What causes haulers picking the wrong source and starving a line?

Source selection ignores distance and current stock, so haulers oscillate between far-away or nearly empty piles instead of consistently feeding the nearest stocked source.

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 a Supply Chain Starving Because Haulers Pick the Wrong Source

Quick answer: Score candidate sources by reachable distance and available reserved-adjusted stock, then pick the best one and reserve the items so haulers commit to a single efficient route.

A factory that keeps running dry while a full warehouse sits nearby has a source-selection bug. Haulers wander to the wrong piles and the line starves. Make them choose the closest source that actually has stock, accounting for what other haulers already reserved. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Score by distance and real stock

Rank sources by path distance and by available stock after subtracting other haulers' reservations. Pick the highest-scoring source so haulers feed the line by the shortest viable route.

2. Reserve at the source

Reserve the exact items a hauler will carry so two haulers do not both target the last unit in a pile, which otherwise causes wasted trips and intermittent starvation.

3. Cap trip distance with a fallback

Prefer near sources but allow a bounded fallback to farther ones only when near sources are empty, so a temporary local shortage does not strand the whole production line.

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.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.