Hello everyone! Hope everyone's doing well.

I have a non-burning but long standing question about the auto save feature on PC.

I was wondering what causes the auto save to happen, aka what exactly triggers an auto save?

Sometimes when I reload the game to the last auto save during, for example, a random encounter that I wanted to handle differently, it brings me back to the moment right before the encounter began, and the encounter is still available. This often happens with enemy camps found in forests - after the reload the camp is often still there or close, ready to be tackled again. Other times the autosave brings me back 20 min back to a random spot on a road I travelled long before the encounter happened. Other times when I'm bored and start shooting everyone in sight in a town, the autosave brings me back to moments before me going berserk in the same town, other times it's basically back to the beginning of the current session, as in back to when I launched the game.

The first auto save after starting the game is particularly mysterious, sometimes it prompts right as the game finishes loading, other times it's like 20 minutes into the game at seemingly random moments. I'm guessing these aren't random, but I can't figure out how this works? Doesn't seem to be just regular intervals, but doesn't look like it's triggered just by the events and encounters, or at the very least doesn't work the same for all encounters. I like my auto save to be reliable though so it's annoying to me.

Does anyone have a quick and easy explanation to what triggers auto save?

Thanks!