How to Fix Godot Re-importing Every Asset After a Fresh Checkout

After someone clones the repo, opening the project triggers a long reimport of all textures and audio, and resource references can shift. The version-controlled import metadata is the key.

How to fix it

1. Commit .import files

Each asset has a sidecar .import file holding its import settings and resource path. Commit these. Without them Godot regenerates imports and may change resource IDs.

2. Ignore only the cache

Your .gitignore should exclude .godot/ (the regenerable import cache and editor state) but never the *.import files or .godot/uid_cache.bin is not needed since 4.x stores UIDs in the import files.

3. Keep resource UIDs stable

In Godot 4, commit the project so uid:// references resolve consistently. If imports were regenerated once, re-run the reimport, then commit the updated .import files so the next clone is clean.

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.