The loop's integrator bound counts only on a cycle the loop decided. A battery another owner set (maintenance, the peak guard, a safety limit) alarms only when it gives more than saturation_w less than told for saturation_cycles cycles. At N>=2 the loop is bounded while maintenance holds a battery, so it does not wind and control comes back one slew step a cycle. The status row counts episodes, not cycles. Digests re-pinned where behaviour changed on purpose; DECISIONS/SAFETY-85-no-false-not-keeping-up.md has the list. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019DBUfvndgHwaV339Fvd2gr