How to save in Outer Wilds

(Image credit: Mobius Digital)

If you want to know how to save in Outer Wilds, that's a trickier question than you might at first think. The little spacefaring mystery game might reset regularly, but it does seem to be keeping track of your progress regardless, labelling all the different rumors and leads on your ship's log for future reference, and who wants to lose that save file? To that end, we'll show you how to save your game in Outer Wilds, including the new Echoes of the Eye DLC, and what the extreme limitations of it are.

Saving your game in Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds save death — (Image credit: Mobius Digital)

If you want to save your game in Outer Wilds, unfortunately there's only one way to do that: reset the time loop. The game autosaves every time the loop triggers, but there's no other way past that to log permanent progress, and no manual save option.

So if you want to save, the only thing you can do is to die, throwing yourself into the sun or a passing anglerfish, or just quit the game altogether from the pause menu. Either way, the loop resets and you're sent back to the starting campfire on Timber Hearth. Obviously you've lost any physical progress in doing so, but the rumors and data acquired on the ship will now be permanent points of reference that you can't lose and can check over at any time.

This means that saving the game properly - i.e., setting a checkpoint before a dangerous area or to give yourself more time for a difficult puzzle - is impossible, at least until somebody unofficially mods it in. And while that might sound demoralising, consider this: because the time loop only lasts 22 minutes total before you're reset, it means that there's nowhere in the game you can't get to in that amount of time or less. So while you'll lose progress, you can't lose THAT much progress.

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Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and Very Tired Man with a BA from Brunel University, a Masters from Sussex University and a decade working in games journalism, often focused on guides coverage but also in reviews, features and news. His love of games is strongest when it comes to groundbreaking narratives like Disco Elysium, UnderTale and Baldur's Gate 3, as well as innovative or refined gameplay experiences like XCOM, Sifu, Arkham Asylum or Slay the Spire. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at Eurogamer, Gfinity, USgamer, SFX Magazine, RPS, Dicebreaker, VG247, and more.