Hmm, to prevent covering UI in godot I would just set label ordering to 1 (higher than sprite animation/sprite). Maybe in Unity its similar?
Viewing post in Super Cute Slime Attack jam comments
Yeah, it has that. It also has Sorting Layers, in which you can assign a renderer to a specific layer to control draw order. On top of that, Order in Layer lets you further refine rendering within the same sorting layer.
I already put particle effects in a sorting layer behind the UI element, so I suspect something else is misconfigured; possibly a parent object or another renderer higher up in the hierarchy.