Permafrost: How to Save Your Game (and Not Lose It)

Quick answer: open the pause menu and choose Save — you can save manually almost anywhere. Autosave exists, but players have found it can be over an hour old after a crash, so save by hand before cold zones, caves and big fights.

How to save

1. Open the pause menu (Esc).
2. Choose Save.
3. Do it before anything risky: cold-zone runs, cave dives, the military-base climb, quest turn-ins.

In a solo private session, the game pauses while the menu is open — saving mid-planning is free.

Autosave: don't rely on it

The game autosaves periodically, but Early Access players report the autosave being over an hour stale after a crash. Treat autosave as a seatbelt, not a plan. Save manually:

• before entering a cold zone or cave
• after any big loot haul (a rifle, a schematic, a stack of ingots)
• before logging off, always

Death, respawns and your backpack

• Claim a bed (interact with it) to set your personal respawn point. Sleeping bags and tents act as temporary respawns in the field.
• When you die, your backpack drops where you fell — you respawn at your bed and can run back to recover it. Save before risky areas so a failed recovery costs you nothing.
• Some world settings (Custom preset) adjust what you lose on death.

Co-op save rules

• The world save belongs to the host. All quest and world progress lives in that save.
• Characters are world-bound — you can't carry a character between different hosts' worlds.
• The host should save before anyone leaves the session; if the host crashes, everyone rolls back to the last save.
• Only the host's world persists between sessions — guests keep their character in that world, on that host's disk.

FAQ

Can I save mid-fight? The menu pauses solo private sessions, but save before trouble, not during — combat and storms also block fast travel and sleeping.

I crashed and lost an hour. Normal? Known Early Access pain point tied to the long autosave interval. Manual saves are the fix.

Where are saves stored? We haven't verified the exact file path on the current build — don't trust third-party claims until we can. (If you need a backup, the safest documented route is the in-game save plus Steam Cloud, which the game supports.)

Related: Beginner guide · Base building & beds · Co-op save rules