What causes boids flocking clumping together?

The cohesion force is weighted far higher than separation, so every boid is pulled to the flock center faster than separation can push them apart, collapsing them into a clump.

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 Boids Flocking Clumping Into a Single Point

Quick answer: Increase the separation weight, give separation a falloff that grows sharply at close range, and balance it against cohesion and alignment.

Boids that should spread into a loose flock instead pile into one vibrating blob. Cohesion is winning over separation. Rebalancing the three forces fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Strengthen separation at close range

Scale separation force inversely with distance (e.g. 1/dist or 1/dist^2) so neighbors that get too close push apart hard, preventing collapse.

2. Rebalance the three weights

Tune separation, alignment, and cohesion weights together; cohesion should be the weakest of the three so the flock stays loose rather than collapsing to its centroid.

3. Use a perception radius and limit speed

Only consider neighbors within a radius and cap each boid's max speed and force, so cohesion cannot accelerate the whole flock into a singularity.

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.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.