Key Notes
- Achievement Sets are available to all Steam users, letting supported games group challenges and track each collection separately.
- Completed sets retain their status as games grow, while DLC progress can be separated from base-game achievements.
- Developers can archive unobtainable rewards so they stop blocking completion, and the redesigned page supports comparisons with up to three friends.
Steam’s revamped achievement system is now available to everyone, giving players separate progress tracking for groups of challenges and a way to preserve completed sets as games expand. Valve released the update on November 11, ending the beta that began in mid-October.
The change tackles a familiar annoyance for achievement hunters: finishing a game’s checklist, then seeing more tasks arrive with an expansion or update. Developers can now organize those additions into their own sets, making it easier to distinguish what you have finished from what is new.
We covered the beta launch on October 15. Players no longer need to join the Steam Client Beta to get the new system, although individual studios still decide how to organize their games’ achievements.
Separate Progress for the Base Game and DLC
Achievement Sets let developers break a long checklist into smaller collections. A studio might separate single-player and multiplayer objectives, group challenges by character, or create a set for an expansion. Each collection has its own progress bar and awards a completion trophy.
For someone interested mainly in a campaign, that means campaign achievements can become a distinct goal instead of being buried among multiplayer challenges. The grouping is chosen by the developer, so players should not expect every game to adopt the same structure.
Valve’s explanation distinguishes base-game sets from DLC sets. DLC achievements are tracked separately and do not enter a player’s overall game progress until they have access to that content.
Completed sets also keep their completed status if more achievements are subsequently added to them. New content can therefore offer returning players something else to pursue without erasing the recognition they already earned.
Expired Events Can Stop Blocking Completion
Developers can archive individual achievements or whole sets when their associated content is no longer available. That gives seasonal events and holiday challenges a place in the system without leaving later players permanently chasing rewards they cannot unlock.
Players who earned an archived achievement retain it on their profiles. Those who missed it will not have that unavailable achievement blocking completion of a set or game.
Archiving still requires action from the developer. The rollout does not automatically repair every old game with an unobtainable reward, or make an expired event playable again. Its benefit depends on studios using the tools to maintain their lists.
A New Page and Better Developer Tools
The redesigned achievements page brings overall progress, individual sets, achievement details and global unlock rates into one view. Search and filtering have expanded, and players can compare progress with up to three friends.
Those comparisons account for the achievements each player can actually earn. Different DLC access or archived rewards can produce different totals, so two friends do not necessarily have identical checklists even when they own the same base game.
Valve’s developer guidance says sets can be configured in Steamworks without updating the game or its Steamworks SDK. Existing achievement names and unlock calls continue working.
The rebuilt editor also supports bulk imports and exports, moving achievements between sets, and checks for missing translations. Developer-only sets allow teams to test upcoming rewards privately before exposing them to players. Those tools give studios a way to reorganize an established catalog, as well as plan achievements for their next release.
