How to Fix Projectiles Spawning Inside the Shooter's Own Collider in Unity

If a gun fires and the bullet dies instantly, it is colliding with the player who fired it. Telling physics to ignore the owner's collider fixes self-hits. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Ignore the owner's collider

After instantiating the projectile, call Physics.IgnoreCollision(projectileCollider, ownerCollider) so the bullet cannot register a hit on the shooter.

2. Spawn at a clear muzzle point

Position the muzzle transform just outside the shooter's collider bounds so the projectile starts in free space, not embedded in the body.

3. Store the owner for hit filtering

Tag the projectile with its owner reference and skip any hit whose target equals that owner, as a backup for cases the physics ignore misses.

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.