Your profile now knows how long you have flown
There is a "Time" tile on every profile, and it has never once counted a minute of flying. It reads a per-world play timer that a heartbeat feeds every thirty seconds, and that heartbeat lives inside the voxel HUD component. The moment you take off, that component is gone and nothing is counting. The operator has 182 hours of flight recorded elsewhere and a flat zero in the counter that is supposed to hold it.
So the number moved to where it actually exists: session telemetry. Every flight already opens a row when you take off and closes it when you land or disconnect, and those rows have been written since 10 July. Profiles now carry a chip beside your rank reading how long you have been at the controls.
Paused time comes out
A flight row spans take-off to landing, which includes the twenty minutes you spent on the pause screen reading the news. Counting that as flying would make the number worthless within a week, so it is subtracted.
There was nothing new to measure. The client already announces the moment you pause, because that is what puts the ⏸ next to your name in the online list, and its idea of paused covers all three real cases: you pressed Esc, you clicked out of the window, or you switched to another tab. The server now files that away against your open flight row.
What it still counts is sitting at a focused window with your hands off the keyboard. That is not something the pause signal can see, and rather than pretend otherwise the tooltip says paused time is excluded and stops there.
The part that was quietly leaking
While wiring this up, one number stood out: 278 flight rows, 17% of every flight ever recorded, were still marked as open. Some had been open since July.
The cause is dull. Deploys happen most days, the process stops with flights in progress, and nothing ever went back to close those rows. The session was not shortened, it was lost outright.
Now two things happen. Movement stamps a liveness mark on your row about once a minute, and on startup the backend closes anything a restart left behind, using that mark as the end time. Never the current time: a July row would have booked six weeks of flying. Rows written before liveness marks existed have nothing to close against, so they close at zero and stay out of the count. Those hours are gone and no arithmetic will bring them back honestly.
Worst case now is losing the last minute of a flight to a deploy, instead of the flight.
"Last seen 8 days ago" on a day you flew
Same root cause, spotted on the operator's own profile minutes after this shipped. The "last seen" line is fed by a field that only two things ever wrote: signing in with Google, and that same voxel heartbeat. Fly every day without walking around a voxel world and your profile quietly reports you as long gone. Seven of thirteen accounts were behind, two of them by less than a day but two by nearly a week, and a couple had been online that very evening.
Movement now stamps it, from the air as well as the ground, and again when you disconnect so the time lands on the moment you actually left. The past is repairable too, since the flight rows say exactly when each person was last seen, so those dates get corrected rather than left to drift into accuracy over the next week.
What the number is
Hours the flight was live, minus time paused. Not distance, not sessions started, not tab uptime. If a restart cut a session short, the tooltip says how many, because the total is then a floor rather than a measurement.