How to Fix Broken Occlusion Culling in a Streamed Unity Open World

Occlusion failing in streamed cells means they had no occlusion data at bake. Baking with the cells loaded, or using runtime culling, fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Bake with all cells loaded

Open the master scene with the streamable cells loaded additively and bake occlusion together so the data covers geometry across cell boundaries.

2. Mark only true static geometry

Occlusion culling only considers Occluder/Occludee Static objects; streamed dynamic content gets no benefit, so combine it with distance culling for moving or runtime-spawned objects.

3. Use layer distance culling as backup

Configure per-layer Camera.layerCullDistances so even unbaked streamed objects cull at distance, preventing far cells from rendering full detail.

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.