How to Fix Two Colonists Claiming the Same Hauling Job

When two colonists walk to the same dropped item and one arrives to nothing, your job assignment is not atomic. The queue hands the same job to everyone who looks before it is claimed. Add a reservation step so a job and its resources belong to exactly one agent. Here is the fix.

How to fix it

1. Reserve on assignment

When an agent picks a job, immediately set job.reservedBy = agent and add the target item or stockpile cell to a reservation set before the agent starts pathing. Do this in the same step that selects the job.

2. Skip reserved jobs in the scan

When scanning for the nearest job, ignore any job whose reservedBy is non-null or whose target is in the reservation set, so two agents never select it in the same tick.

3. Release on completion or failure

Clear the reservation when the job finishes, is cancelled, or the agent abandons it (e.g. path failed), so the resource becomes available again instead of leaking and blocking future hauls.

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.