You've probably spent hours building a cool level, only to realize players will lose everything the moment they leave unless you have a solid roblox data store script running in the background. It's a bit of a heartbreaker for a player to grind for three hours, hit level ten, and then find themselves back at level zero the next time they log in. If you want people to actually keep playing your game, you've got to give them a way to save their progress.
Setting up a data store might feel a bit intimidating if you're new to Luau, but honestly, it's mostly just about following a specific flow. You're basically asking the Roblox servers to hold onto a piece of information, like a player's "Gold" or "XP," and then asking for it back when that same player returns. Let's break down how to get this working without making your brain melt.
Getting the foundations ready
Before you even touch a script, there's one tiny thing you have to do in your game settings, or nothing is going to work. You need to enable "API Services." To do this, head over to the "Game Settings" tab in Roblox Studio, click on "Security," and toggle the switch that says Allow HTTP Requests and Enable Studio Access to API Services. If you forget this, your script will just throw errors every time it tries to talk to the data store, which is a common headache for beginners.
Once that's done, you'll want to create a Script (not a LocalScript!) inside ServerScriptService. Data stores are strictly a server-side thing. You don't want the player's computer to be in charge of saving their own stats, because that would make it way too easy for someone to just tell the server "Hey, I have a billion coins" and have the game believe them.
The basic structure of the script
The first thing your roblox data store script needs is a reference to the DataStoreService. You can think of this as the main office that handles all the filing cabinets. From there, you need to define a specific data store name.
lua local DataStoreService = game:GetService("DataStoreService") local myDataStore = DataStoreService:GetDataStore("PlayerStats")
I usually call mine something like "PlayerStats" or "SaveData_v1." It doesn't really matter what you name it, but if you ever want to reset everyone's progress for a big game update, you can just change that name to something else, and the script will start looking into a fresh, empty "filing cabinet."
Loading data when a player joins
When a player hops into your game, you need to check if they've been there before. This happens inside a game.Players.PlayerAdded event. You'll also want to set up your leaderstats here so the player can actually see their stats in the top-right corner of the screen.
Here's the catch: the internet isn't perfect. Sometimes the Roblox servers are a bit slow or might even be down for a second. If you just try to grab the data normally and it fails, it could crash your whole script. That's why we use something called a pcall (protected call). It's basically a way of saying, "Hey, try to do this, and if it fails, don't break everything, just tell me what went wrong."
```lua game.Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player) local leaderstats = Instance.new("Folder") leaderstats.Name = "leaderstats" leaderstats.Parent = player
local gold = Instance.new("IntValue") gold.Name = "Gold" gold.Parent = leaderstats local playerKey = "Player_" .. player.UserId local success, data = pcall(function() return myDataStore:GetAsync(playerKey) end) if success then if data then gold.Value = data else gold.Value = 0 -- New player, give them a fresh start end else warn("Could not load data for " .. player.Name) end end) ```
Notice that I used player.UserId for the key. You should always use the UserId rather than the player's name. People change their usernames all the time, but the UserId is permanent. If you save data to a name and they change it, they'll lose everything.
Saving data when they leave
Now that we can get the data, we need to make sure we save it when they quit. We use the game.Players.PlayerRemoving event for this. It's pretty much the reverse of what we did earlier. We grab the current value of their "Gold" and shove it back into the data store using SetAsync.
```lua game.Players.PlayerRemoving:Connect(function(player) local playerKey = "Player_" .. player.UserId local success, err = pcall(function() myDataStore:SetAsync(playerKey, player.leaderstats.Gold.Value) end)
if not success then warn("Couldn't save data for " .. player.Name .. ": " .. err) end end) ```
Again, we're using that pcall. It's extra important here because if the save fails and you don't have a way to handle it, that player's hard work just vanishes into the void.
Handling more than one stat
Most games aren't just about one number. You probably have Gold, XP, Levels, and maybe even an inventory. You don't want to create ten different data stores for ten different stats—that's messy and slow. Instead, you can save a Table.
Think of a table like a little box where you can pack all your stats together. When you save the table, the data store treats it as one single item. When you load it, you just unpack it.
```lua -- To save local dataToSave = { Gold = player.leaderstats.Gold.Value, XP = player.leaderstats.XP.Value, Level = player.leaderstats.Level.Value } myDataStore:SetAsync(playerKey, dataToSave)
-- To load if data then gold.Value = data.Gold xp.Value = data.XP level.Value = data.Level end ```
This makes your roblox data store script way more efficient. It also helps you stay under the "rate limits." Roblox limits how many times you can talk to the data store service per minute. If you try to save five different stats separately every time a player leaves, you might hit those limits if your server is full.
Dealing with the "BindToClose" trick
There's a weird quirk with Roblox Studio. Sometimes, if you're testing alone and you close the game, the server shuts down so fast that the PlayerRemoving event doesn't have time to finish saving. To fix this, we use BindToClose. This tells the server to wait a few seconds before completely turning off, giving your script a chance to finish its business.
lua game:BindToClose(function() for _, player in pairs(game.Players:GetPlayers()) do -- Trigger your save logic here for everyone still in the server end task.wait(2) -- Give it a tiny bit of breathing room end)
This is a lifesaver during testing. Without it, you'll constantly think your script is broken when, in reality, the server just died too quickly to do its job.
Keeping things smooth and safe
I've seen some developers try to save data every single time a player gets a coin. Please, don't do that. You'll hit the data store limits almost instantly, and the service will start "throttling" your requests, meaning it will just ignore them for a while.
A better approach is to save when the player leaves and maybe have an autosave loop that runs every few minutes. That way, if someone's game crashes, they only lose a tiny bit of progress instead of everything since they logged in.
It's also worth mentioning that you should never trust client-side data. If you have a script on the player's computer (a LocalScript) sending a message to the server saying "I have 500 gold," you need to verify that. But that's more of a general game security thing. For the roblox data store script itself, just focus on making sure the data gets from the server to the cloud and back again reliably.
Once you get the hang of these basic concepts—pcalls, keys, and tables—you'll realize that data stores aren't that scary. They're just the game's memory. And once you have a working save system, your game feels a whole lot more like a real experience and less like a temporary playground. Keep experimenting, and don't get discouraged if you see a few red errors in the output window at first—we've all been there.