How to Fix Agents Thrashing Between Two Needs and Satisfying Neither

A colonist who walks halfway to the bed, turns around for food, then turns back, is re-deciding every tick between two nearly equal needs. Re-evaluation without commitment causes thrashing. Make the agent stick with a need until it is met. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Commit to the chosen need

Once an agent starts satisfying a need, keep pursuing it until it is met or interrupted by something genuinely more urgent, instead of re-picking the top need from scratch every tick.

2. Require a margin to switch

Only switch needs when another exceeds the current one by a clear margin (hysteresis), so two needs hovering at similar urgency do not cause back-and-forth oscillation.

3. Penalize abandoning in-progress actions

Add a small cost to dropping a partially completed action when scoring alternatives, so the agent finishes what it started rather than restarting constantly.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.