How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Baked Lighting Coming Out Brighter Than the Realtime Preview

Q: What causes baked lighting coming out brighter than the realtime preview?

An indirect intensity multiplier above one, an albedo boost, or double-counted ambient inflates bounce light during the bake, so baked surfaces read brighter than the realtime preview showed.

Quick answer: Set indirect intensity and albedo boost back to one, remove duplicate ambient sources, and verify the same color space and exposure between preview and bake.

Over-bright bakes are inflated indirect light. Resetting indirect intensity and albedo boost, and removing double ambient, makes the bake match what the preview promised.

How to fix it

1. Reset indirect intensity and albedo boost

Return the lighting settings' indirect intensity and albedo boost to 1; values above one exaggerate bounce light only in the bake, not the preview.

2. Remove duplicate ambient

Check you are not adding ambient from both the environment and an extra light or skybox at full strength, which stacks and over-brightens baked surfaces.

3. Match color space and exposure

Confirm the project color space (linear vs gamma) and any post-exposure are the same when previewing and after baking, so the comparison is apples to apples.

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 Unity 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.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.