How to Fix Powered Machines Staying On After the Generator Runs Out of Fuel

A base generator runs dry but the lights and crafters stay on as if nothing happened. The machines cached a powered flag at connect time and never asked the grid again.

How to fix it

1. Recompute supply and demand

Each grid tick, total active generation and total connected demand. Power machines only while supply meets demand. A one-time cached flag ignores the source dying.

2. Brown out by priority

If demand exceeds supply, shed load by a priority order rather than powering everything or nothing, so critical devices stay on the longest.

3. React to fuel-out events

When a generator empties, mark its grid dirty so the next tick re-evaluates immediately instead of waiting for a periodic refresh.

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 Unity 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.