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 Respawn Restoring Collected Items the Player Already Banked in GameMaker

Q: What causes respawn restoring collected items the player already banked?

Respawn reloads the checkpoint snapshot for everything, including the collectible total, so items the player banked since the checkpoint are reverted and re-added to the world as if never collected.

Quick answer: Snapshot only the state that should roll back on death (position, enemies) and keep banked collectibles in a separate persistent total that respawn does not touch.

If your design banks collectibles permanently, dying should not refund them. Separate roll-back state from kept progress so respawn restores the room but not the collection total.

How to fix it

1. Separate banked from in-room state

Keep permanently collected items in a persistent total and only snapshot resettable room state at the checkpoint. Respawn restores the room, not the banked count.

2. Decide your design rule

Some games refund collectibles on death and some keep them; pick one. If kept, never include the collectible total in the checkpoint snapshot that respawn reloads.

3. Do not re-spawn banked pickups

On respawn, skip re-creating pickups whose ids are in the banked-collected set, so a death does not repopulate the room with items the player already secured.

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 GameMaker 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.

The bug you can't reproduce isn't gone — it's just invisible until you capture it from the player's device.