17 Steam Tips and Tricks

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,629
While I would not exactly call all 17 of these Steam Tips and Tricks over at PC World "obscure," there were several of these that I was not aware of. Your mileage may vary.


Steam’s rife with hidden features that can help you get more out of your PC gaming experience—tricks that few people ever touch. Here are some of the most useful, starting with obscure (yet helpful) library management tools on this page before diving into more exotic tips.
 
The ONLY one I didn't know about was sorting steam games by size. Thanks for the article Kyle, now I know what games to remove if I need to free up some HDD space.
 
Good for newbies, I guess. I don't know what updating your video card driver has to do with Steam, though.
 
Armenius said:
Good for newbies, I guess. I don't know what updating your video card driver has to do with Steam, though.
Click to expand...
Grasping at straws? But they could've just made the list 16 or 15 items.

Anyway kind of off-topic question, but is it only me that steam guard always fucks with? It keeps turning off, I set it up, then it disables itself again and again, and returns to email authentication of new logins.
 
Here's one for you: SteamVR audio mirroring so everyone within 3 city blocks can hear you flail to Beat saber.
 
To this point I never demand my money back on a game except once.
This includes Early Access games that the developers ditched. That single accursed game was No Man's Sky. It absolutely did not work with AMD video cards. No answers or fixes for the issue ever came from the developers.
 
The "add a non-steam game to library" function is terrific. I use Steam as a front-end for every game I own and that makes it super easy. You can even add your own grid-based artwork for a layer of polish. There are whole communities dedicated to it, so most games and emulators have Steam Grid images ready to go.
 
They should have narrowed this down to 10, but it is a good list otherwise.
 
Gripe time: I really really hate how Steam handles backups. Since some games take HOURS to download, it's nice to have a local backup, but alas, Steam still thinks people back up to CDs or DVDs, and that the default location is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Backups" which you can't change.

However, I've cheated here. I've used a symbolic link so that when Steam goes to the backups folder, it's actually going to the Steam games share of my FreeNAS server. Here's how:
  1. Exit out of Steam.
  2. Open up a command prompt.
  3. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam
  4. Remove the backups folder
  5. Type in the following: mklink /D Backups "targetdirectory" (e.g. for my setup mklink /D Backup "\\VAULTRON\games\Steam Games")
  6. When successful, you can type in dir and see an entry link "10/01/2017 06:36 PM <SYMLINKD> Backups [\\VAULTRON\games\Steam Games]"
  7. Exit out of the command prompt and restart Steam.
Also, one of those utilities that comes in handy with categorizing games is Depressurizer. I have the utility configured to categorize my games by Genre. Pretty cool.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top