Toward the first outside playtests

SolCraft is a real running game, but it is not a public release yet.

The development build already covers native accounts and Pilots, direct flight, lasers and missiles, mining and gas collection, cargo and salvage, station markets and shipbuilding, warp and gate travel, persistent NPC traffic, parties, chat, push-to-talk voice, walkable stations, private hangars, Pilot services, technology progression, and the first landable moon.

The public-site surface is arriving now because the next phase needs a stable place for development news, realm status, and eventually signed client downloads. The current Windows build is not packaged for distribution: its cooked asset set is still large, there is no installer or release manifest, and production server details are not baked into a player-ready bundle.

So the download stays closed and the status page stays honest. Packaging, update metadata, code signing, deployment rehearsal, and operational tooling come before outside invitations. When a playtest is ready, this news feed will be the canonical announcement channel.