What causes a GOAP agent replanning every frame?

The agent invalidates and rebuilds its plan each tick because a world-state value the plan depends on flickers, so it never gets to run the first action long enough to make progress.

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 GOAP Agent Replanning Every Frame

Quick answer: Only replan when the current action fails, the goal changes, or the plan becomes invalid, and debounce noisy sensor values feeding the world state.

Your GOAP enemy stands still burning CPU while the profiler shows the planner running every frame. It plans, the world state wobbles, the plan is invalidated, and it plans again. Replanning on a trigger instead of every tick fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Replan only on triggers

Run the planner when the current action returns failure, when the goal selector picks a new goal, or when an action's precondition is violated mid-execution, not unconditionally in Update.

2. Debounce sensor inputs

Smooth or hysteresis-gate world-state values like canSeeEnemy so a single noisy frame does not invalidate the plan; require the value to hold for a few frames before flipping it.

3. Cache the active plan

Keep executing the queued actions until one finishes or fails. Only discard the cache when something materially changed, so a stable world produces a stable plan.

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.