How to Fix a Godot ENet Server Flooding Clients by Relaying Every Packet

Godot's high-level multiplayer can relay peer packets through the server automatically. In an authoritative setup this doubles traffic and can flood clients, because the server resends data it should have filtered.

How to fix it

1. Turn off automatic relaying

Call multiplayer.server_relay = false so client packets are not auto-forwarded; the server decides what each peer receives instead of mirroring everything.

2. Target RPCs with rpc_id

Send state only to the peers that need it using rpc_id(peer, ...) rather than broadcasting, especially for area-limited or per-player updates.

3. Throttle per-tick broadcasts

Send networked state on a fixed tick rather than per frame, and skip peers for whom nothing relevant changed, keeping outbound traffic proportional to actual change.

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.