Where Does Endless Sky Store Pilots and Saves?
Where Endless Sky keeps pilots, saves, and plugin data on every desktop OS.
Last updated
Endless Sky keeps pilots and preferences in one user folder per OS: XDG data dir on Linux, Application Support on macOS, Documents-adjacent roots on Windows. Steam and standalone builds share the convention.
Everything is human-readable text. That makes backups trivial and debugging pleasant: a broken pilot file usually names its own problem on the first line. Copy the folder whole to migrate captains between machines.
Where Endless Sky stores this, by platform
%APPDATA%\endless-sky\saves
Pilot files in saves/ plus preferences beside them. Steam and standalone share this root. Exact prefix may vary by store edition.
~/Library/Application Support/endless-sky/saves
Same saves plus preferences layout. Use Go to Folder in Finder since Library is hidden.
~/.local/share/endless-sky/saves
Same layout under the XDG data dir. Flatpak sandboxes this; check the app data path on those installs.
Frequently asked questions
How do I move pilots to another computer?
Copy the whole endless-sky folder (saves/ plus preferences) to the matching path on the new machine. Pilots are individual files, so you can move one captain without the rest. Keep plugin lists in sync or saves referencing them misbehave.
Saves versus preferences layout?
Saves sit in saves/ as text files, one per pilot plus escorts. Preferences and plugin records sit beside them. The folder is plain text throughout, which makes manual fixes and version control unusually easy.
Notice an outdated path? Let us know.