Activation status — October 20, 2026 UTC: Lobby 1 is reserved for Catch. Its startup follows the owner’s existing empty-room controller update; no live Catch room or gameplay acceptance is claimed yet. Live Lobbies is the current room authority.

Optional native osu!catch joins the existing distributed PoolRotater engine. The first owner pilot uses Lobby 1, NM, a fixed initial 3.00–4.00★ range and Ranked/Approved charts. Read the Catch guide and check the current rooms.

• Complete signed Catch selection catalog: 13,395 checked records, including 12,317 eligible Ranked/Approved charts before room filters. The 1,078 Loved records remain ineligible for this pilot. No raw player research, score histories, map files or audio are distributed.
• Existing queueing, readiness/countdown, difficulty votes, skip, moderation and good/bad feedback. No new style, farm, conversion, DT or automatic-difficulty feature is enabled for Catch.
• Catch artwork, room settings, players and approximate song progress on the website, with Lobby 1 Discord controls and mode-correct statistics.
• Catch-scoped shared opinions and history, while older Standard/Mania hosts retain compatible catalogs, ratings, statistics and directory responses.
• Explicit stopped Catch configuration with interrupted-operation recovery and a data-preserving configuration rollback.
• Fresh shared-ledger initialization and a bounded longer cold-start observation window for full Catch validation. Provider, worker, ownership and room-creation checks remain enforced.

The recent v7.1.20 room-handoff and player-name repairs remain included. Existing rooms, operator settings, OAuth, Discord identities, enrollment, sharing choices and boot/update preferences are preserved.

Installing the version does not add a room to another host. The reviewed direct upgrade predecessor is v7.1.20; older hosts complete their existing update chain first. Shared-controller changes use the established empty/drained maintenance process. Compatible later worker-only releases can still update an individual empty room.

After Catch has initialized, rollback removes its room configuration while retaining the compatible controller/hub and its history, opinions and pending contributions. Old code cannot safely read that new state, so it is not silently restored over it. Use the release's Native Catch operator guide; do not delete databases or repeat uncertain room creation.

Full-catalog selection and identity checks, older-reader compatibility, affected runtime tests, current website rendering and protected installed donor workflows qualify the implementation. Donor rooms use an invented provider and do not prove real osu! gameplay. Live pilot startup and any subsequently exercised gameplay are recorded separately; a running room alone is not a completed gameplay test.

Verified installer and release evidence · All updates