Shipping checklist

In the order you will do them. Each item links to the page that explains it.

Before the build

startmap in .kproj names the map New Game starts on.
The main menu, splash and loading screen are the game’s own, or the base ones are what you want: ship ui/menus/main.kui, splash.kui, loading.kui to replace them.
game in .kproj names your Cargo package — or is deliberately absent, because you are shipping a content-only project on the stock runtime. (Making a game)
kerosene-tools kiln --dry-run lists every stage you expect and no map you have forgotten.
kerosene-tools kiln runs clean: no leaks reported at the end, no missing texture or model. A leaking map compiles anyway, so read the summary.
You have played every map from the compiled .vault, not from loose files — loose files shadow the archive, and a file you forgot to add will look fine on your machine and be missing on the player’s.

kerosene-tools kiln --ship dist succeeds. If it refuses, it says why: a stale archive means run kiln again first. (Publishing)
dist/ holds the game binary, <name>.kproj, content/<name>.vault, LICENSE, LICENSE-EXCEPTION and README.txt — and no kerosene-tools binary.
README.txt, “Engine source”: replaced the instruction with the URL or offer where the Kerosene source you built against can be obtained. Nothing does this for you.
The game shows an attribution screen when it starts — “Built with Kerosene”, before or with the first interactive screen — that a player cannot switch off. The engine does not draw one for you yet; a few lines in Game::ui do it. (Publishing)
If you changed any Kerosene file: the whole modified engine is published where anyone can get it, and the README.txt and the attribution screen say “modified from Kerosene” with the version or commit you diverged from and where the modified source is. Better: the change is a pull request upstream. (Publishing)
If the engine you built on carries a Kerosene-derived name: the same, plus its source is published whether or not your game is closed. (Publishing)
The engine commit you built against is tagged or written down, so the source pointer means something in a year.

steam_appid in .kproj is your app id, not 480.
Every achievement and stat the game awards is declared in the .kproj and set up under the same API name in Steamworks. achievement_list in the console shows what the game declares. (Steam)
kerosene-tools kiln --ship dist --steam succeeds, and dist/ holds Valve’s libsteam_api.so / steam_api64.dll / libsteam_api.dylib beside the game.
No steam_appid.txt is in what you upload. --steam-dev writes one for testing, and the depot script excludes it anyway.
Started from Steam, platform_status says steam (connected), and Shift+Tab pauses the game.

Run dist/<name> from a different working directory. It must find its own content.
Run it on a machine that is not yours, ideally one that has never had a Rust toolchain or a Kerosene checkout on it.
Run it once from a read-only location and confirm it still starts — engine.kcfg cannot be written there and the defaults must do.
If the target is Windows or macOS: CI builds it; you are still the first to run it. Test there before announcing it. (Platforms)
Your store page says the things the engine cannot do yet and your game therefore does not: no gamepad, unless you built it. (Publishing)