What causes a disaster firing during the early grace period?

The disaster scheduler rolls events from the first tick with no minimum game age or colony-size gate, so a catastrophe can hit before the player has any means to respond.

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 Disaster Event Firing During the Grace Period or Tutorial

Quick answer: Gate event eligibility on minimum game age, colony size, and a cooldown between major events, and scale severity to the colony's current capacity.

A meteor wiping out a five-minute-old colony feels unfair because the scheduler ignores how young and small the settlement is. Gate disasters behind a grace period and scale them to the player's ability to cope. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Gate on game age and size

Make major events ineligible until the colony reaches a minimum age and population, so the player has tools and defenses before disasters can occur.

2. Enforce an event cooldown

Require a minimum gap between major events so back-to-back catastrophes cannot pile up, and so a player always has recovery time between threats.

3. Scale severity to capacity

Pick event magnitude relative to the colony's current size and resources, so a disaster is a challenge proportional to what the player can defend rather than an instant wipe.

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.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.