What causes knockback overwriting instead of adding momentum?

Each knockback sets the rigidbody velocity directly, so a new hit erases the previous one's momentum and the force of stacked hits feels random rather than cumulative.

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 Knockback Overwriting Instead of Adding Momentum

Quick answer: Apply knockback as an impulse (change in momentum) rather than assigning velocity, so successive hits accumulate and the reaction scales with the number and direction of hits.

When two quick hits knock the target the same distance as one, or a follow-up hit cancels the first, knockback is overwriting velocity. Treating each hit as an impulse makes momentum add up naturally. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Apply knockback as an impulse

Use rb.AddForce(dir * strength, ForceMode.Impulse) per hit instead of rb.velocity = dir * strength. Impulses sum, so stacked hits build up speed the way players expect.

2. Clamp the resulting speed

After applying, clamp the velocity magnitude to a sane maximum so a flurry of hits cannot launch the target across the map; this keeps additive knockback bounded.

3. Reset cleanly when grounded

Let normal friction or your controller bleed off knockback velocity over time rather than instantly zeroing it, so the reaction reads as momentum rather than a teleport.

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.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.