The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - How to Save Your Game

Published May 11, 2023, 9:38 AM EDT

Greysun is the Lead Guides Editor at The Best War Games, where he oversees game help coverage for everything from the biggest AAA releases to standout indie and live-service titles.

Professionally, Greysun has been writing and editing video game content for over a decade. Before joining The Best War Games, he spent over four years at Twinfinite, where he worked his way up from Contributing Writer to News Reporter and, ultimately, Features Editor. During that time, he covered major industry news, reviews, guides, and opinion pieces, edited dozens of articles each week, and helped shape the site's content strategy. He has also attended major gaming events such as E3 and PAX, interviewing developers, covering breaking news, and writing opinion pieces on unreleased titles.

Since joining The Best War Games in 2021, Greysun has served as Lead Guides Editor, planning and managing guide coverage across major releases, coordinating with freelancers, maintaining editorial standards, and writing dozens of articles each month.

A lifelong Nintendo fan since the SNES era, Greysun has a particular soft spot for platformers, JRPGs, and action games that reward curiosity and exploration. He is still patiently awaiting a true sequel to Super Mario Odyssey.

This article is part of a directory: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Complete Guide & Walkthrough

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a meaty game with lots to explore and discover. And because there's just so much stuff to find, players will want to make sure that their precious game progress is kept safe and sound. This guide will show Tears of the Kingdom players how to save their game so they never lose any important items like Korok Seeds or have to repeat tricky parts of the adventure, like Shrines and dungeon puzzles.

How to Save in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Thankfully, saving in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is just as easy as it was in the original Zelda: Breath of the Wild that came out back in 2017 for the Nintendo Switch.

Players just need to hit the pause button (+) and then tab over to the System page to find the Save and Load options. Simply hit the Save button, and all progress will be saved, allowing players to load up the file whenever they come back to Hyrule. There will also be several autosave files to load, just in case players make a mistake and want to revert to a previous save state.

basic controls save screen zelda tears of the kingdom

It's also worth noting that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will auto-save during certain moments, giving players even more chances to keep their progress safe. There will be a message in the lower corner of the screen, and it will pop up often.

We've found that Tears of the Kingdom will autosave during several activities, like when players discover a brand-new area, find one of the hundreds of Korok Seeds, unlock shrines, etc. Basically, as long as players are finding new things, their progress should never be lost --that is, unless players go into the Switch settings and manually delete the save data for Tears of the Kingdom.

How to Delete Save Data for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Nintendo Switch OLED model promo vignette edit — A lifestyle promo image of the white Nintendo Switch OLED.

For anyone that wants to clear all of their save data for Tears of the Kingdom for whatever reason, they'll need to head into the Switch's system settings and then hit Data Management. From there, press Delete Save Data and then choose the game.