What it does: A cron tick that pulls pending topics and stale posts, runs them through the same pipeline, and — if you allow it — publishes what passes the gate. How to access: Draft Forge > Schedule. Notes:

• Frequency (hourly, twice-daily, daily, weekly), how many new posts and how many refreshes per run, the stale threshold and the refresh cooldown are all settings.
• Each tick writes a summary you can read afterwards: what was generated, what was refreshed, what failed.
• Without a licence the tick does nothing at all — it does not queue, retry or half-run.
• The tick takes the oldest topic first, which is what the product had claimed since 1.0.0 and did not do before 1.2.0: the list was read newest-first, so a backlog longer than one run’s allowance was never reached. A topic dated on the calendar comes ahead of an undated one on its day, and is left alone before it.
• A run stops at the first refusal and names the wall: an empty wallet and the site’s own monthly ceiling are reported separately, because only one of them is fixed by buying credits.
• Hands-off publishing lives in the add-on and nowhere else: the free generator asks the draftforge/should_auto_publish filter and defaults to false, so a site without the add-on always gets a draft. That is what keeps a licence check out of the free download.