What causes missing CJK characters?

The game's font does not include Chinese, Japanese, or Korean glyphs, so those characters render as boxes or nothing because the font has no glyph for them.

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 Missing Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Characters

Quick answer: Use a font that covers the needed scripts or set up font fallback to a CJK font, and generate the required glyph ranges for bitmap or SDF fonts.

Missing CJK characters are a font-coverage problem. Fallback fonts fix it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Use a font with the glyphs

Latin-only fonts have no CJK glyphs, so those characters show as missing boxes. Use a font that includes the scripts you ship, or a dedicated CJK font for those languages.

2. Set up font fallback

Configure a fallback chain so characters missing from the primary font are rendered from a CJK fallback font. This lets a Latin UI font coexist with CJK text without boxes.

3. Generate the glyph ranges

For bitmap or SDF font atlases, the required glyph ranges must be generated — CJK has thousands of characters. Include the ranges you need (or use dynamic atlas generation) so the glyphs exist in the atlas.

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.

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