CI's boot test gave every blank password-like setting a throwaway value. A real deploy only fills x-generate fields, so a template whose server won't start without one passed CI and failed for the first owner who deployed it. boottest-payload now fills only x-generate fields, for CI and the builder alike. The old behaviour is kept as -fill-blank-passwords, used only by the builder's second boot to tell whether an empty setting is why a draft fails. Messages and AUTHORING.md no longer say boot tests fill passwords; a server that needs a join password gets x-generate. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>