What causes a falling object never reaching terminal velocity?

Gravity is applied with no opposing air resistance, so the body accelerates indefinitely instead of settling where drag balances gravity.

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 Falling Object Never Reaching Terminal Velocity

Quick answer: Add a drag force that grows with speed (linear or quadratic) so it eventually equals gravity, capping the fall at a realistic terminal velocity.

An object that just keeps speeding up through a long fall, eventually tunneling through the floor, has gravity but no air resistance. Terminal velocity is where drag equals weight, and you need drag for that. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Add an opposing drag force

Apply -k * v (or -k * v^2 for realism) each step. As speed rises the drag rises until it cancels gravity, fixing the terminal speed at sqrt(mg/k) for quadratic drag.

2. Pick k for the desired cap

Solve for the drag coefficient from your target terminal velocity and the body's mass, so the object levels off at the speed your gameplay expects.

3. Prevent tunneling at speed

Even with terminal velocity, set the body to continuous collision detection so a fast fall does not pass through thin floors before drag takes hold.

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.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.