What causes a shader reading the depth texture as all 1.0?

The camera depth texture was never generated because no enabled feature requested it, so _CameraDepthTexture is the cleared far-plane value of 1.0 across the whole screen.

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 Shader Reading the Depth Texture as 1.0 With No Depth Prepass in Unity

Quick answer: Enable Depth Texture in the URP asset or call ConfigureInput with Depth in your render pass so URP runs a depth prepass and populates _CameraDepthTexture.

Soft particles, fog, and water depth effects all sample the camera depth texture. URP only produces it on demand, so without a requester your sampled depth is a flat far value. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Turn on Depth Texture

In the URP Pipeline asset enable Depth Texture, which forces a depth prepass (or copies depth) so _CameraDepthTexture is populated for sampling shaders.

2. Request depth from a render feature

If you only need it for a custom pass, call ConfigureInput(ScriptableRenderPassInput.Depth) rather than enabling it globally, avoiding an unnecessary full-screen prepass.

3. Linearize the sampled value

Raw depth is non-linear; convert it with LinearEyeDepth(SAMPLE_DEPTH_TEXTURE(_CameraDepthTexture, uv), _ZBufferParams) before comparing it to scene distances.

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.