How to Fix the Simulation Still Ticking While a Menu Is Open

If colonists keep starving while the player reads a menu they thought paused the game, your pause stops the wrong thing. Animation halts but the sim keeps ticking. Gate the simulation tick itself on the pause flag. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Gate the sim tick on pause

Check the paused flag at the top of the fixed simulation update and return early when paused, so needs, production, and AI all stop together rather than just visuals.

2. Stop accumulating sim time

While paused, do not add elapsed real time to the tick accumulator. Otherwise the moment the player unpauses, a flood of catch-up ticks runs as if no time was paused.

3. Pause one clock for everything

Have every system read game-time from a single clock that you stop on pause, so nothing — timers, schedules, the day cycle — advances behind a menu.

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.