Auto-saving is pretty common in just about every game on the market these days, but that feature does not exist in NieR: Automata. In fact, the game will tell you several times that it doesn’t support auto-saving, just to make sure that you’re perfectly clear that the game won’t be saving your progress for you. While this will be a nuisance for some, you can usually save frequently and this guide will show you how.
Saving in this game is done by using Access Points, which are machines that are located throughout the entire game. While some Access Points will be free for you to just walk up to for you to use, you’ll find that many of them out in the wild will be surrounded by enemies and will have a force field around them. If that’s the case, then simply defeat all of the enemies that are surrounding the Access Point in order to remove the force field.
Now that you have access to the Access Point, go up to it and press the circle button in order to open the menu. Here you will have the ability to perform a quick save, which will overwrite whichever of the 3 standard save slots you saved in last. However, as long as you are in range of the Access Point you will be able to quick save even without interacting with the Access Point, which you can do through the main menu in the Map tab. If you would rather do a traditional save to a slot of your choosing, be sure you are in range of the Access Point and go to the System Tab and select save.
While saving manually is something that you’ll eventually get used to in NieR: Automata, it definitely throws people off when starting a new game. Losing large chunks of progress is never a good thing, so always make sure you utilize every Access Point that you come into contact with to make sure that your progress is secure.
