Why does my game forget settings when I restart it?

Because the settings round trip is broken: settings aren't being saved when changed (only living in memory and lost on exit), are saved to a non-persistent location or the write fails silently, or are saved but not loaded and applied at startup (or loaded but overwritten by defaults applied later). Each break leaves settings at their defaults after restart.

Why are my settings saved but not used after restart?

That's the 'loaded but not applied' case: the settings are saved and may even be read on startup, but they aren't applied to the relevant systems (the volume, resolution, and bindings aren't actually set from the loaded values), so the game uses defaults. Fix it by applying loaded settings to the systems on startup, and ensure defaults set up later in startup don't overwrite them.

Why Does My Game Reset Settings on Restart?

Q: How do I find why my settings aren't persisting?

Test the round trip: change a setting and check whether it's actually written to persistent storage. If not, the save side is broken. If it is saved, restart and check whether the game reads and applies it, if the saved value is there but the default is used, the load side is broken (not loading, not applying, or overwritten by defaults). This pinpoints which half fails.

Quick answer: Your game resets settings on restart because the settings round trip is broken: they're not saved when changed (only living in memory and lost on exit), saved to a non-persistent location or the write fails silently, or saved but not loaded and applied at startup (or loaded but overwritten by defaults). Each break leaves settings at their defaults after restart.

Losing settings on restart is a small but genuinely annoying bug, players re-configure their controls, audio, and graphics, and have to do it again every launch. It's a persistence problem, the settings round trip from 'changed' to 'saved' to 'restored on next launch' is broken somewhere.

Why Settings Don't Persist

Settings persistence is a round trip: when changed, settings should be written to persistent storage; on launch, they should be loaded and applied. Losing settings means a break in this round trip. The breaks: not saved (the change isn't written to storage, only living in memory and lost on exit), saved wrong (written to a non-persistent location, or the write fails silently due to permissions/path), not loaded (saved but the game doesn't read them on startup, or reads but doesn't apply them, so they default), or load-order issues (settings load but are overwritten by defaults applied later in startup).

Each break leaves settings at their defaults after restart. Which one depends on where the round trip fails, on the save side (not written/written wrong) or the load side (not read/not applied/overwritten).

How to Diagnose and Fix It

Test the round trip: change a setting, then check whether it's actually written to persistent storage. If not, the save side is broken. If it is saved, restart and check whether the game reads and applies it, if the saved value is there but the default is used, the load side is broken (not loading, not applying, or overwritten by defaults). This pinpoints the broken stage.

Fix the broken step: persist settings on change to a proper location (handling write failures), load them early in startup, and crucially apply them to the relevant systems (set the volume, resolution, bindings) rather than just reading the values, and ensure defaults don't overwrite loaded settings. See our guide on fixing a game that loses settings on restart for the steps.

Lost settings is a broken persistence round trip, not saved, saved wrong, or not loaded/applied at boot. Test change-restart-check to find the break, and make sure loaded settings are actually applied.