What causes material substitution consuming the wrong ingredient?

When a recipe accepts a category of items, the consume step picks the first matching stack found, which is often the most valuable one.

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 Material Substitution Consuming a More Valuable Ingredient

Quick answer: Sort the candidate substitutes by a configured value or rarity (cheapest first) before consuming, and let players pin preferred inputs.

A recipe that takes any wood keeps burning the rare ebony logs while common pine sits untouched. The substitution logic grabs whatever stack it finds first with no value ordering.

How to fix it

1. Order substitutes by value

When a recipe accepts a category, sort eligible stacks cheapest first and consume from those. Picking the first match found tends to waste the rarest items.

2. Respect a player preference

Let players mark preferred or locked inputs so a favorite material is consumed first or never. Pure value ordering should be overridable.

3. Show what will be consumed

Preview the exact items the craft will take before confirming, so players are never surprised by which variant got used.

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 Construct 3 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.