Skyrim autosaves

Recently I have begun to play Skyrim as I once played it but never really carried it on. However, I have reached a problem.

For example, during the quest Bleak Falls Barrow - upon completion I noticed that the whole level had been broken up into 4 or 5 autosave segments. I liked this as I could easily load one of them and play from any which part in the level. The same can be said for gameplay outside of levels, as it keeps a charter if you will of my progress, it makes autosaves automatically where I find them to be most important so that I can replay a point in time if I wish to correct something.

Today, however I played it again to find that these autosaves made during the level are not there anymore - why is this the case?

Solution 1:

Skyrim creates auto saves that are usable from the load menu by default at the following times:

• When entering certain areas (usually quest related)
• When the character menu (inventory/map/magic/skills) or the pause menu is opened after a set amount of time has passed, configurable in settings.
• On waiting
• On sleeping
• On fast travel

However, these are created on a rolling system which by default only allows for three auto-saves to be kept. Once there are more than three autosaves (including across characters), the oldest one will be overwritten on the next save.

In addition to this, whenever you encounter a loading screen a temporary non loadable save is made that serves as your respawn point if killed. There are no story replay style saves (as seen in GTA V, for example) in Skyrim, nor to my knowledge ever have there been.

Manual saves can be made at any time, and if you are playing on PC then there is a mod available that adds new autosave options.

Solution 2:

To add to Rory's answer, if you're playing on the PC, you can change the amount of autosaves that Skyrim keeps by setting this in your INI file (My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Skyrim.ini):

[SaveGame]
iAutoSaveCount=x

x is the number of autosaves you want Skyrim to keep. Increasing this variable will allow you to have more autosaves to choose from in case you need to load a previous save. .

If you're playing on the PC, the mod, Auto-save and time adds additional auto-save events to the vanilla game: at discovery of new location, after clearing a dungeon, at completion of a quest and when the player leaves the combat area. This will allow you to have more specific gameplay points to choose from in case you need to load a previous save.