NOTE: As far as I can determine this method no longer works. My apologies.

One of the biggest complaint about BioShock Infinite is the save system. The game autosaves and you can get one autosave. If you want to go back, you have to go and restart the chapter. Well, I can’t do anything about the game only autosaving at certain points, but I have figured out a way to get more autosaves. Now this is a work around and requires opening files and either copying them or changing files names. It’s not overly hard to do though. Of course this only works for the PC.

First thing you need to do is turn off Steam Cloud. Having it running will probably mess things up in some way. Next open up the following directory.

“Steam\userdata\(Steam ID Number\8870\remote\savedata”

This is the location where BioShock Infinite stores its save game files. It would be a very good idea to create a shortcut to this directory. Once there, you will find a bunch of files that look similar to those below.

TC_CabRide-0_9_7_2016_8_55_56_10.sav
TC_CabRide-0_9_7_2016_8_55_56_10.bkm

Most files will end with “bkm” and at least two of them will end with “sav”. All of these different types of saved games. Those files ending with “bkm” are chapter starts. BSI allows you load the game from chapter starts so we can mostly ignore these files for the moment.

The files we want are those that end with “sav”.

As you can see above these files start with letters and end with numbers. The first 2 letters are the map. In this case “TC” stands for “Town Center”. The rest of the letters indicate a specific location on the map where the autosave as triggered. “CabRide” is the entrance to the “Montgomery Residence”. The numbers are the date and time stamp for the autosave. But the last number, in this case “10” is the sequential number of the autosave. This number is important, so remember it.

Now I said earlier that there could be more than two sav files in this directory. If you have any of the DLC they will have their own sav files. Now why are there so few autosave files? Shouldn’t there be an autosave file for every autosave? Well, there isn’t. BSI deletes old autosaves as it creates new ones BUT there is hope.

Remember: Safety First! Before doing anything, make a copy of the “savedata” directory until you are comfortable with what you are doing. That way if you make a mistake you have a backup.

Even with if you don’t have any DLC, there are two sav files. When the game deletes the old autosaves it deletes the older one from before the previous autosave. So if BSI autosaves sequence number “10”, the games deletes autosave number “8”. This means that autosave “9” is still there, safe and sound. Now there are a number of different ways to keep the older autosaves around. A simple way to make a copy of the sav and put it in another directory. A good way to help keep the files in order is to set the "View" to "Sorting By Date".

Now you don’t have to exit the game to save your “extra” autosaves. You can just minimize BioShock Infinite and copy files at will. The game will go to a menu and you won’t miss a moment of the action. I would not advise deleting *any* files while the game is running as I don’t know what would happen. Maybe nothing would happen, maybe not.


So now you have old autosave files, how do you use them? This is a little trickier and BSI should not be running when you try this. In order to use an old autosave file you have to either rename, delete or move the files with a sequential number higher than the one you want to use. For example, I want to use autosave “5” and your current autosave sequence number is “67”, you need to move/rename/delete sequence numbers “66” AND “67”. Just to be on the safe side I would add autosaves “4” and “5” in the directory, not just “5". I don’t know what BSI would do if it went to delete an old autosave (number “4”) and it couldn’t find it. Nothing may happen, or you could crash the game. I would rather not find out.

Now as I am playing through BSI again I am “collecting” autosave files. Not just a few, but everyone that I can. That way if I need to go back to a specific area but don’t want to play through a large portion of a chapter I can easily go back.

A little on the bak files. These files are actually the same file as a sav file, but have a different name to signify that they are the start of a new game chapter. You can actually copy a “bak file and change the file type to “sav” and it will work. There is no reason to do this though.

I hope this has been useful for folks out there! sm