Steam Achievement Sets Beta Separates DLC, Archives Retired Trophies and Protects 100% Completion

On October 15, 2026, Valve launched Steam Achievement Sets in the Steam Client Beta, a structural overhaul of how PC gaming’s largest storefront categorizes, tracks, and preserves player milestones. As reported by Windows Central and detailed in Valve’s official Steam News announcement and Steamworks documentation, the update gives developers the tools to separate base-game accomplishments from post-launch DLC, multiplayer modes, and retired seasonal events.

How Steam Achievement Sets Work​

At the heart of Valve’s update is a simple premise: modern PC games live longer than ever, frequently receiving years of expansions, seasonal updates, and additional game modes. Previously, Steam dumped every achievement into a single monolithic bucket. If a studio added ten achievements for a paid expansion, players who only owned—and mastered—the original release lost their "Perfect Game" status until they bought and completed the add-on.

With Achievement Sets, developers can partition a game's achievement list into distinct collections, each with its own progress bar and completion tracking. According to Valve’s Steamworks documentation, every title can support up to 40 sets in total, including the mandatory default group.

Here is how Valve divides the new structure:

• Base Game Achievements Set: Every game on Steam automatically starts with a Base Game set. Unless a developer moves achievements elsewhere, all existing achievements remain here. This primary set cannot be renamed, deleted, or reordered, and it always appears first on the achievements page (unless left completely empty). In the updated Steam interface, base game progress bars and completion trophies are highlighted in blue.
• Custom Sets (All Players): Studios can create custom categories accessible to anyone who owns the base game—such as splitting single-player campaign goals from co-op or competitive multiplayer milestones, or grouping challenges by chapter, character, or difficulty mode.
• DLC Sets: Developers can tie a set directly to a specific downloadable content App ID. While any player can browse DLC sets on a game’s achievement page or the DLC's store page, those achievements do not count toward overall game completion unless the player actually owns or has access to that expansion. Once owned, DLC sets appear with a "DLC" prefix, pull artwork and links from the expansion's store page, and track progress with purple progress bars and trophies. Unreleased DLC sets stay hidden from public view until the expansion launches.
• Developer-Only Sets: Studios can flag sets as developer-only, keeping them invisible to the public while testing new achievements prior to launch.

Once a player unlocks every available achievement in a specific set, Steam awards a "set complete" trophy on their profile. Crucially, Valve states that if a studio adds new achievements to an already completed set later on, players who previously finished that set retain their completion status. Even so, Valve's Steamworks best practices advise studios to create a fresh set for major updates rather than appending locked achievements to an already completed group, keeping progress intuitive for returning players.

Summary: By splitting achievements into up to 40 distinct sets—distinguishing between universal base-game lists, mode-specific groupings, and ownership-gated DLC sets—Steam prevents paid expansions from revoking a player's hard-earned base-game completion.

Archiving Broken, Retired, and Seasonal Achievements​

Paid expansions are only half the battle for completionists. What happens when an online mode's servers shut down, a seasonal holiday event ends, or an early-access mechanic is patched out of existence? Historically, those unobtainable achievements remained like dead weight on a game's list, permanently locking newcomers out of 100% completion unless the developer deleted the achievement outright—which also stripped it from the profiles of veteran players who earned it legitimately.

Valve’s middle ground is Archiving. Developers can now mark individual achievements—or entire Achievement Sets—as Archived in the Steamworks backend.

• For veterans who unlocked it: The archived achievement or set remains permanently visible in their history and can still be displayed in their profile showcases.
• For new or returning players who missed it: Unachieved archived entries are hidden from view and excluded from the completion requirements for that set or game.
• Storefront cleanup: Archived achievements—alongside "Spoiler" achievements (Valve’s new name for Hidden achievements)—are automatically excluded from the achievement preview panels on Steam Store pages.

This effectively defuses two major pain points at once. First, it gives studios a clean way to run time-limited holiday or seasonal events without weaponizing fear of missing out (FOMO) against future completionists. Second, combined with custom sets, it rescues games where tacked-on multiplayer modes or retired features previously walled off solo players.

Summary: Archiving lets studios retire unobtainable or seasonal achievements without deleting them from the profiles of players who earned them, while ensuring latecomers can still reach 100% completion.

Overhauled UI, Family Sharing Fixes, and Completionist Concerns​

To surface all this new data, Valve rebuilt the Steam Achievements page across both the desktop client and the Steam Community web interface. Global unlock statistics—which previously lived on a separate tab—are now accessible via an inline toggle, alongside search and filter controls for specific sets and locked/unlocked status.

Social comparisons also got smarter. Players can now compare their progress side-by-side with up to three friends simultaneously, covering rare unlocks, completed sets, and DLC progress. Because total earnable achievements now depend on which DLCs a player owns and whether they unlocked retired seasonal achievements before they were archived, Steam calculates personalized totals for each friend in the comparison view. Furthermore, games played via Steam Family Sharing now appear properly in a user's Games List, and friends who played via Family Sharing are now eligible for side-by-side achievement comparisons.

Across user profiles, the Store, and the Steam Library, several labels and showcases have shifted:

1. From "Perfect Games" to "Completed": The profile tab previously labeled "Perfect Games" has been renamed Completed and expanded to list both fully completed games and titles where the user has finished at least one Achievement Set.
2. Completionist Showcase Eligibility: According to Steamworks documentation, a game now qualifies to be featured in a player's profile Completionist Showcase as soon as the player completes any single set within that game.
3. Profile Stat Trade-offs: Not every change in the beta has been universally cheered by hardcore stat trackers. As Windows Central observed during the beta rollout, the overall "Average Game Completion %" metric was absent from profile showcases, and profile counters emphasize completed sets alongside completed games. Because a single title can host up to 40 sets—a long-running game like Team Fortress 2 has over 500 achievements across numerous updates —completing multiple sets in one title can inflate a user's completed-set count compared to finishing a standalone single-set game. Whether Valve restores the average completion percentage metric or adjusts showcase counters before the beta concludes remains an open question.

Summary: The redesigned Steam interface adds three-way friend comparisons, Family Sharing support, and set-based filters, though beta testers have raised concerns over the disappearance of the Average Game Completion percentage showcase and how multi-set games weight profile statistics.

Zero-Code Developer Setup and Early Adopters​

The biggest hurdle for any non-mandatory platform feature on PC is studio adoption. Because Valve cannot automatically guess which of a game's existing achievements belong to an expansion versus a co-op mode, developers must organize sets manually.

Fortunately, based on general software engineering principles and Valve's technical documentation, the barrier to entry could hardly be lower: Achievement Sets require zero game code changes and no Steamworks SDK updates. Games continue firing the exact same SetAchievement API strings they always have. All set creation, DLC ownership mapping, and archiving happens entirely on the Steamworks web backend. Studios can either use the visual "Bulk Move" table editor in Steamworks or export their achievement definitions and multi-language localizations to CSV spreadsheets, edit them offline, and re-upload them in bulk. Windows Central notes that indie developers, including the founder of Arcen Games (Heart of the Machine), have already praised the workflow on Reddit for taking less than ten minutes to categorize a hundred achievements.

At the launch of the October 15 beta, Valve confirmed that 17 games have already implemented Achievement Sets:

• Against the Storm
• Age of Wonders 4
• American Truck Simulator
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
• Crusader Kings III
• DREDGE
• Euro Truck Simulator 2
• Flock Around
• Forza Horizon 5
• He is Coming
• Left 4 Dead 2
• LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
• Portal 2
• PowerWash Simulator
• PowerWash Simulator 2
• Team Fortress 2
• Victoria 3

Notice Forza Horizon 5 and Call of Duty alongside Valve classics like Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 and expansion-heavy strategy titans from Paradox Interactive (Crusader Kings III, Victoria 3, Age of Wonders 4). For games with massive post-launch DLC catalogs like Euro Truck Simulator 2 or PowerWash Simulator, separating base lists from add-on packs immediately makes achievement hunting manageable again.

How to Test Steam Achievement Sets on Windows Today​

If you want to inspect the new achievement pages and set ribbons right now on your Windows PC, you will need to opt into the Steam Client Beta:

1. Open the Steam desktop client on Windows.
2. Click Steam in the top-left menu bar and select Settings.
3. Navigate to the Interface tab on the left sidebar.
4. Locate Client Beta Participation and select Steam Beta Update from the dropdown menu.
5. Click Restart Now when prompted to download the beta update and relaunch the client.

Once updated, check any of the 17 supported titles in your Steam Library or browse their community achievement pages to see the new blue Base Game and purple DLC progress bars in action. While the feature's long-term success will depend on how many studios take ten minutes in Steamworks to tidy up their back catalogs, Valve has finally built the plumbing PC completionists have been begging for since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era.