Engine

• Place residency (#6528): added PlaceResidencyResource tracking which places have materialized ECS state on the server. Non-default places lazy-load on enterPlace / spawnPlayer — ECS entities, physics runtimes, terrain chunks, and atmosphere are only created when a player enters. Empty non-default places unload after 300 ticks (~10s) with no players: entities destroyed (onDestroy fires), physics/terrain/atmosphere freed. Ephemeral places additionally drop from the spec on unload; authored/session/persistent places retain their spec definition for re-loading. Default place is always resident. ensurePlaceResident() triggers a spec update so the place materializes in the same tick. Observability: tome.place.resident, tome.place.unload_scheduled, tome.place.unload.

Networking

• Fixed connection-startup races (#6523) where client messages (e.g. fullsync requests) arriving before connection setup completed were silently dropped at three layers: container WebSocket open handler, runtime worker attach flow, and room-runtime pending-connection queue. Early-arriving messages are now buffered per-connection and replayed in order once the connection materializes.

Tome / ObjectAPI

• Fixed non-deterministic api.random() under Area of Interest (#6529). The behavior-update system previously used a single shared RNG stream per tick; when client and server iterated different entity sets due to AOI, subsequent entities drew from different stream positions, causing permanent state divergence. Each entity now gets an independent PRNG seeded from (tick, entityId) via rngFor, making random output invariant to which other entities are present.
• api.patch("player", ...) now validates against PlayerDefSchema.strict() at the API boundary (#6526). ObjectProperties keys passed at the PlayerDef root (e.g. model, feetPosition, physics) used to merge silently and never render — the patch landed in the spec but the engine never read them. Invalid patches now early-return and emit a mutationWarn to Savi's run_script log naming the offending keys with a "nest under properties" hint. Shares the strict-schema precedent used by patchTerrain; renamed the helper formatTerrainValidationIssues → formatZodIssues (4 callers updated).

Renderer

• Packed PointLightDataNode, SpotLightDataNode, and DirectionalLightDataNode into single stride-N uniformArray("vec4") bindings shared by JS writer and TSL reader through a typed STRIDE/SLOT constant (#6525) — writer/reader drift is no longer expressible. Fragment UBO bindings for batched dynamic lighting: point 3 → 1, spot 4 → 1, directional 2 → 1. Per-point-light memory 48B → 32B. Lighting math, countNode Loop trip count, and DynamicLightsNode.customCacheKey() are untouched — no material recompiles when light counts change. Dropped // @ts-nocheck from all four DynamicLighting/data/* nodes; they now type-check under strict TS via narrowed builder.context access and a small BatchedLightSentinel Node subclass for the lightNode slot of LightingModelDirectInput.