What causes a NavMeshAgent that will not move?

The agent is not on a baked NavMesh, the destination is unreachable, or another script is fighting it — commonly an agent placed above the surface, an unbaked area, or transform movement overriding the agent.

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 a NavMeshAgent That Won't Move in Unity

Quick answer: Bake the NavMesh, make sure the agent sits on it and the target is on a connected area, and stop setting transform.position directly while the agent is driving movement.

A NavMeshAgent that just stands there usually is not broken — it cannot find itself or its goal on the navigation mesh. A few checks find which. Here is the order to work through.

How to fix it

1. Bake the NavMesh and confirm the agent is on it

Open the Navigation window and bake. If the floor is not walkable (too steep, marked non-walkable, or never baked) the agent has nowhere to stand. The agent must spawn on the blue mesh, not floating above it.

2. Check the destination is reachable

SetDestination returns false if the target is off the mesh or on a disconnected island. Sample the nearest point on the NavMesh for both the agent and target, and verify a path exists with CalculatePath.

3. Stop fighting the agent's movement

If another script sets transform.position or a Rigidbody moves the object, it overrides the agent. Let the NavMeshAgent own movement, or set updatePosition and updateRotation deliberately if you drive it yourself.

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.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.