How to Fix Buoyancy Bobbing That Never Settles

A barrel that bounces up and down on the water indefinitely is missing damping. Archimedes buoyancy is a restoring spring force, and a spring with no friction oscillates forever. Adding water drag fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Add per-sample drag

At each submerged buoyancy point, apply a force opposing local velocity, e.g. -dragCoef * pointVelocity using rb.GetPointVelocity(samplePos). This dissipates energy where the object meets the water.

2. Boost damping while submerged

Increase rb.linearDamping and rb.angularDamping proportionally to submerged fraction, then restore them when the object leaves the water. Underwater drag is far higher than air drag.

3. Scale force by submerged volume

Compute buoyancy from the actual submerged volume per sample point rather than a binary in/out test, so the restoring force tapers near the surface instead of slamming.

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.