MTG farm volunteer client v18

SUPERSEDED by client-v19 (https://github.com/fuzzy1450/forge/releases/tag/client-v19), which fixes the card order a game is played from: v18 claims its cached decks by an order-blind deck hash, so a deck file rewritten into a different card order is never re-sent and the old order is played for ever. Use v19.

---

One-zip Windows volunteer client for the MTG sim farm. Unzip, double-click run-client.bat, enter the farm URL and your runner credential on the first-run page, click Add, pick your work, and go.

New in v18: you never hand-edit runner.json again. The harness pin -- the digest that proves the farm's compiled harness is the one this client expects -- now travels with the client and is refreshed by every update. Until now it was copied into your runner.json when you first set the client up, and nothing could correct it afterwards: an install first configured before the harness was rebuilt on 2026-09-03 refused Install Forge for ever, updated cleanly to v17, and stayed broken.

If that is you, this update fixes it by itself: press Update, then Install Forge. If your client shows "the harness the farm sent is not the harness this client expects", that is exactly the case this release closes.

Nothing about the security of the check changes. The pin still never comes from the farm -- it ships inside this bundle, over TLS, and a self-update verifies the download against the sha256 in these notes before installing it. A pin you type into the first-run form yourself still wins for your own farm.

From v17: the 2.0.14+139b268b780 engine row. From v16: workers persist -- add, start, stop and delete are separate, and rows and their game counts survive a restart. From v12: the client updates itself.

Headless: farmrunner.py --mode backfill --decks REF[,REF...] [--scope within].

Ships Windows embeddable Python 3.12.10; the Forge engine (~205 MB) is downloaded on demand.

sha256(mtg-farm-client-v18.zip) = a9b43a7f1aa8528d4d2a1097cae3bf7d0ddaa7a37693480832192080526b62c5