Saving the Game

     You can save your progress in several ways: manual, quick, and automatic saves.

• Automatic Saves – These occur at key moments, like when moving between locations, starting a cutscene, or just before important story events. They’re handy if you forget to save or want to experiment with different quest outcomes. Automatic saves happen in the background, without needing to pause the game, and are stored in dedicated auto-save slots.
• Manual Saves – These let you save your game at any chosen point, ideal for returning to a specific moment, especially before risky encounters or critical choices. Sometimes manual saving may not be possible, and a prompt will notify you. There are two manual save options: regular saves and quicksaves. Quicksaves overwrite a single slot, while regular saves can be stored in multiple slots, allowing you to return to various points in the game.
  • To make a quick save, press F5 on the keyboard. To load the latest quick save, press F8.
  • On a gamepad, press Y in the pause menu to quick save.
  • For a regular save, open the pause menu, select Save Game, and choose a slot.

     Save Slot Limits: You have 3 campaign slots, each with capacity for 31 manual saves, 10 auto-saves, 3 quicksaves, and 6 mission-specific auto-saves. When slots are full, a prompt will notify you.

     If you encounter an issue saving, you may need more disk space. A message will inform you if this is the case. Free up space by deleting unneeded saves.

Where to Find Save Files

     On PC, save files are located at:

• Steam, GOG, Epic Games Launcher:
  \Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\SaveGames
•  Microsoft Store/Xbox App (PC GamePass):
  \Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Packages\GSCGameWorld.S.T.A.L.K.E.R.2HeartofChernobyl_6fr1t1rwfarwt\SystemAppData\xgs\

     To use saves from another player, transfer their entire save folder to this location.