Go ahead and set things up for the traditional merge, I'd say. It looks like MB gave each tribe sufficient supplies at the beginning to reach the traditional merge, it may be one of his options to delay it a bit, but it's 50/50 at worst that the traditional merge won't happen in number seven.

"If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but his bare body alone that he was born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from him so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so that the race of man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys." (Samuel Butler, "Erewhon")