What causes per-difficulty overrides clobbering base data?

Difficulty modifiers are applied by mutating the base data in place, so overrides accumulate or persist, and switching difficulty does not return to the original values.

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 Per-Difficulty Overrides Clobbering Base Data Values

Quick answer: Keep base data immutable and compute effective values as base plus the active override layer at read time, never writing modifiers back into the base.

Hard mode doubled enemy health, but switching back to normal left it doubled because the override was written into the base data. Overrides should layer over base, not mutate it. Compose, do not clobber.

How to fix it

1. Keep base data immutable

Treat the base values as read-only; never apply a difficulty modifier by writing back into them, or the change becomes permanent across difficulty switches.

2. Compose at read time

Compute the effective value as base combined with the active override layer whenever you read it, so changing difficulty simply selects a different layer.

3. Separate override storage

Store difficulty modifiers in their own data set keyed by id, so they can be swapped wholesale without ever touching the base content.

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.