No audio when using RNBO patch as VST

Howdy all. I just got into RNBO this week and I've been having an issue wherein patches I render as VSTs do not produce audio. This screenshot of my Ableton session is my best attempt at showing what's wrong without an audio example. In Ableton, after every plugin in the chain, there's a measure of volume (the green monitors), and as you can hopefully see my RNBO plugin doesn't get any output. There is no sound, no levels, nothing.

Here's what my patch looks like, I've tried making many other patches but below is my desperate attempt to try to get audio working.

Like ?????? what is going wrong here????? Some things I'm considering:

• It has to be licensed by Steinberg (I saw documentation that said if you want to sell plugins you need to license them, maybe there's some inbuilt copyright thing because my plugin manufacturer code in the export dialog is just a placeholder?)

• I should make it into a .dll instead of a .vst3 (all my plugins from professional creators are formatted as .dlls). I haven't tried this yet because honestly idk how to code

Any help would be much appreciated