What causes a match-3 cascade that stops after the first clear?

The board clears matches once and refills, but it never re-runs match detection on the settled board, so new matches formed by falling tiles are missed.

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 a Match-3 Cascade Not Re-Checking After Tiles Fall

Quick answer: Run a loop: detect matches, clear them, collapse columns, refill from the top, then detect again, repeating until a pass finds zero matches.

Cascades are the heart of match-3 scoring. If clearing one set of tiles drops others into a new line of three and nothing happens, your resolution is a single pass instead of a loop. The fix is to iterate to a fixed point.

How to fix it

1. Wrap resolution in a loop

After clearing and collapsing, immediately scan again. Keep a did_clear flag and repeat the whole detect-clear-collapse-refill sequence while it stays true.

2. Collapse then refill before re-scanning

Gravity must finish before the next scan: move surviving tiles down to fill gaps, spawn new tiles at the top, and only then look for matches so the grid reflects the real layout.

3. Track the cascade depth

Increment a chain counter each loop pass and use it as a score multiplier. Stop when a pass produces no clears, then return control to the player.

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.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.