Noise merging's per-run start ran once per stage, so it reported no matching step in the stage without the named step, and the Second run restarted from zero at the cut. Two stages now moves the OUTER_SAMPLE wrappers behind it around the staged run, and exposes the stage on the guider for the per-stage sampler wrappers. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Tw9fjXkZ7WjhgGdsdUwPsc