How to Fix Prestige Reset Wiping Permanent Unlocks It Should Keep

Prestige is supposed to wipe your run but keep your hard-earned permanent upgrades and cosmetics. When a reset nukes those too, players rage-quit. Partitioning the save so reset only touches run state fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Partition the save

Separate fields into a run-scoped struct (currency, level, current upgrades) and a persistent meta struct (prestige currency, permanent unlocks, cosmetics) so each can be reset independently.

2. Reset only the run section

On prestige, replace the run struct with a fresh default and grant the prestige reward, but never reassign or clear the meta struct.

3. Carry forward the right values

Explicitly compute what prestige preserves (e.g. a meta-currency earned from the run) and write it into the meta section before clearing the run.

4. Test the round trip

Add a test that records meta state, performs a prestige, and asserts every permanent unlock survives while run state is back to defaults.

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.