How to Fix Puddles Not Forming During Rain or Never Drying Afterward

It rains but the streets stay dry-looking, or puddles from an old storm never go away. Realistic puddles need an accumulation value driving a flood level against the surface's pooling map, not a fixed decal.

How to fix it

1. Accumulate rainfall

Keep a per-area water level that increases proportional to rain intensity and decreases by an evaporation rate while clear, clamped to a sensible max so puddles cannot grow without bound.

2. Threshold against a pooling mask

Bake or paint a height/cavity mask of where water collects; reveal puddle material where the mask value is below the current water level, so puddles fill low spots first and recede from edges as they dry.

3. Tie ripples to active rain

Only animate puddle ripple normals while rain intensity is above zero so standing water goes still once the rain stops, signalling the storm has passed.

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.