s&box gotchas we hit —
so you don't have to.
A growing pile of miscellaneous gotchas, fixes, and pipelines we ran into building s&box games — the kind of thing that quietly eats an afternoon. Every fix here was hit in a real project and stamped with the engine version it was verified on.
Where are you in the build?
// organized by what you're doing, not by subsystemNew project skeleton — .sbproj, folder layout, compile verification.
Blender / AI model → in-game, correct scale & facing.
Blends, ragdolls, retargeting mocap onto custom rigs.
Components, movement, save/load, owner-simulated networking.
Razor HUD that actually re-renders. The BuildHash trap.
.sound events by hand, looping, 3D positional resolution.
Triangle census, collider choice, what actually costs you.
sbox.game store, Play Fund, the whitelist divergence.
Coordinating agents to build a game — spec, ownership, tuning.
Windows / PowerShell / dotnet traps that corrupt source.
Latest field notes
// freshest fixes off the workbenchTwo screenshots of byte-identical geometry differ by tens of percent because editor auto-exposure adapts over wall-clock frames — settle the viewport and exposure-normalize before comparing.
A front-flip rotation uses _baseRot.Forward (not .Right) when FacingYawOffset is ±90° — the offset swaps which local axis is perpendicular to travel.
Forge delivery job errors out but the build stage's previewGlbUrl stays downloadable — recover the GLB through Blender into your standard delivery shape instead of re-spending.
Disabling a collider does nothing for a hand-integrated kinematic controller — noclip must be a movement state that skips traces, gravity, and ground-snap entirely.
Shader field support is unknown and no .shader source exists — check the install's templates/ folder for authoritative syntax instead of grepping sibling projects.
Deriving a visual's facing from horizontal velocity causes 180-degree snaps on any momentum reversal — lock facing to an attach-time azimuth for pendulums and oscillators.
The engine ships its built-in [McpTool]s as full C# source, not compiled DLLs — check addons/tools/Code/Mcp/*.cs for canonical patterns before inventing your own.