The Stale Godot Class Cache Bug That Passed CI but Broke Local Startup

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup powered by Sentry . Project overview Nocturne Vania is a small pixel-art Metroidvania built with Godot 4. The game has interconnected rooms, enemy AI, save data, unlockable movement abilities, and a growing automated test suite. I hit this bug after adding a bell tower area. The new rooms, enemies, effects, and map markers used GDScript's class_name keyword so they could be referenced as global types. The new area worked in a freshly imported project and in CI. It did not always work in an existing local checkout. Bug fix or performance improvement Godot stores imported project data under .godot . An editor session that predated the bell tower scripts could still have an old global_script_class_cache.cfg . In that state, starting the game caused a parse error because scripts such as game.gd referred directly to global types that were missing from the stale cache. One room script, for example, inherited from a new global class by name: extends TowerRoom The test code also used the new classes for casts and enum access: var sentinel : = await _test_spawn_enemy ( "res://src/enemies/clockwork_sentinel.tscn" , Vector2 ( 320 , 300 ) ) as ClockworkSentinel if sentinel . _state == ClockworkSentinel . State . CHARGE : charged = true Those references were valid after Godot refreshed its global class registry. Before that refresh, the parser could not resolve them. CI missed the problem because the test workflow imported the project before running the suite. The import regenerated the cache, so CI always tested the healthy state. Local startup followed a different order and exposed the bug. Refreshing or deleting .godot could repair one checkout, but it left the startup dependency in the code. I wanted the game to parse even before the editor rebuilt the cache. Code I merged the complete fix as PR #95 in the project's private repository. Since the repository is not publicly accessible, the relevant before-and-af