How to Fix a Stockpile Search Scanning the Whole Map Every Haul

If frame time balloons with map size because haulers scan everything to find storage, your lookups are O(n) per query and run constantly. Index items and stockpiles spatially so each query touches only nearby candidates. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Bucket items by region and category

Maintain per-region, per-category lists of stockpiles and loose items, updated on add and remove, so a hauler queries only the relevant bucket near it instead of the whole map.

2. Search outward by region

Query the agent's own region first and expand to neighboring regions only if needed, so most lookups resolve against a tiny candidate set rather than every stockpile on the map.

3. Keep the index incremental

Update buckets when items spawn, are hauled, or stockpiles change rather than rebuilding them each frame, so maintaining the index stays cheap as the colony grows.

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.