Valve has launched a beta for Steam Achievement Sets, a new feature designed to solve a problem that has frustrated completionists for years: the moment a game adds new achievements through DLC or seasonal content, your hard-earned 100 percent completion vanishes.
Achievement Sets let developers group a game’s achievements into named collections, each with its own progress bar and trophy. When new achievements are added to a set you have already completed, your completion status is preserved rather than reset. Players can see exactly which sets they have finished and which still have locked achievements waiting.
How Achievement Sets Work
Developers decide how many sets a game has and what purpose each one serves. One title might split achievements into single-player and multiplayer groups, while another could organise them by character class or expansion. Players still unlock achievements by playing as usual; Steam simply sorts the unlocks into the developer-defined sets.
There are two types of set. Base Game sets contain achievements available to all players and display in blue. DLC sets group achievements that require additional purchased content and appear in purple. Importantly, DLC achievements do not count toward your overall game progress until you own the relevant content, so your completion percentage reflects only what you can actually earn.
Key detail: If new achievements are later added to a set you have already completed, your completion is preserved. You keep the trophy, and the new unlocks appear as additions rather than resetting your progress.
Archiving Achievements
Valve has also introduced an archiving system. Developers can archive individual achievements or entire sets, which is particularly useful for seasonal games or time-limited events. Players who already unlocked an archived achievement still see it on their profile, but archived achievements do not appear on the profiles of users who missed them, nor do they block progress toward completing a set or game.
This solves a long-standing issue with holiday events and limited-time challenges. Previously, missing a seasonal achievement meant your completion percentage could never reach 100 percent. Now, those achievements simply disappear from the requirements for players who were not playing at the time.
An Updated Achievements Page
Alongside the sets themselves, Valve has overhauled the achievements page. It is now reachable from the Games List on the web and from games in the Steam Library. Search gains filters for specific sets and for locked or unlocked achievements. Players can compare their progress with up to three friends, including rare achievements, completed sets, and progress in DLC sets.
The Perfect Games tab has been renamed Completed and now expands to show both completed games and games with completed achievement sets. Games played via Family Sharing now appear in the Games List, and friends who played that way are eligible for friend comparison. Store and Library pages also indicate whether a game supports achievement sets.
Games Already Supporting Sets
Seventeen games have already added achievement sets at launch of the beta. The list includes Against the Storm, Age of Wonders 4, American Truck Simulator, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Crusader Kings 3, Dredge, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Forza Horizon 5, Flock Around, He is Coming, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, PowerWash Simulator, PowerWash Simulator 2, Team Fortress 2, and Victoria 3.
Valve describes this as a growing set and says it will continue making improvements during the beta. Developers do not need to update their game or the Steamworks SDK to start using Achievement Sets; existing achievements, API names, and unlock calls all keep working.
How to Try It
Achievement Sets are available through the Steam Client beta. Players need to opt in to the beta channel to see the new features, and supported games will display the sets in their achievements pages. Valve has not given a date for general release beyond the beta period.
The timing is notable. Steam set a new concurrent user record last Sunday, clocking up 43.5 million users simultaneously. With that many players tracking achievements, any improvement to how completion is managed affects a substantial portion of the platform’s user base.
For developers, the appeal is clear: games that receive regular content updates no longer risk alienating players who completed the base game. For players, it means the satisfaction of finishing a game’s achievements is no longer a fleeting moment, undone the instant the next expansion drops.
Whether Achievement Sets will become standard across all of Steam remains to be seen. The beta is a start, and the seventeen launch titles suggest Valve is confident the system works. For anyone who has ever watched their 100 percent completion slip away because a developer added three new achievements in a holiday update, it cannot arrive soon enough.
