How to Fix a Unity Tilemap Rendering Behind or In Front of Sprites Incorrectly

Your ground tilemap covers the player, or props poke through walls, because the tilemap and sprites are not ordered consistently. Sorting layers and renderer mode decide who wins.

How to fix it

1. Assign sorting layers deliberately

Give the tilemap a Sorting Layer (for example Background) below the layer your characters use. Within a layer, set Order in Layer so the map sits where you intend.

2. Use Individual mode for interleaving

If a character must pass behind some tiles and in front of others, set the Tilemap Renderer Mode to Individual so each tile sorts by its own position rather than as one chunk.

3. Match the transparency sort axis

When using position-based sorting, ensure the tilemap's per-tile sort point and the global Transparency Sort Mode share the same axis so tiles and sprites order consistently.

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.