Hi Railway team,

Our production environment has one STAGED patch that was created earlier and never deployed. Reading it via GraphQL patch(decryptVariables: false) returns status STAGED and content {}. Separately, another Railway view reports staged: null for the same environment, which conflicts with the GraphQL result.

The service is deployed from a local package (not connected to GitHub). We must keep that patch exactly as it is, and we need to (a) change one service variable without triggering a deploy, then (b) deploy one specific local package with railway up (CLI 5.63.4).

Could you please confirm:

Q1. Does railway variable set ... --skip-deploys change, add to, or consume the existing staged patch?

Q2. Does railway up apply/commit pending staged patches, or deploy only the uploaded local source?

Q3. Can applying an empty {} staged patch trigger a redeploy or any config change?

Q4. Is there a read-only way to verify, right before deploying, exactly which patch (if any) a deployment will apply?

Q5. Can you confirm the existing patch will remain untouched through the variable update and the local-package deployment?

We can share project and environment IDs privately. No changes have been made yet; we are waiting for your answer before acting.

Thanks!