How to idle Steam games for trading cards

How card drops actually work

Every game with trading cards has a set, usually five to fifteen cards. Playtime earns you about half of that set, rounded up: a game with eight cards drops four, a game with five drops three. The badge page of your profile shows the count as “card drops remaining”. The drops are spread over the first few hours of playtime, most often one every fifteen to thirty minutes, and once the quota is spent the game never drops again on that account.

Steam does not care whether the game is in the foreground, minimised, or reported as running by a tool: the clock is the same. Idling a game with drops left is simply the cheapest way to let that clock run.

The rules that stop drops

Four things can leave you waiting for cards that never come:

• The refund window: a game bought recently only drops cards once it has been played for two hours or owned for fourteen days, whichever comes first. Steam added this in 2015 to stop farm-and-refund.
• Limited accounts: an account that has never spent five dollars on Steam gets no card drops at all. One purchase lifts the limit for good.
• Free-to-play games: cards drop from money spent inside the game, not from playtime. Idling Dota 2 or Team Fortress 2 without ever buying anything drops nothing.
• No cards at all: plenty of games never enabled them. The store page says “Steam Trading Cards” under the features list when they exist.

Farming by hand

Launch the game, minimise it, come back in two hours. It works, costs nothing, and scales badly: you can run a handful of games at once before your PC complains, and every game has to be installed. Steam also only counts drops for one game at a time when several run together, so parallel farming mostly saves you launches, not hours.

Farming with a desktop tool

Idle Master Extended, Steam Game Idler and ArchiSteamFarm tell Steam a game is running without loading it, so nothing needs to be installed and dozens of games can idle at once. ArchiSteamFarm goes further and reads your badge page to farm exactly the games with drops left, then stops. The catch is the same for all three: your PC or a server has to stay on and signed in for hours, and you handle the setup and the updates when Steam changes something.

Farming from the cloud

A hosted service runs the games on its own servers, so your PC can be off. On AFK Hours, the card farmer is a switch per Steam account on the paid plans: it reads your badges, plays the games that still have drops (several at once until each reaches two hours, then one at a time, the way Steam drops them), and returns to your normal idle list when nothing is left. The cards land in your inventory as usual; we never touch, collect or sell them.

Whichever way you farm, check how the service signs in. AFK Hours uses a QR code scanned with the Steam app, so your password is never typed anywhere, and the session can be revoked from Steam in two clicks. The full comparison with the other services is on the comparison page.

What to do with the cards

Sell them on the Community Market for Steam wallet funds, trade them, or complete sets and craft badges for Steam XP, profile backgrounds and emoticons. Once a game has no drops left you also become eligible for random booster packs from it. We wrote a separate guide on that: What are Steam trading cards used for?.