Starsand Island is essentially what you’d get if Stardew Valley got a total makeover from Studio Ghibli: a cute, anime-esque life sim with a focus on harmonious and natural living in a small, tight-knit island community.
There are admittedly some bumps along the road, however, including but not limited to the game’s surprisingly arcane save system. If this is something that’s been worrying you, rest assured that you’re not alone. Here’s how to save in Starsand Island, as well as everything you need to know about rollbacks and customising autosaves.
How to save in Starsand Island
Don’t beat yourself up when I tell you this, but in order to save in Starsand Island, you just need to press the Esc key and choose the Save option from the menu list.
It’s actually quite understandable why so many players are being caught out by this, though. There are actually two menus: the main menu accessed by pressing “Escape”, and the in-game menu you reach by pressing “Tab”.
The UI and tutorials are very clear about the existence of the latter, but do somewhat gloss over the former – and it gets especially confusing because there is a “Settings” section of the in-game menu, where you’d usually expect to find options like “save” and “quit”. But no, you need to go to the main menu for all that.
Does Starsand Island autosave?
Starsand Island features an autosave system, which by default is set to save your game every 10 real-world minutes. The game also autosaves whenever your character ends the in-game day by going to sleep (or passing out), and when travelling between the Starsand Island and Moonlit Forest maps.
This is potentially good news if you were struggling to find the manual save system we explained above, but it can be frustrating as well – after all, similar games such as The Sims don’t feature autosave at all because of the high likelihood of something happening that makes you want a do-over.
One thing you can do is adjust the frequency of autosaves. Funnily enough, in order to do this, you need to press Tab and then go to Settings – you know, the menu where manual save isn’t even though it really feels like it should be.
Head to the Game tab of the Settings menu. Under the “Save File” heading, you can change the Autosave Interval, with options on the drop-down menu to autosave every 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes (default), or 20 minutes. Unfortunately there’s no way to turn off autosave altogether, but with the game still being in early access, hopefully that’s a feature that will arrive in response to player feedback.
How to rollback saves in Starsand Island
If you really can’t stand something that just happened in Starsand Island, you have the option to rollback to a previous save. However, be aware that this will cost you at least the current in-game day’s worth of progress.
To rollback a save, press Esc and select Rollback to Previous Save from the main menu options. You’ll see a list of backup saves to choose from: basically, you have the choice to restart from any in-game day for up to the last seven days (not inclusive of the current in-game day).
In other words, your only backup save options are created when you end the day by sleeping; you can’t rollback to a previous manual save, timed autosave, or autosave generated from travelling between maps. It’s a limited system, for sure, but hopefully it’s enough to use in case of emergency, like if you’ve accidentally gone and romanced the wrong character.
For more on Starsand Island, be sure to check out our Starsand Island codes list. And to avoid another couple of common sources of confusion, here are our pages on how to get the Cutter 1 blueprint and where to find all of the mentors.