It's annoying when your roblox startergui screen gui reset on spawn settings keep wiping your custom menus or health bars every time a character reloads. You spend hours designing the perfect inventory system or a sleek shop interface, only to realize that as soon as a player trips on a part and resets, the entire UI goes back to its default state. If you've been pulling your hair out wondering why your variables aren't saving or why that "Close" button suddenly reappears after a death, you're definitely in the right place.
Why does the UI keep resetting?
To understand how to fix this, we have to look at how Roblox handles the StarterGui folder. Think of StarterGui as a template. Everything you put in there is just a master copy. When a player joins the game, Roblox takes everything in StarterGui and clones it into that specific player's PlayerGui folder.
The catch is that, by default, Roblox treats every character respawn as a fresh start for the UI. It thinks, "Hey, the player died, so let's just delete their current UI and give them a brand-new copy from the StarterGui template." This behavior is governed by a single property that's tucked away in the Properties window, and it's the culprit behind almost every "my GUI won't stay closed" complaint.
The simple fix: ResetOnSpawn
If you want to stop the madness, the solution is actually much simpler than writing fifty lines of Luau code. Every ScreenGui object has a property called ResetOnSpawn.
By default, this box is checked. When it's checked, the GUI is deleted and re-cloned every time the Player.Character is added to the workspace. If you uncheck that box, the GUI stays in the PlayerGui folder for the entire duration of the player's session. It doesn't matter if they fall off the map or get hit by a sword; the UI will remain exactly as it was before they died.
I've seen a lot of beginners forget this exists, and they end up trying to write complex scripts to "save" the state of their UI. Save yourself the trouble—just click the checkbox.
When should you keep ResetOnSpawn on?
You might be thinking, "Well, if it's so annoying, why is it on by default?" The truth is, there are plenty of times when you want the UI to reset.
Take a "You Died" screen, for example. If you have a custom death message that triggers when the player's health hits zero, you probably want that to disappear and reset once they are back in the game. Or maybe you have a round-based game where the UI needs to clear out old data every time a new life begins. In those specific cases, leaving ResetOnSpawn enabled is actually the easiest way to handle the cleanup.
But for things like main menus, settings toggles, or currency displays? You almost always want that property turned off. There's nothing more immersion-breaking for a player than having to re-mute the game music every time they respawn because the settings menu reset itself.
Dealing with scripts and local state
Once you turn off the reset property, you have to change how you think about your LocalScripts. When a GUI resets on spawn, any script inside it also restarts. This means all your variables inside that script are wiped clean and start from scratch.
However, once you disable ResetOnSpawn, that script is going to keep running as long as the player is in the game. This is great for performance because you aren't constantly killing and creating new threads, but it can lead to some "ghost" bugs if you aren't careful. For instance, if your script is looking for a player's character, it might still be holding a reference to the old character that just died.
To fix this, you'll want to use the CharacterAdded signal within your LocalScripts. Instead of assuming the character exists when the script starts, you set up a listener. It looks something like this:
lua local player = game.Players.LocalPlayer player.CharacterAdded:Connect(function(newCharacter) -- This code runs every time the player respawns, even if the UI doesn't reset print("Player is back, let's update the UI references!") end)
By doing this, you get the best of both worlds: a GUI that stays put and code that stays updated.
The StarterGui vs. PlayerGui trap
One thing that trips up a lot of people is trying to change the UI through a ServerScript inside the StarterGui folder. I'll be blunt: don't do that.
StarterGui is basically a storage container. Changing something in StarterGui while the game is running won't change what the players are currently seeing on their screens; it will only change what new players see when they join or what people see the next time their UI clones (if ResetOnSpawn is still on).
If you want to manipulate a player's GUI, you have to go into game.Players.PlayerName.PlayerGui. But even then, GUI work should almost always be handled on the Client via LocalScripts. If you find yourself trying to force a UI change from the server because you're worried about the roblox startergui screen gui reset on spawn logic, you're probably overcomplicating it. Use RemoteEvents to tell the client when to show or hide something, and let the client-side logic handle the rest.
Common mistakes to avoid
Even after unchecking that magical box, you might run into some weirdness. Here are a few things I've noticed over the years:
- Parenting Issues: If you have a ScreenGui with ResetOnSpawn set to false, but inside that GUI you have a Frame that you are manually re-parenting to something else, you might lose it. Keep your UI elements organized within the ScreenGui they belong to.
- The "Everything is Invisible" Bug: Sometimes, if you have a complex intro sequence that hides the UI, and you've turned off ResetOnSpawn, the UI might stay hidden forever if the player dies mid-intro. You'll need to add logic to your script to "reset" the visibility manually if a certain event happens.
- Memory Leaks: If you're creating new UI elements via scripts and you've turned off the reset property, Roblox won't clean those up for you when the player dies. Make sure you're destroying old or unneeded frames so you don't bog down the player's device.
Designing UI for persistence
When you decide that a GUI shouldn't reset, you're basically committing to a "persistent" UI design. This is a bit of a different mindset. You need to ensure that your UI can handle state changes gracefully.
For example, if you have a quest tracker, it should probably be persistent. If the player dies while they have three out of five items collected, they don't want to see "0/5" just because the UI re-cloned itself. By disabling the reset, the text label stays at "3/5." It feels much more professional and polished.
On the flip side, consider the "health bar." While you don't want the bar itself to disappear, you do want the value of the bar to update when the player gets their health back. This is why connecting your UI to the Humanoid.HealthChanged event is so much better than relying on a GUI reset to "refresh" the health bar display.
Wrapping it up
At the end of the day, managing the roblox startergui screen gui reset on spawn behavior is one of those small details that separates a "my first game" project from a finished product. It's all about control. By default, Roblox tries to help you by cleaning up the mess, but as you get more advanced, that "help" starts getting in the way.
Just remember the golden rule: Checkboxes for the easy stuff, and CharacterAdded for the heavy lifting. Once you get the hang of toggling ResetOnSpawn and managing your UI states through LocalScripts, you'll find that your game feels a whole lot more stable.
It might seem like a tiny property, but it's the key to making sure your players don't get frustrated by disappearing menus or resetting progress. So go ahead, dive into those ScreenGui properties, uncheck that box, and start building a UI that actually stays where you put it!