How to Fix an Async Continuation Touching Destroyed Objects After a Scene Change in Unity

Your async load finishes a moment after the player changes scenes, and the continuation assigns to a transform that no longer exists, throwing MissingReferenceException. The task outlived its objects. Here is how to guard it.

How to fix it

1. Cancel on teardown

Create a CancellationTokenSource tied to the object or scene and call Cancel() in OnDestroy or on scene unload, passing the token into every awaited call so the chain stops.

2. Check the object still lives

Before touching a Unity object in the continuation, verify it: a destroyed object compares equal to null, so if (this == null) return; guards against MissingReferenceException.

3. Use a destroy-aware awaiter

Adopt a helper (for example UniTask's GetCancellationTokenOnDestroy()) that automatically cancels awaits when the MonoBehaviour is destroyed, so continuations never resume on dead objects.

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.