I created an application that automatically idles your Steam games to extract all of your available Steam Trading Cards. The application automatically finds the games you have drops remaining in, and idles those games one by one until all of your trading cards are in your inventory. This way, you can start up the program and go to sleep / work / away and come back to an inventory full of cards.

Website
Source Code
Official Group

Installation Instructions

Go to the Official Site, download and run the setup.exe file there. The program should launch automatically when the installation is complete. Make sure Steam is open and you're logged in. To start idling, you'll need to click the (Sign In) button and sign in to Steam. Once that's done you should be "in-game" on Steam and the program will indicate as such. Now go watch TV, go to bed, or go on vacation. When you come back to your computer, you should have a pile of Trading Cards in your inventory.

Some FAQ

How does this work?

First of all, the program will determine which of your games still have card drops remaining. It will go through each application and simulate you being “in-game” so that cards will drop. It will check periodically to see if the game you’re idling has card drops remaining. When only one drop remains, it will start checking more frequently. When the game you’re idling has no more cards, it’ll move on to the next game. When no more cards are available, the program will exit.

Do I need to download a game in order for this program to get it's trading cards?

No.

Do I need to be logged in to Steam for Idle Master to work?

Yes, Steam needs to be running and you must be logged in.

Can I play a game while this is running?

It’s possible, but doing so may significantly reduce your card drop rate. For best results, exit this program before playing a game.

How do I close the application?

Simply click the red X on the application.

Is this safe?

Presumably so, yes. The program that simulates you being in-game is no different than other popular methods like using Steam Achievement Manager or "the AppID trick".

Why do I need to sign in to Steam from the application?

When you visit your badges page on Steam, it will show you how many card drops you have remaining in each game. When another user looks at your badges page, they can only see the badges you've completed. By signing in, this allows Idle Master to connect to Steam properly and gives it access to this information that only you can see.

Why should I trust this?

The entire project is open source, which includes the source code for all binaries.

Troubleshooting

Idle Master looks like it's working, but I'm not getting any Steam Trading Cards.

First of all, be patient. Idle Master doesn't make them drop any faster than they normally would if you were playing the game, and each game has a different drop rate. Another thing to check is that your Steam profile correctly shows that you're "In-Game". If Steam doesn't think you're "In-Game", it means something is wrong with your configuration.

10 years ago*

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Are SAM and Idle Master safe?I mean,could I get VAC banned or whatever if I just simulate being in game?

10 years ago
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Idle Master safe. SAM? Forget it.

:D

10 years ago
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Not safe, or you just don't like it?

10 years ago
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SAM is safe as long as you don't use its achievement managing functionality

10 years ago
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A very useful tool,but you may miss some good games

10 years ago
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This! But I'm doing it anyway

9 years ago
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Bump because of awesomeness

9 years ago
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Help me, I'm getting this error:
20:51:27 - Finding games that have card drops remaining C:UsersHART~1AppDataLocalTempMEI80442bs4builderhtmlparser.py:163: R untimeWarning: Python's built-in HTMLParser cannot parse the given document. Thi s is not a bug in Beautiful Soup. The best solution is to install an external pa rser (lxml or html5lib), and use Beautiful Soup with that parser. See http://www .crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#installing-a-parser for help. 20:51:27 - Error finding drop info Press any key to continue . . .

9 years ago
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Is your Steam page in English? A parsing error like this might indicate that Idle Master is running up against a character in the document that it doesn't understand. Try changing your Steam language to English on the web page, then see if you're still getting the same error message.

9 years ago
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Finally downloaded this. Thanks for this! Is awesome. Love this and enhanced steam. :3

9 years ago
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Idle Master is no longer moving on to the next game on the list for me. It just says error retrieving card drop info when it finishes the first game. I have to manually close and reopen Idle Master to start it idling another game.

9 years ago
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No thanks. I will avoid any possible gray area that Valve might one day decided is ban-able. It's not worth it. I'll do it the slightly harder way and literally idle manually.

9 years ago
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This program is amazing, It has helped me a bunch the last few days to help collect cards.

But since this morning it gives me the error:

invalid cookie data, cannot log in to steam.

Any Ideas?

9 years ago
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lol all of a sudden its working again. And I didn't do anything :-)

9 years ago
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I keep having this issue as well, only it's not fixing itself. I even plug in the cookie data again and restart Steam.

9 years ago
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I got the same error. When this happens, just open your Steam profile page in web browser and start again Idle master and it should work :)

9 years ago
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this exactly helps every time for me :)

9 years ago
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I dropped 200 cards out of 300 in 2 weeks, dude you are awesome, i also love enhanced steam!

9 years ago
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Trying to set this up for my other computer, and this time no sessionid cookie. I am logged in.

9 years ago
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yeah i just install the game, run the game and go do some other things.. and wenn i get back poef cards :P

9 years ago
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no need to bother with any of that with idle master

9 years ago
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sounds Kind of bad... load hhundreds of gb and run a game that slows down cpu and block pc ..... i think your power-bill will be much much higher than before. and this only for some 3-cent-cards... ;)

9 years ago
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Is this thing virus free and trustable?

9 years ago
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yes

9 years ago
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OMG, this thing it's a fucking gold mine! <3 Thanks! I love you!

9 years ago
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thx man

9 years ago
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would it be advisable to blacklist mp games or does it not matter?

9 years ago
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There's some debate about running a program like this while connect to a VAC game, but you're always better off being safe and just don't play/run any VAC-enabled multiplayer games while its idling.

As far as using this to earn cards in games with multiplayer, you're fine. Just don't actually play the multiplayer while you're idling.

9 years ago
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Just run it while you are sleeping, is my advise.

9 years ago
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ye i meant while idling, i wouldnt play while using it. thanks.

9 years ago
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Doesn't matter, even in games with VAC.

You aren't actually connecting to any servers.

9 years ago
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Idle master + Sandboxie + alts + indiegala happy hour = a shitload of cards! . Thanks for the awesome tool!

9 years ago
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what is alts?

9 years ago
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Alternate accounts.

9 years ago
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Thank you.
But, can you tell me how to use idle master in sandboxie?

9 years ago
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Ok. So I've started idling with Idle master couple days back. it works like a charm. but I do have a small problem and I think I know the answer but just want to get a confirmation or workaround:

So when I idle at night using idle master i do get the drops but they are very slow (not a problem) but in the morning after the program has been running for about 10-12 hrs, it errors on me and starts saying that the info is not correct. Now I think I know the reason for it. when I reach my work and go to steamgifts, it uses my id and thus changes the login info while my home computer is still using the old info. So I think that is why it stops looking for more cards and errors out.

Am I right or not? Is there any workaround to this so that I can keep my cards dropping at home and also use steamgifts and steampowered.com at my work laptop?

Thanks for this awesome program.

9 years ago
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You're correct. I've run into the same problem if I leave it running at home and log into Steampowered.com at my Dad's house, but I haven't found a workaround yet.

9 years ago
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same here. im logging in at work or at my parents and my idlemaster at home puts out Errors, until i log into steam at home-browser again.

9 years ago
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Then log in from your mobile phone and copy the cookie data from the mobile browser into Idle Master.

9 years ago
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Deleted

This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

9 years ago
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Steam cards can be sold for money, that means that doing this is probably illegal because it can farm real life money

9 years ago
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Regardless it violates Steam's ToS which probably means it's not to be promoted here (just like SAM). Kudos on the code though!

9 years ago
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steam make money on every card sold, the money you make goes into your steam wallet, you spend your steam wallet on steam games, it might violate the ToS but the money keeps rolling in.

9 years ago
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"farm real life Money " looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooololllllllllll
though this isn´t true, all bitcoin-miners that were sold must be illegal to. or each pickaxe (you could mine Gold with it...)

9 years ago
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"Invalid cookie data, cannot log in to Steam"
:(

9 years ago
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It still works, you did it wrong.

9 years ago
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Open Steam in your browser. Restart Idle Master.

9 years ago
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Is it possible to make it run games even thought I finished collecting cards from it, I just want to increase playtime hours

9 years ago
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then use sam. before i had idlemaster, i used sam. idled a huge amount of games at the same time... got over 1000h playtime in a day ^^

9 years ago
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Add the SteamID of the game as a parameter to steam-idle.exe.

For example, to idle Killing Floor you would use:
steam-idle 1250

9 years ago
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Great, thank you for that!

9 years ago
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Sorry but I'm not that good with these things

Can I ask where to add the parameter to steam-idle.exe, do I properties it?

9 years ago
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The easiest way is to create a shortcut to steam-idle.exe and add the parameter to the target, like this.

9 years ago
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Thanks!!

9 years ago
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Can you add an optins when you start a game your name to be changed with an idle tag (example: Name #idle) and when you stop idlemanager the goes to normal e.g. only Name without #idle

9 years ago
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One thing you could do is set your profile status to "Offline". This won't affect drops, but will stop people from thinking you're available to talk.

9 years ago
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works like a charm thanks man :D told my friends about it

9 years ago
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9 years ago
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Most awesome thing i've seen in a while, kuddos!

9 years ago
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