How to Fix Pet or Summon Despawn Bugs

Summon despawn bugs are lifetime and ownership tracking. Here is how to fix them.

How to fix it

1. Track owner and lifetime

Give each summon an owner reference and a lifetime, and despawn it when the timer expires. Without tracked lifetimes, summons persist forever or despawn at inconsistent times.

2. Enforce the summon limit

Cap how many summons an owner can have, despawning the oldest when exceeded. Unenforced limits let players stack summons past the intended amount, breaking balance and performance.

3. Despawn when the owner is gone

When the owner dies, disconnects, or leaves the area, despawn or handle their summons. Orphaned summons that outlive their owner clutter the world and can cause ownership-related bugs.

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.