releng works, baseline doesn't when building iso from archiso

good morning,

i'm building an image of arch using archiso. currently testing build in kvm. i want to boot uefi using the baseline image starting point, but i'm having trouble. i've built the image, and i'm at the point of booting. upon booting the image in kvm, it does the typical boot crawl in which services are started. it makes it to "Load/Save Random Seed" and rather than give me a login prompt, it says:

Welcome to your new installation of Arch Linux!

Please configure your system!

-- Press any key to proceed --

but it doesn't accept any keystrokes. the cursor, however, continues to blink. it doesn't seem to respond on the ip address i've manually assigned it through systemd. i think i've missed adding something to the image when i built it?

when building the image, i copy baseline from archiso/configs, add a hostname, move ssh keys, configure the sshd_config file, add a .bashrc to root, configure the nic, and add the packages arch-install-scripts, dosfstools, edk2-shell, memtest86+, parted, util-linux, vim, and wget, copy my own hosts file, copy a bunch of scripts into /usr/local/bin, then build the image using:

sudo mkarchiso -v -w ${tmp_dir}/work -o ${tmp_dir} ${tmp_dir}/baseline

can anyone tell me what i'm missing?