Every Godot tutorial pretends save systems are easy. They are not. The choice you make on day one quietly decides whether your save format survives a refactor, whether modders can edit a config, and whether your players lose their progress when you ship a patch. I have shipped two Godot games and dug through the docs and source of a few more. Here are the five save patterns that actually show up in production Godot games, ranked by where they make sense and where they bite you. 1. ConfigFile for settings, not state ConfigFile writes INI-style files: [section] blocks with key = value pairs. The official docs describe it as "creating simple configuration files." It is good at one thing: settings. Audio volumes, resolution, keybinds, accessibility toggles. The file is human-readable, easy to ship as a user://settings.cfg , and trivially editable by tech-savvy players. var cfg = ConfigFile . new () cfg . set_value ( "audio" , "master" , 0.8 ) cfg . set_value ( "controls" , "jump" , "space" ) cfg .…