What causes a campfire burning fuel while the base is unloaded?

Fuel is decremented per Tick only while the actor is active, so design assumes constant draw but unloaded bases either never burn or wrongly catch up to empty.

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 a Campfire Consuming Fuel While the Player Is Away From Base

Quick answer: Track fuel as a burn-until timestamp computed from the loaded fuel and burn rate, and resolve remaining fuel from elapsed time whenever the base reactivates.

Players return to camp to find the fire either still fully stocked or completely burned out, depending on how long they were gone. Fuel is being driven by Tick instead of real elapsed time.

How to fix it

1. Convert fuel to a burn-until time

When fuel is added, compute BurnUntil = Now + fuel * secondsPerUnit. The fire is lit while Now < BurnUntil. Per-Tick subtraction breaks when the actor is not ticking.

2. Resolve on reactivation

When the base loads back in, recompute remaining fuel from BurnUntil - Now and update visuals accordingly. This makes offline burn consistent.

3. Persist burn-until in the save

Write the timestamp to the save so a reload mid-burn continues correctly instead of refilling or instantly emptying the fire.

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 Unreal Engine 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.