How we find your save files
This was supposed to be easy. “We can find files and directories, so we need just a few more options…” What did we get ourselves into?
Well, however we got here, we have arrived. We built a way to find save files that works across most games. The mechanism consists of locations and layouts. Location is where we should look for save games. Layout is out of all these files and directories, what exactly we include in a single save.
Most of you won’t need to care about any of this — and we hope you won’t have to. Save Override is supposed to “just work”. But unfortunately, magic does not exist. Someone has to do the actual work. The rest of this post — all the details about locations and layouts — is for advanced players. You’re the brave few — first to find a new game, figure out its details, and recommend a config to everyone else.
The success of Save Override will depend on the quality of the data that drives how we find save games. If there are any problems in this data, saves will not be detected, backed up or restored properly. There are thousands of games out there. We’re avid gamers, but we can’t play and configure all of them ourselves. So we need your help. Well, we can at least be polite about it, and we can do our best to make this “work” as quick and painless as possible.
That’s the core of the update we’re shipping today in v2026.21: our combined location and layout editor.
Locations come with recommendations, and lots of expansion symbols to remove any of your personal info (like username, Steam ID, etc.) from the location and thus make it suitable for sharing. Before you can recommend a location to others, the editor checks that those personal bits have been swapped out for symbols — so what you share stays free of your details.
The layout editor is even more powerful. It has ways to identify saves, name them, include or exclude files or folders, using globs or regular expressions. You can do all of this in a form that guides you, or in raw YAML when you want a rule as complex as you need.
And a live preview shows you exactly which files your configuration will capture.
Any changes you make live on in two ways. First, they become “your” configuration, which you can reuse on your other computers. So, there are no limits on how you want to configure your game. But also, your config (if properly anonymized) will be recommended to our moderators. They will regularly go through all the recommendations, and take the best of them to add as our official locations and layouts. This way, through crowd-sourcing, we hope to build a catalog that helps the whole community.
Our data and catalog come from a variety of sources. Main game data is mirrored from IGDB. We also took some portions of data from Ludusavi. It’s the tool we used before we built Save Override, and we found it genuinely useful. And most of our data will come from our users. It is important to acknowledge all this. We do not want to benefit from other people’s work without giving back. We will give data from our database back to Ludusavi and IGDB if there’s something in it useful to them. We also want to reward the players who help us succeed. While we don’t have concrete plans, we want these words to be out there as a promise and commitment.
Locations and layouts are live in v2026.21. You can read how to edit them in detail in our guides for locations and layouts. As usual, we welcome your feedback. Join the conversation on our Discord.
— The Player Override Team