How to Fix a Locked Chest Consuming a Key Without Opening

Losing a key to a chest that never opened is a feel-bad bug. Checking the key count and chest state before consuming, and consuming only on a successful open, fixes it.

How to fix it

1. Check before consuming

Confirm keys > 0 and the chest is closed before doing anything, and bail out early without touching the key count if the check fails.

2. Consume only on success

Decrement the key only after the chest's open routine has committed, so any early return or failure path leaves the key intact.

3. Make the interaction atomic

Wrap the validate-open-consume sequence so it cannot be interrupted midway by another input that would desync the key count from the chest state.

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 GameMaker 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.