Destiny 2 Checkpoints Explained: Bots, Limits, and When to Skip Them

In raids and dungeons, Destiny 2 saves your progress per encounter. Clear the second fight of a raid and your character holds a save at the third; wipe, log off, or come back two days later and you resume from that point instead of the beginning. That save is the checkpoint.

Three properties make checkpoints shareable, and they define everything else in this guide:

• They spread through the fireteam. Load into an activity with someone who holds a later checkpoint, reach a wipe or a fresh spawn there, and your character now holds that checkpoint too.
• They are character-bound. The save lives on the character that earned it, not your account. Your Titan holding a final-boss checkpoint does nothing for your Warlock.
• They expire at the weekly reset. Tuesday's reset wipes stored checkpoints along with the weekly loot lockouts, which is why the ecosystem rebuilds itself every week.

None of this involves mods, glitches, or third-party software. Checkpoint sharing runs entirely on the game's own fireteam and save systems, which is why it has lived openly for years.

Sharing a checkpoint with a clanmate is as old as raiding. The modern ecosystem industrialized it: volunteer-run checkpoint bots are secondary accounts parked inside an encounter around the clock, existing only so strangers can join, inherit the save, and leave. Directory sites list which bots hold which encounter, with D2Checkpoint.com the best-known hub, alongside Discord servers and Twitch channels that rotate popular saves.

The service is free and donation-funded, and it survived the Monument of Triumph transition just fine: with every raid and dungeon now permanently launchable from the Raids and Dungeons node, bots hold saves across the whole catalog, from Last Wish's Shuro Chi loot cave to The Witness at the end of Salvation's Edge, on Standard and Master alike.

It runs on an honor system with two rules. Do not clear the encounter from the bot's instance, because finishing the fight burns the save the bot exists to hold. And leave once you have your copy, because seats in that fireteam are the scarce resource. The system works because tens of thousands of players per week respect those two rules.

The whole process takes about two minutes:

• 1. Find the encounter you want on a checkpoint directory and copy the bot's full Bungie Name, including the number code.
• 2. In orbit, open the text chat and type /join BotName#0000 with the exact name you copied.
• 3. Once you load into the activity, let the encounter kill you and wipe the team. The wipe commits the save to your character.
• 4. Leave the fireteam. You now hold the checkpoint and can launch it later with your own group, or pass it on by having friends join you.

Expect friction at peak hours. A full fireteam error means six people beat you to it; retry or pick another bot. A failed-to-join error usually means the bot went offline, so refresh the directory. And check the difficulty label before you burn time: a Master checkpoint puts you into Master modifiers whether or not your build is ready for them.

Used well, a checkpoint is the best time-per-reward tool in the game:

• Weekly exotic attempts. Raid exotics drop from final bosses, one chance per character per week. A final-boss checkpoint turns three full raids into three boss fights, which is how most players actually run their weekly Vex Mythoclast or Conditional Finality attempts.
• Practicing one encounter. Learning Verity in Salvation's Edge or the Templar's mechanics is far faster when you can reload the exact fight instead of re-clearing everything before it.
• Rescuing a interrupted night. If your group disbands two fights from the end, a checkpoint lets Thursday's fireteam finish what Tuesday's started.
• Targeted loot on featured weeks. When a raid is featured, a specific encounter that drops the weapon you are chasing can be farmed from its checkpoint. Check the weekly rotation to see what is featured before you hunt a save.
• Solo dungeon boss practice. Rehearsing a final boss on a checkpoint before a solo flawless attempt saves hours of run-up per attempt.

A checkpoint moves you through space. It does not create loot, and it does not count as playing the game for most of the systems that track that. The specifics:

• Skipped encounters drop nothing. Every encounter you bypass is a loot roll you did not get. In 2026 that stings more than it used to, because featured raids pay Deepsight weapons or Tier 5 armor from every encounter, not just the boss.
• Weekly lockouts still apply. The boss pays each character once per week outside of featured farm rules. A checkpoint does not reset or multiply that.
• No full-clear credit. Triumphs, seals, and challenge completions that require a full run do not care that you killed the last boss. Anything on your title checklist generally wants the whole raid.
• Challenges are encounter-complete, not encounter-skip. Weekly challenge rewards require executing that encounter's special condition properly, from its start.
• Tuesday deletes your stash. Grab a save on Monday night and it is gone in the morning.

The honest summary: checkpoints optimize repetition of content you already know. They do nothing for progression breadth, title hunting, or learning a raid end to end. Our raid guide and dungeon guide break down what each activity actually pays across a full clear.

The fair question, answered honestly. Checkpoint sharing uses the game's normal fireteam-join and save mechanics: no automation touches your account, nobody logs into anything of yours, and no software modifies the client. It is not account sharing, which is the practice Bungie's ban policy actually targets, and the bot services have operated publicly for years, complete with community shout-outs, without a policy crackdown.

That said, Bungie has never formally blessed the ecosystem either, and the bot accounts themselves sit in a gray zone that is the operators' risk, not yours. Joining a public fireteam and inheriting a save is ordinary player behavior. The practical risks are mundane: a bot holding a modified or wrong-difficulty instance, wasted evenings on offline bots, and the occasional griefing attempt in an open lobby. Treat checkpoints like hitchhiking, not like contraband: legal, free, usually fine, occasionally unreliable.

A checkpoint is free and fast; a full clear pays more and counts for more. Which one you want depends on what you are missing:

This is also where our lane is, stated plainly: LFCarry does not sell checkpoints, because the free community system already does that job. What we run are full raid completions and dungeon clears, where a PRO team takes you through every encounter, so the Deepsights, the Tier 5 armor, the challenge triumphs, and the boss loot all land on your account in one sitting.