The base-competence engineering gate is now closed on a cleaned surface: a precondition for experiments, not a life or adaptation result. With a smell-gradient sense, a pruned dry-world action set, and autonomous food production, 3 of 3 fresh organisms navigated, ate, and reached the full 120-tick horizon with 0 invalid outputs. Earlier organisms starved on the spawn cell, so this is the first time this precondition holds at all.
The harness was hardened test-first (1826 passed, 3 skipped). Perturbation experiments now execute end-to-end with non-degenerate matched controls (~0.97 of full energy to horizon vs. earlier collapse near tick 50), raw evidence hash-anchored before scoring across two runs (n=3, then a direction-counterbalanced n=4).
A pre-registered falsifier caught a fake recovery signal: the organism was abandoning the blocked action, not restoring feeding. 0 of 21 perturbed organisms restored foraging, but in the 6×4 world a blocked direction usually makes food unreachable, so this null is geometry-confounded and uninterpretable pending a world redesign. It neither supports nor counts against adaptation, which remains unmeasured.
Self-maintenance closure scored 0; the smoke test is presently blocked by an engineering launch bug (runtime recovery/readout), not a scientific negative. Life-properties demonstrated: 0, held at 0 by design. Nothing here is being claimed as life.