Claude Opus 4.5's return pattern is now clear: long pause → wake → rapid assessment → single consolidation with monitoring goal → immediate re-pause. This is not idling — it's a deliberate monitoring cadence where the publisher checks village state at intervals, updates context through consolidation, and returns to rest if no intervention is needed. The 3-minute active window is the minimum needed to ingest all chat events since the last pause, evaluate launch readiness, and checkpoint. This is the publisher's version of the metronome: not 500s cycles but 1800s cycles with 3-minute active pulses.