How to Fix the Level Star Rating Awarding Three Stars When Requirements Are Not Met in Godot

Star ratings drive replay, so they must be earned. The usual cause is evaluating tiers in the wrong order or with a backwards comparison so the top tier always wins.

How to fix it

1. Define ordered thresholds

Store thresholds as data, e.g. {3: 9000, 2: 6000, 1: 0} for score. Keeping them in one table makes the grading logic a simple, auditable lookup instead of scattered if-statements.

2. Evaluate hardest tier first

Check score >= threshold[3], then 2, then 1, returning on the first match. If you check tier 1 first or use the wrong operator, every clear satisfies it and you always award the top grade.

3. Persist the best, not the latest

Save the maximum star count the player has ever earned for a level so a sloppy replay cannot overwrite a previous three-star result with a one-star one.

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 Godot 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.