores and match positions
that wandered onto unrelated scenery. Recaptured as a plain 3-channel opaque crop of
the portal's upper arch (the lower ring is occluded by branches).
Present 0.949-1.000 / absent 0.398-0.514, straddling the 0.68 threshold.
2. pindle.approach() opened with an "already in Pindle area?" shortcut. Harrogath
scenery scores 0.76-0.79 on PINDLE_7, over its 0.62 bar, so it fired in town and
returned A5_PINDLE_START without ever clicking the portal — the bot "killed Pindle"
in town for five straight games with zero loot and zero XP while logging
runs_failed_total: 0. Shortcut removed; entry is proven by the loading screen.
3. pather.find_abs_node_pos fell back to a 0.55 first-match search that fabricated node
positions (A5_TOWN_1 at 0.60-0.62 on scenery, three different frames, three different
phantom positions), steering the char into the town wall. Raised to 0.62, forced
best_match, and added a per-node heading gate that rejects a low-confidence match
implying a >90 deg reversal. Confident matches are never gated.
4. Walking onto the waypoint opened the WP panel, which health_manager counted toward a
chicken — 3 of 6 games died at full health. WP panels are now escaped without
counting, bounded at 6 attempts.
5. pindle retry re-pathed from a hardcoded A5_TOWN_START; it now verifies the act first.
Verified live: +349,890 XP over baseline, loot drops (Ring, gold), 6 games,
runs_failed_total 0. Docs updated with all four bugs, template asset conventions, and
how to verify a boss run actually killed something (XP delta + loot, never failed:false).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
