Screenhots of players showing the features of the farming update on the live servers start on the 16th (Tuesday):
You can see a screenshot of moebius with a waterblock in his hand standing on Niia Zed Ka posted on the 16th.
Also, comments on the testing topic stop on the 15th:
The official release notes were late.
I mean you are not wrong with releases on Thursdays, there were still 3 releases on Thursdays. One of them was the beacon reclaim and compactness update, which is not a small feature. It just wasn’t the farming update.