Turns out the phone version had been shipping without any of its fonts, splash, or banner art. Without fonts there are no words, and without words there is no game; just a polite crash on the doorstep before the tavern even opened. Bug had been quietly riding along since 1.4.0. The chickens deny all knowledge.

  • Fix Android crash on launch by having Client.Android drive its own MGCB pipeline (MonoGameContentReference) instead of leaning on a stale Client.Desktop bin folder; the old setup silently shipped APKs with zero XNBs whenever CI built Android on a clean checkout, blowing up on the first Content.Load. Also add a smoke test in build-android that fails the release if any of the four required XNBs (DefaultFont, MenuFont, Banner, Splash) are missing from the signed APK, so this regression class can’t sneak through again.
  • GHA release: install ttf-mscorefonts-installer on the ubuntu-latest Android runner so MGCB’s FontDescriptionProcessor can find Arial; the first 1.4.2 dispatch failed at the font-build step because the runner ships fontless by default.