Limiting the number of auto-saves in SkyrimSE

I've noticed with the Special Edition that they've done some work to clean things up in terms of the save system, namely with separating saves between different characters.

However, there's a slight niggle with this; I have TONS and TONS of autosaves. Ohhh by Ysmir's beard do I have a lot of autosaves. Is there a way to limit how many the game will keep before deleting/over-writing existing ones?

1 Answer

I have discovered a solution!

You will need to find the location of your Skyrim.ini file. This is typically located in:

C:/Users/#you#/My Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition

Open this file with a text editor of choice, and at the very bottom of the file, add the following lines:

[SaveGame]
iAutoSaveCount=3

This will limit SkyrimSE to only keep 3 autosave files, overwriting the oldest one each time. This is particularly useful because each save can be upwards of 3MB depending on content/mods, so limiting this can save a ton of space.

EDIT: Additionally, you will want to disable/clear Steam's file sync process, if you had it enabled. If you remove the bulk of your saves, Steam will try to redownload them from the cloud.