What causes Godot NavigationAgent avoidance jitter?

Agents with avoidance enabled push against each other and the avoidance velocity oscillates, so they jitter or vibrate when crowded, especially near the goal.

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 Godot NavigationAgent Avoidance Jitter

Quick answer: Tune the avoidance neighbor distance and max neighbors, smooth the avoidance velocity, and stop agents at an arrival distance so they do not crowd one point.

NavigationAgent avoidance jitter is oscillating avoidance. Tuning and smoothing fix it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Tune the avoidance settings

Tune the neighbor distance, max neighbors, and time horizon so avoidance is stable. Settings that make agents react too strongly to each other produce the oscillating push-pull that reads as jitter.

2. Smooth the avoidance velocity

Smooth the velocity the avoidance system produces rather than applying it raw each frame, so rapid changes in avoidance direction do not vibrate the agent. Light smoothing removes the jitter without much added lag.

3. Stop at an arrival distance

Have agents stop when within an arrival distance of the goal rather than all pushing toward the exact point, so they do not crowd and jitter against each other at the destination. Spacing the goals helps too.

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.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.