How to Fix a Gear Puzzle Where Meshed Gears Spin the Same Direction

Meshed gears always counter-rotate: if one turns clockwise its neighbor turns counter-clockwise. Copying the same direction across a chain breaks the simulation. Flip direction at each mesh and scale by gear size.

How to fix it

1. Flip direction at each mesh

When propagating from a driving gear to a meshed gear, negate the angular direction. Two meshed gears can never share a rotation sign.

2. Scale speed by tooth ratio

A driven gear's speed is the driver's speed times driverTeeth / drivenTeeth. A larger driven gear turns slower; a smaller one turns faster.

3. Traverse the whole train

Do a BFS from the powered gear across mesh links, assigning direction and speed to each reached gear. Detect conflicting cycles (a gear forced both ways) as a jammed train.

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 Godot 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.