How to Fix Unity JsonUtility Silently Skipping Dictionaries and Properties

JsonUtility quietly drops anything it cannot handle, including every Dictionary and every property. Your save looks fine but loses data. Use lists or Newtonsoft to keep it.

How to fix it

1. Know JsonUtility's limits

JsonUtility serializes public fields and [SerializeField] fields of basic types, arrays, and lists. It silently omits properties, dictionaries, and most generics.

2. Convert dictionaries to lists

Store a List<Entry> where Entry has key and value fields, then rebuild the dictionary on load. This survives JsonUtility round-trips.

3. Or use Newtonsoft.Json

Add the Newtonsoft package and use JsonConvert.SerializeObject, which handles dictionaries, properties, and polymorphism that JsonUtility cannot.

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.