Store:Steam
Steam is a digital distribution platform launched by Valve Corporation in 2003.
Information
First Time Setup
When launching a freshly installed game on Steam for the first time the game will normally initiate "First Time Setup", installing DirectX, Visual Studio re-distributable and .NET libraries. While you may be running the latest and greatest versions of these programs, especially if you're a Windows 7 gamer, the individual games may still require specific versions of APIs like Direct 3D 10. More information on this can be found on this Steam forum post. Occasionally after carrying out first time setup you may find the root of your hard drive filled with a dozen or so "vcredist" files, these can be safely removed as they're temporary files created as part of the install and are meant to be cleaned up after the install is complete.
Work Arounds
Steam game not starting
Sometimes a game on steam may not start up, so you may be able to get it working by:
Library > [Game] > Right click > Properties > Local files > Verify Integrity of Game Cache
It can take over 10 minutes to detect the bad files and replace them
Steam gets stuck on update
Steam updates sometimes get stuck at a certain amount of percent, however, you can usually fix it by deleting clientregistry.blob which can be found in the following locations:
C:\Program Files\Steam\
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\
~/Library/Application/Support/Steam/
(Mac OSX)
This will delete your saved password for steam, and force it to re-download the Steam client update. This method usually always fix other problems with Steam, so it is usually a good idea to delete this whenever steam encounters an error.
When installing a game: "missing configuration"
The exact cause of this error is unknown. However, the solution is to simply walk away from your computer for a while, and try again when Steam is not under heavy load.
Steam will not launch at all
If Steam will not launch on a Windows 7 64 bit, delete the appcache\ directory
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\
Restart steam it will then re-download and launch successfully.
Saving Steam games for re-install
If you wish to re-install steam, or transfer your game data to a new hard drive, simply move the
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\
folder to a new destination. Depending on the size of the folder it may take some time. Then, on the new system, install Steam and let it run once. Replace the newly created steamapps\ directory with the previous steamapps\ directory. Restart Steam and it will recognise the files. This saves having to re-download every game when you move to a new system.
Sometimes when attempting to download a game via steam, particularly during busy periods such as the holiday sale, Steam will present the error message "The Steam Servers are currently unavailable. Please try again later." or "The Steam Servers are too busy". At times, these messages may persist for hours. In this situation, it is possible to change the Steam content server you are downloading from using the following steps:
- In the Steam client, select "Steam" then Settings.
- Navigate to the Downloads tab.
- Change the Download region to a different location.
Locations in a time zone where it is currently late night may yield the best results.
Offline Mode
For some reason, if your internet connection is limited (i.e. if ports required for Steam to run are closed), Steam will not start in off-line mode and will return the following error:
Could not connect to steam network. This could be due to a problem with your internet connection, or with the Steam network. Please visit www.steampowered.com for more info.
Force Offline Mode
The following steps cause Steam to always open in Offline Mode. A prompt will appear and the options Retry and Offline Mode will show up. Retry will simply restart Steam and cause the same menu options to come up, whereas Offline Mode will take one into the Steam game library.
Create or edit the steam.cfg in this folder (the same folder as the steam.exe):
C:\Program Files\Steam\
Enter the following and save:
BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable ForceOfflineMode=enable
Steam backup utility won't restore games
Sometimes when trying to install a backup created using inbuilt backup utility the loader will pop up and disappear constantly. To fix this, launch steam and delete local data for the game you're trying to restore. Exit steam and rerun the installer. This should work nicely.
- Find a proper network. Open Steam whilst internet connection is working.
- Click "Steam" > Go Offline. Steam should now restart.
- Steam offline mode should now work even with limited connection.
Alternative Method:
- physically unplug your network cable from your computer, or disable the adapter under the network settings in the control panel.
Other Tips
Steam 3rd Party DRM
A website which lists all 3rd party DRM associated with Steam games. http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/
Steam Wishlist Notifier
A free service which can provide email notification for Steam sales. http://www.wishlistnotifier.com/
Moving Steam games to another drive
Chances are your steamapps\ folder is huge and taking up a lot of hard drive space. It is possible to move the entire steamapps\ folder, or indeed individual games to another drive by utilising symbolic links. Symbolic links are like shortcuts except they are seen by the operating system and programs as the real thing. Symbolic links are supported in Windows as part of the NTFS filesystem, but are not accessible by default. So you will need the Link Shell Extension.
Once you've installed the extension, close Steam (open task manager too and make sure the process has ended). Now navigate to your steamapps\ folder, right click it and move it to your other drive. Wait for it to finish moving (it will probably take a while) and then right click it, choose "Pick Link Source" and go back to your Steam directory. Right click it and choose "Drop as -> Symbolic Link". When you relaunch Steam, it will continue to be able to detect your Steam games as if they never moved.
It is of course also possible to move individual Steam games and not just the whole directory. If you wanted to move Fallout: New Vegas, for example, you would go to
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\fallout new vegas<code>steamapps\
move it somewhere else and then pick link source, drop it as a symbolic link in
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\steamapps\common\
Optimizing Steam's GCF Files and Batch Maintenance
Steam's Game Properties offers an interface to validate and physically and internally de-fragment the game's GCF files if it has them, however Steam itself uses 2 GCF files but does not provide a way to do this, and there is a lot of time, prompting, and UI lockout between tasks. GCFScape has some batch mode utilities to handle this.
Get Nem's GCFScape. Once downloaded and installed, shutdown Steam*. Go to GCFScape's Tools menu -> Batch -> Defragment. Navigate to the Steam App Cache in
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\
or
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\
Select as many GCF Files as you want to batch de-fragment. If you decide to do all the files, this could take a long time! Consider making it an overnight task. If you just want to de-fragment the two unreachable files used by Steam, they are winui.gcf and sourceinit.gcf.
- Shutting down Steam is optional, however
winui.gcfandsourceinit.gcf, the two files Steam uses, are locked while Steam is running. Steam can run while performing maintenance on the other GCF files, but it may cause problems if there is an update while the files are being worked on.
GCFScape also provides batch validation, but does not have the repair facility that Steam has when it detects a corrupted file. Batch validation as an overnight task prior to backing up your files is a great idea. If it finds a problem, have Steam do a validation and repair on it.
System Requirements
| Category | Minimum |
|---|---|
| OS | Windows XP Windows Vista Windows 7 Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 |
| Processor | 1 GHz |
| Memory | 512 MB |
| Hard Drive | 1 GB |