I'm going to make the argument again that the game should have some form of autosave. The dev seems to argue against implementing it because saving takes a long time. That only matters if it is mandatory. It doesn't even have to be the default, but people should have the option to enable it.
I believe there might be a mod that adds this functionality but I would argue that this is pretty core to any progression based game and needs to be in the base. Mod interaction is unpredictable, and the support for such an important feature should not be delegated to the community.
Some have flippantly told people to quick save religiously. Maybe that works for them, but as someone who has lost multiple hours of gameplay on multiple occasions because I haven't got into the habit yet, I want the ability to enable autosaves. I can hack the few seconds it takes and for those who won't they don't need to enable it. 5 seconds compounding into minutes over a long play session vs multiple hours lost seems like a good trade. And this argument is strengthened when it regards to new players who haven't gotten in the habit yet and are more likely to be put off the game entirely when they lose their first few gaming sessions.
As suggestions for implementation, at least 3-5 rotating autosave slots are best practices. As for when to autosave, I would argue either time based like every 6 months or a year, or event based like before combat. Before combat as compared to after combat would allow people to retry difficult battles. Most long time players seem to quick save before anyhow, why not make it automatic. Another option would be when jumping into and/or out of a system. You already have some transition animations taking up time and this time could be used to make the save without adding much extra time to the player.
If I had my way I would also have quick saves a separate entity from save saves. In fact this game does not have a "quick save" function. F5 saves and F9 loads. Regular saves are more like checkpointing and quick saves are for incremental saving. The game does seem to have a roundabout way of implementing checkpointing by doing a copy save, but that is not an industry norm.
I'm sure some players are going to argue that not having an autosave is part of the "experience." This is a single player game. You should be able to play it the way you like and I should be able to play it the way I prefer. This is not changing the core game mechanics, it is simply providing some automation to what many experienced players do already and relieving a pain point for those of us who don't.
