Skyrim creates thousands of save files?

[Acrylique]

I stumbled over the folder C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\Saves today, and there were almost 30.000 save files in there. Cleaned up most of them (Older ones), and now I'm wondering if this is normal.

[SpeedFreak1972]

Depends really I mean quick saves, etc are mostly overwritten, however normal saves are not so if you have an extremely long play through it will accumulate

[CrackeR]

Depends on what you direct the game to do with auto saves in Options.

[Zero McDol]

Autosaves tend to add up, yea.

I often go into my save folder and delete autosaves, so there's never a chance for them to pile up. I've had as many as 20 autosaves in my folder though.

[xybolt]

You have spent lots of hours in the game I guess :)

When performing a manual game save, you can cycle through your manual saves and do an overwrite instead of creating a new game save file.

Also, for autosaves, it should cycle through three files by default. There is an Skyrim.ini setting for this, iAutoSaveCount. It should be "3"

[Death Approaches]

it is not, and it is. 30k woof that's impressive, well done! :-) as crack said, there are settings, if all autosave methods are enabled plus all your manual saves and quicksaves, and this is per-character... it adds up really fast if you don't manage it. I'm guessing it took a few seconds for you to even see the list, now that you pared that down (hopefully to just a thousand or so) you'll make loading menu much snappier.

You can do it through the menu under Gameplay or manually, go to your SkyrimPrefs.ini file where your saves folder is, and in the [Main] category, find or add:

bSaveOnPause=0
bSaveOnTravel=0
bSaveOnWait=0
bSaveOnRest=0

now you're responsible for almost all your own saves; if all 4 are on, you're getting a lot of saves! But if you want some autosaves, as xy said you can set a cap on the amount, ontravel is a an OK one, some prefer onpause, then you tweak the time increment under [SaveGame] with fAutosaveEveryXMins=<minutes_between_saves> but I think it defaults to 15, you probably want to increase that, unless you rarely manually save. (which can be bad, please make manual saves sometimes, or use something that solves this for you, like SSE Engine Fixes that can turn all quicksaves into full saves.)

and if you use mods and SKSE, there's a whole other set of saves you have to manage, too. :-) Always delete only the matching named ones, as they're, you know, kinda important.

Also if you do use mods, check out PO3's regional save namer https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/49698

this changes the generic overland "Skyrim" or region names to something more specific, if you prefer deleting old saves from within the game loading screen with X before it gets so out-of-hand you have to go bulk delete from file explorer. (and SSE Engine Fixes helps and deletes the matching .skse cosave for you when done this way.)

you will still eventually have to go clean up, though. they do accumulate.

[Acrylique]

Maybe I shouldn't admit it, but yeah, 2600 hours is a lot I guess. And thanks for the very helpful(!) replies!

@Death Approaches, OK, there's quite a bit for me to read, as I do use SKSE. I think I'll look at ontravel or onpause, as those are going to be most of my saves. I'll also check out the save namer.

Again, thanks a lot for the well written reply, much appreciated!