Steam Achievement Manager (SAM) alternatives: unlock achievements without your PC

How Steam Achievement Manager works

SAM is a free, open-source Windows program. It lists the games of the Steam account signed in on your PC; you open one, SAM tells Steam that this game is running, then reads and writes its achievements through the same Steamworks functions the game itself calls. Tick an achievement and it unlocks, untick it and it locks again. Steam stamps each change with the current date and time.

Because it talks to the Steam client on your machine, SAM needs Windows and Steam open and signed in for as long as you use it. It works on one game at a time, and everything you apply lands at the same moment.

What no tool can change

Some achievements are out of reach whatever you use. Games that keep their stats on their own servers mark those achievements as protected, and a write to them is refused. A few Valve games, such as Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, handle achievements outside Steam's regular stats system, so they cannot be edited this way at all.

Does Steam ban accounts for it?

Valve has never announced bans for unlocking achievements, and tools like SAM have been around for well over ten years. VAC looks for cheats that change how a game runs; an achievement is a stat on your profile. That does not make it invisible: unlock dates are public on your achievements page, and a hundred achievements dated the same minute look like what they are. Community sites that rank achievement hunters may flag or exclude such profiles.

The honest advice: keep it to games you do not compete in, and do not use it to climb a leaderboard. The wider question of what gets accounts banned is in our guide on idling and VAC.

All at once or over time

Most people who unlock achievements on purpose want the profile to look played: a few achievements here, a few there, over an evening. SAM applies whatever you tick in one go, so spreading them out means coming back to it again and again. That is the main thing a server-side tool changes.

Unlocking from the cloud with AFK Hours

On the Pro and Ultra plans, AFK Hours' Achievements page does what SAM does, through the Steam session your account already has with us: no PC, no Steam client open. Pick the account and a game, tick what to unlock or untick what to lock again, then apply now or spread the changes out, one every 10 to 60 minutes, while the game shows as played. Protected achievements are listed but left alone, and you are told which changes Steam refused.

The list shows the games that still have something to unlock, with a checkbox for the others. On Ultra, the Discord bot's /idle achievements command unlocks everything still locked on a game without opening the site.

Side by side

The short version:

• Steam Achievement Manager: free, open source, Windows only, Steam open on your PC, one game at a time, every change applied at the same moment, lock and unlock.
• AFK Hours: Pro or Ultra plan, nothing to install, PC off, any linked account, apply now or one change every 10 to 60 minutes, lock and unlock, also from Discord on Ultra.
• Both: protected achievements, and games such as Counter-Strike 2 or Dota 2, stay out of reach.