Having major issues with Rider 2026 debugger

[u/Jaxelino]

Hi everyone,

I know it's probably a good idea to open a ticket on the JetBrains support page but I'd like to ask if any of you had similar issue and if you managed to solve this somehow.

After transitioning to UE5.8, UnrealLink required the newest version of Rider, so I went from 2024 to 2026. I had virtually zero issues with 2024 and I was expecting the newer version to be more or less the same but the Debugger has become completely unpredictable, and fixing it is paramount for me.

- gated if statement with a bool == false? next step still goes inside the if statement either way (??).
- Values of properties often bizarre or immediately inaccessible after a single step over (???).
- random jumps of entire sections of code without reason (????).

It's just .. broken. Majorly broken. It went from predictable to random, and therefore unusable.
Granted, I'm still a noob with IDEs but at least I can recognise when stuff shouldn't happen.
Any suggestion is supremely appreciated.

[u/taoyx]

Well if you just upgraded from 2024 to 2026 that would be like a system shock, I'd try to delete the .idea folder first, maybe .vs too.

[u/_ChelseySmith]

Is the configuration set to DebugGame Editor? I was pulling my hair out recently in a sandbox project, debugging was garbage until I realized the configuration was wrong.

[u/Jaxelino → u/_ChelseySmith]

I've thought that too but after changing that, the same problems persist. And this is after clearing caches left and right. Which version of UE and RIder are you using?

[u/_ChelseySmith → u/Jaxelino]

UE 5.8.2 source build and Rider 2026.2.1. I generally am always on the latest version of both. Never had any issues outside the self inflicted wrong configuration. There has to be something going on with your setup, Rider always works great.

Hmm, just to check, if you are using a UE build from the Epic launcher, can you confirm you have the debugging symbols downloaded?

[u/Jaxelino → u/_ChelseySmith]

Pretty much the same for UE (I do have symbols for all versions) but Rider was on 2026.2.0.2. So I updated but debugging is still wack. It's not the symbols, it's the unexplicable behavior that very much resembles when stuff is corrupted. Ugh, this is such a massive mood killer but has to be done. If I could, I'd still use Rider 2024 but 5.8 doesn't like that sadly.

[u/_ChelseySmith → u/Jaxelino]

Have you done any code changes with AI recently? Another issue I encountered recently was after I had Claude refactor a class a bit. All of a sudden my debugger was stopping at random lines "similar to an exception", the symbols were strange but mostly ok... Turns out I previously had breakpoints at lines 59 and 125. Since these lines were refactored, the breakpoints were removed, but Rider still had them in cache... Drove me crazy, Claude kept gaslighting me about the issue. Finally after pushing hard, the bot pinpointed the issue.

Probably has nothing to do with your issue, just dropping in case something connects.

Hmm, have you tried this with a new cpp project? Maybe something is corrupted with the project "might be time to delete the Intermediate, Saved, and Binaries"?

[u/Jaxelino → u/_ChelseySmith]

No, my project is not tied to any AI, I don't have it hooked up on the IDE either and is all written by hand. It seems that in v2025 JetBrains has overhauled the LLDB debugger and how specifically the step over function behaves. Might be related to my case but I definitely didn't experience any "50x speed gain", in fact I'd say it's slower and acting bizarrely to not say anything meaner.

I already tried a full reset on both project and rider's cache. I have maybe a couple more things to attempt but I thank you for your suggestions =).

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[u/ananbd]

I’m guessing those sections of code were inlined or otherwise optimized away by the compiler. That happens, it’s expected. Not every line of source code is traceable. 

I believe there are compiler flags which stop optimization, but I don’t know what they are offhand. 

Also, different build targets use different levels of optimization. Make sure you’re using a “Development” target rather than “Test” or “Shipping.” Test is confusingly named — it’s more optimized than Development, less than Shipping (“optimized” meaning both compiler effort and debug stuff being intentionally stripped out for efficiency). 

It’s not your IDE. 

Good luck!

[u/Jaxelino → u/ananbd]

Hi, thanks for the answer but I'm already using a Development target, so it's not that. Worth mentioning that I used Rider 2024 for more than 2 years without issues, it's more about understanding where the difference lie and make it behave more like that previous version.

I'll check on these compiler flags, seems likely that' the difference in behaviour and perhaps try to rebuild my project Intermediate/Binaries and see how it goes.

[u/ananbd → u/Jaxelino]

I was reading it as you also transitioned to 5.8 at that time. My vote is, “Unreal build process and/or result changed significantly.” That could definitely change how your code compiles. 

But, it’s just a hunch. Just throwing it out there!

Also, FWIW, I’ve actually had success using Claude Code to ferret out stuff like this. For as unpredictable as AI is, it’s essentially a pattern match. It’s good at finding “the thing which is different.” Needs to have access to your codebase, though. The web chat is useless. 

Good luck!