The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom features a massive world, and despite the fact that the game does have an auto-save to store your progress every now and then, sometimes players are in a hurry to leave, or they are in a critical situation, and they need to save the progress before moving further.
This is when a manual save can come in handy. If you wonder how you can save your progress, we can help you with that!
Updated by Chad Thesen on 28 June 2023: This guide has been reviewed and some additional embedded links have been added for the convenient navigation of the reader.
How To Manually Save The Game
In order to save your progress manually, press the "Plus" button on your JoyCon to open up the inventory menu. Now, press "R" multiple times to switch to the Setting tab, which is showcased with a gear icon. Here you can spot an option for saving.
Click on it, and then click on "Save." That's all you need to save your progress.
After exiting the game, if you want to resume your adventure from your manual save, you should select the "Load" option in the main menu, as the "Continue" button will boot up the game from the latest auto-save. You can also load your manual save from the same Setting page that we talked about earlier.
Keep in mind that you cannot access manual save during cut scenes. The game always triggers an auto-save after every major cut scene, but if you want to boot up before a cut scene, you need to save your progress manually before completing any quest.
Best Time To Manually Save
One of the best use cases of manual save is when you discover a new area but are unsure if you will face any big threat ahead. A manual save could allow you bravely delve into the dangerous zones knowing that you will not lose much progress at the end of the day, no matter what could happen to Link. This is also quite useful to have a manual save next to the auto-save, so you can experience a mission or quest once again if you need to learn something about the story, take a screenshot, or just have fun for another time.
Keep in mind that you should overwrite your previous manual save when you want to store your progress again. In order to create a new save slot, you need to create a new run from the very beginning.