State of Decay 2 How to Save: Are There Manual Saves?

Figuring out how to save in State of Decay 2 is one of the first things that you’ll want to learn. Since there’s permadeath, you’ll likely want to know how to make a manual save and how the autosave works, so you don’t lose that survivor that you’ve spent hours leveling up. Below we’ve got everything you need to know about the save system in State of Decay 2.

How to Save in State of Decay 2

There are three community save slots in State of Decay 2, and once you start your game, you’ll just have the one autosave to load. Unfortunately, there aren’t multiple save slots for each community, so you’re stuck with the single one. The game often autosaves, for better or worse, so you never have to worry about losing much progress if you quit the game.

Because the game autosaves so much, there’s quite a bit of permanency to your actions. This means you have to be extra careful with your survivors. If they die and the game autosaves, then they’re permanently dead. You can avoid this by quitting out of the game before they die, but once they’re dead, you’re unlikely to beat the autosave.

The one thing that the autosave won’t save in State of Decay 2 is mission progress. If you’re in the middle of a mission and quit, you’ll have to start the whole thing over when you load the game again. This isn’t too inconvenient since each mission isn’t that long, but it can still be annoying if you only have a limited time to play.

How to Manually Save in State of Decay 2

So with permadeath being an ever-present threat in State of Decay 2, it’d be nice to have the ability to save manually, right? Well, there are no manual saves in this game. I guess Undead Labs doesn’t want players save scumming. Since there’s an emphasis on realism in State of Decay 2, I can understand why they didn’t put manual saving in the game.

You can tell that your game has autosaved successfully when “Saving” appears in the top-right corner of the screen. You can force an autosave by either completing a mission or switching to another character as well. So if you want to make entirely sure you’ve saved then do one of those two things, and you should be golden.