What causes a desirability overlay showing stale values?

The overlay is computed once and cached, and building or demolishing does not invalidate the affected tiles, so the heatmap keeps showing values from before the edit.

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 Desirability Overlay Showing Stale Values After Edits

Quick answer: Mark the tiles in a changed building's radius dirty on every edit and recompute only those tiles' contributions before redrawing the overlay.

A pollution or desirability map that does not change when you add a factory is reading a stale cache. Edits must invalidate the affected area. Dirty the tiles in the influence radius and recompute just those. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Dirty the influence radius on edit

When a building is placed or removed, mark every tile within its desirability radius as dirty, since only those tiles' totals can have changed.

2. Recompute only dirty tiles

Before drawing, recompute the desirability sum for dirty tiles by re-summing nearby sources, then clear the dirty flags. This avoids rebuilding the whole map every frame.

3. Redraw from the recomputed grid

Have the overlay sample the freshly recomputed grid rather than a snapshot, so the heatmap reflects the player's last edit immediately.

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.