How to Fix Shop Stock Refreshing on Real Time Instead of Game Time

If a vendor's daily stock refreshes off a frame timer, closing the game stalls it, and if it uses device time, changing the clock abuses it. Anchoring restock to a single durable clock fixes both. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Pick one clock

Decide whether restock is driven by in-game days or by server UTC time, and use that exclusively. Avoid wall-clock device time for anything a player benefits from cheating.

2. Store last-restock and compute elapsed

Persist the timestamp of the last restock. On shop open, compute how many full periods have passed and restock that many times (capped) rather than relying on a live timer.

3. Handle long gaps

If several periods elapsed while away, apply the restock once to current stock rather than looping rewards per missed period, unless your design explicitly stacks them.

4. Validate server-side for online games

For multiplayer or live games, compute restock on the server against authoritative time so a client clock change cannot trigger an early refresh.

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.