Guide to the Godot game engine/Saving and loading

Most game engines allow you to save files. Godot is no different.

Guide to the Godot game engine

<-- Physics Saving and loading Animation-->

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There are five methods to save files, and each method has at least 1 loading method.

Methods

Resources

These can be loaded with GDScript's built-in load() function. See creating resources for more.

Pros

Load and save built-into Godot

Cons

Hard to debug

Json

Commonly used for sending data over the internet. It's easy to read and modify, so consider compressing or encrypting your save file to prevent cheats. This is especially important in multiplayer games. Alternatively, save player data in the cloud. This will require setting up a server.

Pros

Easy to debug
Fast saving/loading times

Cons

JSON does not define ints, only numbers. All numbers comes out as a float.

File

Files can be opened and parsed with the File object.

Pros

Easy to debug
Easy to encrypt to prevent cheaters

Cons

Can be hard to parse

Xml

Xml is a simple file format, but hard to parse. See XMLParser.

Pros

Widely supported

Cons

Hard to parse

Scenes

This can be done by calling Node.pack(), which turns it and any child with owner set to it, which can be saved with ResourceSaver.save() and loaded with load().

Pros

Built into Godot, can be rather fast

Cons

Saves everything, difficult and time-consuming to select what to save
Hard to debug

You can exclude a node by setting its owner to null. To include a property, make the property exported. If a node's oowner property to anything other than the node that pack() is called on, it will not be saved. Note that this property will have to be set to anything that is added to the scene by script, as they start with no owner.

Notes

Prior to Godot 4.0, file sizes cannot be larger than 24Gib (gigabytes).
A useful text file format is "csv" (comma separated values), where each value is comma (",") separated. Use String.get_csv() to separate them.