Saving and progress

There is no save button and no Continue. The game saves itself, and what it saves is your character - never the dungeon you happened to be standing in.

What persists, and what does not

Travels with the hero	Thrown away every session
Level, experience, stats, unspent points	Which dungeon level you were on
Inventory, all ten tabs, belt, equipment, gold	Your position in it
Learned spells and their ranks, class-tree investment	The dungeon layout itself
Both readied buttons	Quest progress inside the run
The waypoint unlock table, one per difficulty	Dropped items left on the floor
The stash (its own file)	Open portals

Selecting a character always starts a fresh dungeon. The "Continue / New Game" prompt is gone from single-player entirely: picking a hero goes straight to the difficulty picker. This is a design statement, not a limitation - V1's goal is building the strongest character across many runs, not finishing one.

Autosave

Two things trigger a save: a timer, and an event worth not losing.

An interval save, every Auto Save Interval minutes (see INI options).
A scheduled save, queued the moment something durable changes. The full list of triggers:

A queued save waits for a safe moment rather than firing mid-swing. It will not run while you are dead or dying, while the game is paused, while a menu or a store or a dialogue is open, while the cursor is holding an item, or during a demo.

If Auto Save Notification is on, a small indicator appears when a save lands, and the event log records every one.

Saving on the way out

Leaving through Main Menu or Exit Game saves first, deliberately bypassing the safe-moment check - because opening the menu to leave is itself one of the conditions that blocks an autosave, so without this the last thing you did would be the one thing you lost.

Waypoints are per character, per difficulty

Every character carries its own table of unlocked waypoints, and there is a separate table for each of the four difficulties. Unlocking Cathedral Level 1 on Normal does not unlock it on Nightmare - those are separate runs with their own progress, exactly as in Diablo II. Activating a waypoint schedules a save on the spot.

Tristram is always unlocked. See Quests, shrines, town for the full waypoint list.

The event log

F11, or the Menu popup on the belt. A timestamped record of the session's noteworthy moments, newest first, scrollable with the mouse wheel.

Every save, interval and exit alike.
Noteworthy item drops - uniques, sets, primals, runeword completions.
Boss and unique-monster kills.
Your deaths, attributed to whatever actually killed you rather than to "you died".
Shrine effects, in red when a shrine takes something from you.
Gold transactions like the respec at Adria, and the run/walk toggle.

The log is session-only: it accumulates for as long as the client stays open, oldest entries dropping off at capacity, and it is never written to disk.

Where the files are

File	Holds
The hero file	The character, its inventory and belt, its equipment, and a chunked tail carrying everything this fork added
A tab sub-file	The nine extra inventory tabs, written alongside the hero
The stash file	The shared stash, saved separately on every change

Old characters break on format changes. This is a fork under active development and the hero format has been extended many times. When a change cannot be made backward-compatible the wiki's Version history says so - the standing rule for V1 is that a broken character is acceptable and a corrupted one is not.