How Can I Save the Game?
If you’ve completed the tutorial you can save at any time from the pause menu while in the garage, if you’re out on a trip, you’ll need to complete your current junction in order to trigger the autosave.
You should try to exit the map! If you’re on a trip with multiple stops, moving on to the next one will auto-save your progress, and if you’re already at an end destination, you should gather anchors and activate a gateway, which will auto-save your progress when you go back to the garage.
Devs go into more detail about our save system, how it functions, and why:
Saving on a Trip in Progress
Currently, saving functions like this: when you’re in the garage, you are able save up to your current level of progress. Parts will stay on the ground, your inventory stays the same, you’ll even have the same amount of gas in the tank for the car, etc. While out on a trip into the Zone it’s a bit different. You’ll keep all your progress up to the current junction, but nothing after – your game will save automatically when you enter a new level and the game won’t save again until you get back to the garage, or move on to the next junction.
Due to the scope of the game, and our focus on providing a robust and varied experience across a high number of trips into the zone, with variable map sizes, anomaly populations, and the amount of hazards, we had to make technical sacrifices early on in the project that makes revisiting this save behavior not feasible. While we understand why this is highly requested, it’s not something we plan on revisiting for those reasons.
We believe that once a majority of players have had time in the game, it’ll be apparent why the save system is working this way. The game gets much faster and more intense the more you learn your way around the Zone and you’ll have plenty of time to grab the essentials and get out or take your time and explore. If you do need to save mid-run, just head for the next exit and then you can safely quit the game once you load into the next level, without losing any progress.
Devs
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a Save+Quit function set up that auto-ends the run and returns you to your starting point that acts as if you’d died and had to return back to the garage like the demo settings as an example of what to keep/lose used.
That’s very different from a suspend/save and continue function which, as someone who does software development, I can see how they’d make some decisions early on and make implementing ‘save + continue’ very difficult to add in later on in any reasonable time frame. Worst case they might have to literally re-write the entire game to make it feasible OR make a huge clunky solution of writing all the data and then adding in a new override function that’d make it super easy to cheat and/or brick the game via writing/loading a world-‘text’-file of the data of everything in the current zone. That might also eat up memory really quick depending on things too.
can they eventually add it in, sure, but that’s probably gonna be a month or two more work depending on what they’ve done lol.