Dust Front RTS Speicherstände: Was bestätigt ist

Players coming from long grand strategy campaigns tend to ask about saves before they ask about anything else: can I save mid-battle, how often does it autosave, and where do the files live so I can back them up. For Dust Front RTS none of those three has a published answer, and this page keeps that gap clearly marked rather than filling it with a plausible guess.

What the developer has and has not said about saving

The save system is not specified by the developer. There is no published list of save slots, no stated autosave interval, and no published save file path. That means the following are all unconfirmed, and you should not plan around them:

• Whether a manual save command exists, and what key or button it uses.
• Whether the game autosaves, and if so how often or at which points.
• Whether you can save during a battle or only between them.
• Where save files are stored on disk, and whether they can be copied or backed up.
• Whether there is a single campaign save, rotating autosaves, or named slots.

Do not read that as a warning about the game. Dust Front RTS has not released yet — Steam shows it as coming soon, with the release date to be announced and the price not announced. Save behaviour is exactly the kind of detail that gets documented close to launch, and the demo does not exercise it, because the demo is not a campaign.

What is confirmed: progress lives at the global map level

One structural fact is confirmed and it is the useful one. Campaign progress in Dust Front RTS is stored at the campaign and global-map level rather than per battle.

That follows from how the game is built. The real-time battles sit inside a strategic global map — the developer describes the combat as C&C-style, the campaign as in the spirit of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, and the global mode as more complex than either, closer to Total War's strategic layer. Which regions you hold, which strike groups exist and where they are, and how the campaign has gone are the persistent state. An individual battle is a resolution of that state, not the state itself.

The practical consequence for a player is that the thing you would most want protected — the campaign — is the thing the game is organised around persisting. It is still worth saying plainly that the mechanism, the frequency and the file format are unconfirmed.

Veterans: the persistence the developer has described

The clearest confirmed statement about persistence is about units rather than files. The developer's own description is that strike groups and garrisons give you the ability to lead veterans from start to end.

• Strike groups are how the army is organised. Part of your force deploys immediately when a battle begins and the rest arrives as reinforcements; the demo ships an interface for configuring this before the fight starts.
• Garrisons hold units and territory between battles. They are what makes the campaign map behave like a front line rather than a mission list.
• Veterans are the units that survive. Because they carry across battles, a formation you have kept alive through several engagements is a campaign asset, and losing one is a real loss rather than a stat reset.

That is the closest thing to a published answer on what is remembered between sessions: the state that matters is the shape of your army and the ground you hold. Whether that is written to disk automatically, on demand, or only at certain points has not been stated.

The demo is one mission, not a campaign

The free demo does not add information about saving, because it is not structured as a campaign. It is a single procedurally generated mission: the Siege of an Industrial City, one of several battle types focused on macro. The mission type is fixed and the map is always slightly different.

What the demo does let you configure is the difficulty and scale of the fight — a multiplier sets enemy strength and base size, with the enemy base made up to four times larger — and an optional durability and health modifier that multiplies enemy hit points. Since update D-30, chevrons and stars are awarded on the final stat screen for the enemy base multiplier, showing the maximum difficulty multiplier achieved at each enemy base size.

The demo also remains available indefinitely. The developer extended it a week past Next Fest and then left it up, saying no further patches are planned, that it may be used as a public test platform, and that he will not announce when it closes.

Where to get a real answer

If you need the save behaviour confirmed before you commit to a 15-hour campaign, ask the developer. The official Discord is the fastest route — it is where he answers questions informally — and the Steam community hub is the second best. The Steam news hub is where formal mechanics posts appear.

Two things about how he communicates are worth knowing before you ask. He posts rarely on Steam on purpose: posts have to be long, translated and formatted, Steam has no embedded video player, and he will not create artificial news cycles before release. On the release date question specifically he has said he will not answer until he makes an official announcement, because he is not a fan of postponements.

Put together, the pattern is a developer who prefers systems to be met in game rather than itemised in advance. The reasonable reading is that some details are deliberately held back until launch rather than missing. That reading is our interpretation, not a quoted policy.

Related pages

• Dust Front RTS multiplayer and co-op: the honest answer
• The Dust Front RTS demo: what is in it
• Demo patch notes and the D-30 update
• How to play Dust Front RTS: the strategic layer
• Official Dust Front RTS Discord