What causes camera shake stacking and never decaying?

Each shake trigger starts its own coroutine or adds a fixed offset, so overlapping shakes sum forever instead of feeding one shared intensity that decays over time.

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 Camera Shake Stacking Up and Never Decaying in Unity

Quick answer: Replace per-call coroutines with a single trauma float clamped to 1, add trauma on each hit, and subtract a decay rate every frame so shake amplitude falls to zero.

If small hits leave the screen permanently rattling, your shakes are stacking instead of sharing one decaying value. A trauma model fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Use one shared trauma value

Keep a single float trauma clamped to [0,1]. On a hit, do trauma = Mathf.Min(1f, trauma + amount) instead of launching another coroutine.

2. Decay every frame

In Update, subtract decay * Time.deltaTime from trauma and clamp at zero so the shake always returns to rest no matter how many hits arrive.

3. Drive offset from trauma squared

Compute the shake offset from trauma * trauma times max angle/offset, sampling Perlin noise. Squaring makes small residual trauma fade smoothly rather than linger.

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.

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