I randomly got it by sorting for the most robots in the bottom left quadrant while looking for robot concentrations, it was number 13. Despite being in the centre of the grid it didn’t show up when sorting for most robots in the middle 30% columns of the screen, which is kind of wicked, in the traditional sense.

The first things I tried was looking for horizontal symmetry (find a grid where all the lines have the same number of robots on the left and on the right of the middle axis, there is none, and the tree is about a third to a quarted of the matrix on each side) and looking for grids where the number of robots increased towards the bottom of the image (didn’t work, because turns out tree is in the middle of the screen).

I thinks I was on the right track with looking for concentrations of robots, wish I’d thought about ranking the matrices according to the amount of robots lined up without gaps. Don’t know about minimizing the safety score, sorting according to that didn’t show the tree anywhere near the first tens.

Realizing that the patterns start recycling at ~10.000 iterations simplified things considerably.

(This is three matrices separated by rows of underscores)