Manually saving a game

[jonassv]

Hi Klei and everyone,

I really enjoy this game, a form of guilty pleasure game.

But I'm still learning and not in the hardcore way, where I accept anything that is disastrous. So going back a bit is usually a strategy of mine.

However, dinner was coming, and I wanted to use the AFK time to get some job done. Normally I just pause the game or quit entirely. 
So, for the first time, I saved the game, manually, as in 'save as', only to find out later, that the "manually saved", as in "this point in time is important to me" does nothing more, that the auto save does. What is the point of 'save as'? 

I get that you don't want a crap ton of save files absorbing precious SSD space, but a single, specific time and scenario should be able to be saved outside the auto saves. Or am I missing something?

[KILLABUDZ]

I think you want to use the "save as" button to name the save as a branch, so when you make the new save the newest save of the old name is your backup.

[Ixenzo]

There are three saves. Autosave is game-wide, across many colonies, and they're overwritten every cycle. "Save" saves the current colony only, so you get a save independent from autosaves. "Save as" is the same as above, except you get to name the file, useful for creating branches of one colony (for testing purposes or something).

If you're only ever playing a single colony at a time, you don't even have to manually save. You also can configure autosave settings on per-colony basis, so that your sandbox test bed colony wouldn't overwrite live colony's autosaves.

[jonassv]

Thanks for the answers and I get your points.

But are the no way, to save at a specific point, say cycle 200, and it remains and never overridden or deleted?
That is without manually copying the save file to another folder?

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, jonassv said:

Thanks for the answers and I get your points.

But are the no way, to save at a specific point, say cycle 200, and it remains and never overridden or deleted?
That is without manually copying the save file to another folder?

There is: Just use a different name in "save as". I usually name my "snapshots" a000, a001, .... so on. "save" overwrites the current one, "save as" with the digits incremented leaves the last save to the old one in place and all saves go to one number higher from there onward. So far I have gotten up to 200 in one extreme case. Sometimes I also do, for example,  "a012  4 dupes" or so and then immediately save as "a013" to preserve that "a012" save.

[jonassv]

Thanks for clearing this up!

Have a great weekend. christmas and new year.