How to Fix Choosing OnTrigger vs OnCollision for Pickups

Pickups that the player walks straight through without collecting, or hits that block movement when they should pass, come from mismatching trigger vs collision callbacks and rigidbody flags. Here is how to choose correctly.

How to fix it

1. Use triggers for overlaps

For coins and zones the player should pass through, mark the collider isTrigger and handle OnTriggerEnter. Trigger contacts never block movement and never call the collision callbacks.

2. Use collisions for solid impacts

For things that should physically stop or bounce, leave isTrigger off and handle OnCollisionEnter, reading the contact points and impulse for hit reactions.

3. Provide a rigidbody

Either object in the pair must have a non-kinematic Rigidbody (or a kinematic one for trigger-only) for events to fire; two static colliders generate no callbacks at all.

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.