What causes torches and lanterns not lighting up at night?

Night lights are always-on or always-off because nothing connects their enabled state and emissive to the day-night cycle's time of day.

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 Torches and Lanterns Not Turning On at Night

Quick answer: Drive each night light's intensity and emissive on or off from a night factor derived from sun elevation, with a small randomized offset so they do not all switch at once.

Your village lanterns stay dark all night, or burn through the day. They should ignite as dusk falls and extinguish at dawn, driven by the same time-of-day value as the sun.

How to fix it

1. Gate by night factor

Compute a night factor from sun elevation and fade each lantern's Light intensity and the lamp material's emissive from 0 to full as night arrives.

2. Stagger the switching

Give each light a small randomized threshold or delay around dusk so lamps flicker on over a minute rather than all snapping on at the same instant.

3. Cull distant night lights

Limit how many night lights are active at once with distance culling or light importance so a town full of lanterns does not tank performance after dark.

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.