What causes distant agents freezing under LOD simulation?

The LOD system stops updating distant agents entirely instead of running a cheaper coarse update, so their state pauses and then snaps when they come back into the high-detail band.

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 Distant Agents Freezing When Using Level-of-Detail Simulation

Quick answer: Run a cheap aggregate update for distant agents that advances needs, jobs, and position abstractly, and reconcile to full fidelity when they re-enter the detailed band.

If colonists you scroll away from freeze in place and teleport when you return, your LOD is fully halting their simulation rather than coarsening it. Keep a low-cost update running so they keep living off-screen. Here is how to LOD agents without freezing them.

How to fix it

1. Run a coarse update for distant agents

Instead of skipping distant agents, run a cheap approximation: advance needs by elapsed time, resolve jobs statistically, and move along paths without per-step collision so they keep progressing.

2. Reconcile on promotion

When an agent re-enters the high-detail band, reconstruct its full state from the coarse state (snap position to a valid tile, resume the in-progress job) so it does not pop or teleport.

3. Tune bands by visibility and count

Promote agents the player can see and those involved in active events to full detail, and keep the rest coarse, so visible behavior stays correct while the bulk of the population is cheap.

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.