Last updated: 8 September 2026

KCD2 How to Save Your Game Saviour Schnapps, Save & Exit, and Autosaves

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 deliberately does not have a quicksave button, and that trips up more new players than almost anything else in the game — Warhorse Studios has been open about keeping the original's save system as part of its commitment to realism, even after plenty of backlash toward the first game over it. The good news is the sequel is noticeably more forgiving than KCD1: there's now a proper Save & Exit option, autosaves cover most quest and combat moments, and Saviour Schnapps itself is easier to keep stocked. This guide covers every way to save, how to brew and buy Saviour Schnapps, and what changes if you're playing Hardcore Mode.

01Why There's No Quicksave

Warhorse built KCD2's save system around the same philosophy as the first game: progress should feel earned, and the risk of losing it is meant to make you play more carefully rather than reload your way through every mistake. Rather than removing the restriction for the sequel, the studio added more forgiving ways to save around it — an in-menu Save & Exit option and more frequent autosaves — while keeping Saviour Schnapps as the only way to create a save you can reload freely mid-session.

In practice this means you have four distinct ways to save progress, each with different rules. Understanding when each one triggers is the difference between losing five minutes of progress and losing an hour.

02The Four Ways to Save

• Saviour Schnapps: Drinking a dose creates a save you can reload at any time, from anywhere, as many times as you like. This is the only save method with no restrictions on when or where you can use it.
• Save & Exit (pause menu): Quitting through the pause menu's Save & Exit option creates a save file and returns you to the main menu — no Schnapps required. This is new to KCD2 and is the easiest way to guarantee a save before putting the controller down, but it only creates a save at the moment you quit; it doesn't let you reload mid-session the way Schnapps does.
• Sleeping in a bed: Resting in any bed you own (or are otherwise permitted to use) creates a save when you wake up. This has been in the series since the first game and remains one of the most reliable free ways to save on a long play session.
• Autosaves: The game automatically saves after key moments — after dialogue exchanges and after combat encounters, among other triggers — specifically so that dying partway through a quest doesn't send you all the way back to your last manual save. Autosaves are a safety net, not a substitute for saving deliberately before something risky.

Travelling between regions via caravan also creates a save point, which is worth knowing if you're about to attempt something dangerous right after a long journey.

03Saviour Schnapps: Recipe and Where to Get It

Brewing the standard recipe with fresh ingredients yields regular Saviour Schnapps, which heals 20 Health and gives a small temporary boost to Strength, Vitality, and Agility on top of creating a save, so it's worth carrying even outside of its save function. Using old or wilted herbs instead produces a weaker version with a smaller effect.

• Brew it yourself: The recipe uses a wine base, 1× nettle, and 2× belladonna. Nettle is one of the most common herbs in the game; belladonna grows in clearings and leafy woodland, so keep an eye out during forest travel. Once you own the recipe, brewing a batch of six to ten at a lab is far cheaper than buying doses individually.
• Buy it: Apothecaries — including Apothecary Emmerich in Troskowitz — and some innkeepers and bathhouse owners sell Saviour Schnapps directly, along with the recipe itself if you don't have it yet.
• Find it: Doses occasionally turn up in chests and as loot on defeated enemies, though this isn't a reliable primary source.
• Upgrade it: The Alchemy perk that improves Saviour Schnapps produces a stronger version with a bigger healing and stat bonus and a longer duration — worth taking once your Alchemy skill allows it, since the ingredients cost is the same either way.

For the full brewing walkthrough, ingredient locations, and other essential potions, see our dedicated Alchemy Guide.

04Hardcore Mode and Saving

Hardcore Mode does restrict saving: it turns off the regular dialogue-and-combat autosave, so you can no longer count on the game quietly saving your progress in the background. Save & Exit, sleeping in a bed, and Saviour Schnapps all still work exactly as they do outside Hardcore — the game just stops autosaving for you, which makes the other three methods far more important to use deliberately.

In practice this means a Hardcore run leans much more heavily on Saviour Schnapps and Save & Exit than a normal playthrough, since you can no longer rely on an autosave catching a death mid-quest. The rest of Hardcore's added difficulty comes from separate survival and combat systems, not from the save system itself.

05Tips for Not Losing Progress

• Always carry at least three Saviour Schnapps. It's the only save method that works instantly, mid-dungeon or mid-fight, without needing to reach a bed or back out to the pause menu.
• Use Save & Exit as your default "I'm done for now" save. It costs nothing and takes a few seconds — there's no reason to risk losing a session's progress to a crash or an autosave that happened to land at a bad moment.
• Drink a Schnapps before anything genuinely risky. Difficult fights, tricky lockpicks on a unique item, dialogue choices you might want to redo — anywhere the stakes are high enough that you'd want a true retry point.
• Don't rely on autosaves as your safety net for major decisions. They protect you from mid-quest deaths, not from making a story choice you regret — those aren't necessarily near an autosave trigger.
• Stock up on belladonna and nettle before a long trip. Running low on Schnapps ingredients deep into a dungeon or siege, far from an alchemy lab, is the most common way players get caught without a reliable save option.