How to Fix Permadeath Wiping Meta-Progression in a Roguelite

Permadeath should erase the run, not the player's account. If a death is wiping the meta currency a player ground out, you are clearing too much. Separating the two saves draws a hard line.

How to fix it

1. Split run and profile saves

Store the active run in run.save and persistent meta in profile.save. The death handler deletes only the run file and writes earned currency into the profile.

2. Bank rewards before clearing

On death, first compute and add the run's meta currency to the profile and flush it to disk, then delete the run file. Order matters so a crash mid-death cannot lose both.

3. Never clear the profile on death

Audit your death and game-over code for any call that touches profile data. The only profile write on death should be additive (currency gained, new unlocks).

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.