diff --git a/hw/straylight/default.nix b/hw/straylight/default.nix
index 731402f..00f47a0 100644
--- a/hw/straylight/default.nix
+++ b/hw/straylight/default.nix
@@ -73,8 +73,14 @@ let
 
     ; Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B MoE (official GGUF). ~3B active, multimodal; mmproj
     ; comes with --hf-repo. Q4_K_M is ~22 GB.
+    ; Sampling + a thinking cap: unrestricted <think> on this checkpoint stalls
+    ; long agent turns (Talos). Clients that send their own temperature still win.
     [ornith-1.5-35b-a3b]
     hf-repo = ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_K_M
+    temp = 0.6
+    top-p = 0.95
+    top-k = 20
+    reasoning-budget = 8192
     dedup-cache-models = true
 
     ; Qwen 3.8 27B dense, refusal-ablated. Preferred uncensored coding agent.