How to Fix Cloth Simulation Exploding or Jittering

Exploding cloth is an unstable solver, usually stiffness or collision driven. Tuning it fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Raise solver iterations or shorten the step

Stiff cloth needs more solver iterations or a smaller timestep to stay stable. Too few iterations for the stiffness makes constraints overshoot and the cloth explode. Increase iterations or reduce the step.

2. Fix body collisions

Cloth interpenetrating the character's collision bodies gets violently pushed out. Size the collision capsules to match the body and avoid the cloth starting inside them, so collisions resolve gently.

3. Start from a settled pose

Initializing cloth in a stretched or penetrating state, or with inherited velocity, triggers a blow-up. Start from a relaxed, non-penetrating pose and let it settle before applying forces.

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.