#publishing

The operational recipe for shipping player-hosted (P2P) multiplayer in s&box (lobby mechanics, invite codes, the join handshake liveness contract, replication traps, and the three-rung testing ladder), covering the layer the official docs don't document and where live multi-peer sessions actually break.

A #if DEBUG guard inside a .razor component is always false in every configuration, so it strips nothing, and the razor source plus any sibling .scss ship into the uploaded package as readable text regardless. Build anything that must be absent from a release as a plain .cs class.

Org/ident rules, every store-page field is launch-blocking, AI thumbnails demoted: verify as a player after publish.

Published game boots with error.vmdl placeholders; engine may rewrite prefab refs, no auto-retry; restart editor + republish.

Headless dotnet build is green while the in-editor compiler emits SB1000: Environment/IO/Process/reflection are banned in game code.

Whitelist divergence, loose Resource Files, and silent cloud-asset failures after publish.

Standalone export hangs if PackageReferences still need sbox.game to resolve: don't accumulate cloud package deps casually.

PNG/WAV/MP3/JSON must be listed in Project Settings → Resource Files without an assets/ prefix: #1 editor-vs-publish break.

Ident is org.package: two lowercase segments; keep Org local until real; never put TODO placeholders in Org or the editor won't boot.

Preview as of 2026-07: Valve approval + Facepunch license; full .NET, lose platform services; clean PackageReferences or startup hangs.

No paid storefront: revenue is clamped player-hours from a daily pool; retention is the monetization feature.

Stats.Increment/SetValue, Leaderboards.GetFromStat, Achievements.Unlock: cheap platform polish; total achievement score capped at 1000.