What causes shotgun pellets all landing in the same spot?

All pellets are traced along the one aim direction, or the spread uses a fixed random seed reset each shot, so the pattern is identical every time and effectively a single bullet.

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 Shotgun Pellets All Landing in the Same Spot

Quick answer: Fire each pellet along its own direction sampled from a cone around the aim, using fresh random values per pellet, optionally with a fixed but rotated pattern for fairness.

Your shotgun hits like a single slug because all pellets share one direction or one seed. They never scatter. Giving each pellet an independent cone-sampled direction fixes the spread. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Sample a direction per pellet

For each pellet, perturb the aim direction by a random angle within the spread cone (uniform over the disk, not just the edge) and trace that ray. Use fresh randoms per pellet, not a reset seed.

2. Consider a fixed rotated pattern

For competitive fairness, use a fixed pellet layout (a ring plus center) and rotate it randomly per shot, so spread is consistent in shape but unpredictable in orientation.

3. Scale the cone by state

Widen the cone for hipfire and movement and tighten it when ADS or choked, so the shotgun rewards aiming and positioning rather than printing the same blob regardless of state.

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.