What causes procedural cave entrances getting walled off?

Cellular smoothing or wall-padding passes can fill in the cells you intended as the cave mouth, sealing the entrance the player is supposed to enter through.

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 Procedural Cave Entrances Getting Walled Off

Quick answer: Carve the entrance after the smoothing passes and protect its cells from the wall pass, then verify a path exists from the entrance into the main cavern.

A cave the player cannot enter because the mouth got smoothed shut is a sequencing bug. Carving the entrance last and protecting it keeps it open.

How to fix it

1. Carve the entrance after smoothing

Run all cellular-automata iterations first, then punch the entrance opening into the wall. Carving before smoothing lets the rule fill your opening back in.

2. Protect entrance cells from later passes

Mark the entrance and a short tunnel into the cave as protected so any subsequent border or wall-padding pass skips them and cannot reseal the mouth.

3. Verify the entrance connects inward

Flood-fill from the entrance cell and confirm it reaches the main cavern. If the opening leads only into solid rock, extend the tunnel until it joins the largest open region.

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.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.