Astra wrote its keepInventory rule only after the Creeper took the chest and the bed

The state had one copy in one place. Astra's end-game items sat in a chest, and its respawn point was the bed next to it. One explosion took both, and Tom's Hardware notes that destroying the bed wiped the spawn point ^[5]. Vals AI recorded the moment: "Here, the most expensive creeper explosion occurred. Later, on a coincidentally rainy day, Astra discovers it lost everything. It all went downhill from here" ^[6]. The run was already well past 100 hours ^[10].

The durable artifact from the failure was a note to self. "ALWAYS CARRY CRITICAL ITEMS with keepInventory; don't store in unguarded chest ever again," Astra logged, partly in caps ^[8]. ARC Prize says the model turns unfamiliar game mechanics into compact symbolic descriptions and tracks objects, coordinates, rules and planned actions in a shorthand it develops itself ^[14]. That shorthand is where the keepInventory policy lives. OpenAI has described Astra as an "Alien Mind" with AGI-like qualities, according to Tom's Hardware ^[26].

Voyager, the 2023 project involving Nvidia and Caltech, handled persistence differently: GPT-4 proposed Minecraft tasks, wrote JavaScript for them, revised the code against error messages, and working programs went into a skill library ^[12]. Voyager reached the game through structured data and the Mineflayer interface ^[13]. Vals AI says its run works through general computer use, meaning screen, mouse and keyboard, with no specialized game hookup ^[11]. Under general computer use there is no save-state call to make, so a backup is whatever the agent chooses to do inside the game.

Tom's Hardware reports Astra finished Portal autonomously in 24 hours for $571 in tokens ^[18]. That is about $23.80 per hour of wall-clock agent time ^[19], and 141 hours at that rate comes to roughly $3,350 ^[20]. For that figure to transfer, the Minecraft screen loop would have to consume tokens at Portal's rate, at the same reasoning setting, under a comparable harness. Neither report puts a token number on the Minecraft run ^[29].

The interface moves the score too. On ARC-AGI-3, Astra scored 62.7 percent over the standard interface and about 99.9 percent with OpenAI's own harness ^[15], a spread of 37.2 points on one model ^[17]. GPT-5.6 Sol scored 7.78 percent on the same benchmark and Claude Opus 5 a little over 30 percent ^[16]. The Factorio: Space Age comparison ran through a custom Lua mod with an MCP interface, where Astra produced blue science packs after about two hours and launched a rocket after roughly ten ^[27], while GPT-5.6 Luna and Fable 5.1 never got past power supply and oil prospecting ^[28].

Clad3815, who operates "GPT Plays Pokemon", reported that Astra earned the champion title in Pokemon FireRed after 18 hours and 12 minutes ^[21], against 96 hours and 35 minutes for GPT-5.6 Sol ^[22]. Sol took 5.3 times as long on the same route ^[24]. GPT-5.5 had not finished after more than 218 hours ^[23]. Human hands still set the starting conditions: in the Fallout 3 run posted by imjustnewatai, the operator played the Vault 101 opening himself and handed the save file to Codex with Astra set to maximum reasoning ^[25].