What causes a character falling through the world at high speed?

At high fall speed the character moves past the floor between physics steps before collision is detected, so it tunnels through, especially with thin floors or a large timestep.

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 Character Falling Through the World at High Speed

Quick answer: Enable continuous collision detection, cap the fall speed, give floors thickness, and use a smaller physics timestep for fast falls.

A fast character falling through the world is collision tunnelling. Continuous detection fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Enable continuous collision

Use continuous collision detection on the character so the engine sweeps its collider along the fall path between steps, catching the floor it would otherwise skip at high speed.

2. Cap the fall speed

Clamp the maximum fall speed (terminal velocity) so the character never moves far enough in one step to tunnel through normal floors. This also makes falling feel more controlled.

3. Thicken floors and reduce the step

Give floors real thickness so there is more to hit, and use a smaller fixed timestep so each physics step covers less distance, both reducing the chance of tunnelling at speed.

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.

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