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 a Reflection Probe Showing a Stale Reflection After a Scene Change

Q: What causes a reflection probe showing a stale reflection after a scene change?

A baked or on-awake reflection probe captures its cubemap once, so when scene geometry or lighting changes at runtime the reflection still shows the original captured state.

Quick answer: Switch the probe to realtime with an appropriate refresh mode, or call a manual re-render after the change, and use time-slicing to keep the cost down.

A stale probe reflection is a one-time capture. Setting the probe to refresh at runtime (or re-rendering it on the change) updates the cubemap to match the new scene.

How to fix it

1. Use a realtime refresh mode

Set the reflection probe to realtime and choose a refresh mode (every frame, on awake, or via script) that matches how often the reflected scene changes.

2. Re-render on the change

When the change is event-driven, call the probe's render API right after the geometry or lighting updates so the cubemap is recaptured exactly once when needed.

3. Time-slice the update

Enable time-slicing so a realtime probe spreads its cubemap faces across several frames, keeping the reflection fresh without a per-frame spike.

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.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.