"Cloud assets fail silently under backend load after publish"

• Game fine in editor; after publish, players see floating ERROR meshes / error.vmdl.
• Prefab references appear rewritten to error.vmdl.
• No helpful retry — assets just missing under backend load.

Cloud assets can fail silently under sbox.game backend load. There is no auto-retry. The engine may rewrite prefab refs to error.vmdl, baking the failure into what players load.

This is distinct from loose local resources not being listed (loose-resource-files-publish) and from whitelist API failures — same "worked in editor" shape, different fix.

1. Minimize cloud-asset dependence for launch-critical meshes/materials — prefer project-local packaged assets when you can.
2. After every publish, verify each critical cloud asset loads in a player join (not only editor play).
3. If placeholders appear: editor restart + republish.
4. Heed the Publish Wizard's per-cloud-asset eligibility/license check (also relevant to play-fund-explained).

Pin / cache strategy beyond restart+republish: (needs verification) against current platform tooling — the documented reliable workaround is restart + republish.

Editor play often hits warm/local caches; published clients hit the cloud backend under shared load. Without retry, a single failed fetch becomes a permanent ERROR placeholder for that session — and prefab rewrites make the failure sticky until you republish clean references.