How to hide or disable save in Ren'Py

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Sometimes you may want to hide or disable save in a Ren’Py game—for example, in a visual novel where choices are final.

Quick Menu

To hide the menu at the bottom of the screen, open game/screens.rpy and change the default value of quick_menu:

-default quick_menu = True
+default quick_menu = False

Alternatively, you can hide it from your script after the game starts:

label start:
    $ quick_menu = False

Open game/screens.rpy and find the navigation screen. Comment out or remove the Save button:

textbutton _("Save") action ShowMenu("save")

If you also want to hide loading, remove the Load button:

textbutton _("Load") action ShowMenu("load")

Removing these buttons only removes them from that navigation screen. Other code could still open the screens directly with ShowMenu("save") or ShowMenu("load").

Game Menu

By default, pressing Esc or right-clicking opens the Save screen.

To open another screen instead, set config.game_menu_action in game/options.rpy:

define config.game_menu_action = ShowMenu("preferences")

This example opens the Preferences screen when the player presses Esc or right-clicks.

You can replace preferences with another game-menu screen. In game/screens.rpy, search for tag menu to find the available screens:

  • about
  • preferences
  • history
  • help
  • save
  • load

These changes hide the usual ways to access saving, but they do not disable saving completely if another part of the game calls the save screen or save functions directly.

Rollback

To prevent the user from rolling back the game, add the following to game/options.rpy:

define config.rollback_enabled = False

Alternatively, you can prevent the player from rolling back past a point in your script:

$ renpy.block_rollback()

Save

Hiding the Save and Load buttons does not disable every way of saving or loading. If you also want to disable the standard shortcuts and automatic saves, add the following to game/options.rpy.

Disable save/load keyboard shortcuts:

define config.keymap["save"] = []
define config.keymap["load"] = []
define config.keymap["quick_save"] = []
define config.keymap["quick_load"] = []

Disable quicksave slots:

define config.has_quicksave = False

Disable autosaves:

define config.has_autosave = False