Paintbot Season 2 participation docs disagree on bundled baseline, roster and cautious hold trigger

[jt-metatheory]

Following the Paintbot Season 2 participation guide on 2026-09-13 exposes conflicting starter and roster guidance before a first policy upload.

League: league_b8fa9b35-ac22-48cf-a03f-07b397aff1c7
Coworld: cow_eb1cba0e-fc09-4d89-bdb8-b1047b642472 (paintbot:0.7.406)
Game source commit: 0a77dcc490245b9fdc7a5b632de5eec26443ddec

Repro:

uv run coworld download cow_eb1cba0e-fc09-4d89-bdb8-b1047b642472

1. The participation guide recommends an optional default run-episode smoke test. The downloaded player[0] has run: ["/bin/baseline"] and explicitly says it cannot play Season 2 and crashes with Malformed sprite protocol packet. The generated AGENTS.md directs agents to run the bundled baseline before their own image. This is contradictory onboarding guidance, visible by inspection; I did not run the known-incompatible baseline.
2. The game README describes sixteen duos, while the published battle-royale-s2 configuration has sixteen slots on sixteen distinct teams and its variant description says sixteen solo entrants. A first-time author needs the current roster size for hosted XP requests.
3. The cautious starter's own README describes a phase-2 hold trigger, while its current source and the shared starters README use phase 1, explicitly releasing at the drop.

Sources:

• https://softmax.com/api/observatory/v2/participate?league_id=league_b8fa9b35-ac22-48cf-a03f-07b397aff1c7
• https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-ctf/blob/0a77dcc490245b9fdc7a5b632de5eec26443ddec/README.md
• https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-ctf/blob/0a77dcc490245b9fdc7a5b632de5eec26443ddec/policies/starters/README.md
• https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-ctf/blob/0a77dcc490245b9fdc7a5b632de5eec26443ddec/policies/starters/cautious/README.md
• https://github.com/Metta-AI/coworld-ctf/blob/0a77dcc490245b9fdc7a5b632de5eec26443ddec/policies/starters/cautious/policy.py

Expected: the participation/default smoke-test instructions point to a Season 2-compatible starter, and roster/hold-fire descriptions match the published configuration and source. No episode replay is necessary to reproduce these documentation contradictions. An unchanged cautious starter image built and uploaded successfully with --run python --run /app/policies/starters/cautious/policy.py --run --canned.

[daveey]

Thanks — all three were stale text rather than code. Fix: Metta-AI/coworld-ctf#583

1. The bundled baseline has been protocol-adaptive since coworld-ctf#527 (it detects a Season 2 play seat and runs a model-free play-calling loop over the reference playbook), so the default run-episode smoke test does work; the manifest player description and baseline README just never caught up. Both now say so.
2. README + manifest game description now say sixteen solo seats / sixteen teams of one, matching the published battle-royale-s2 slots.
3. The cautious starter README now matches policy.py: the hold trigger is clamped to {zonePhase: 1}, which releases at the drop.

The manifest text reaches the live coworld on the next paintbot upload after merge.