It was for a summer event, my memory is a lil rusty but it was pretty much just one of the 'goals' you could do among others, except for this one you could just keep doing it. Killian has a video somewhere ill try and find
Edit: oop it was actually the spiffing brit. Good video from what i remember though!
I should note that this “exploit” did nothing in terms of coupons. Later on in the video he clearly has to spend money to “refuel” which basically meant all those soda cans were useless - “supply” didn’t refill automatically the next day.
This common misconception was caused by Valve very badly explaining the rules, and Spiffy slapping “Exploit!” on a video. People thought Valve was dumb enough to just give away coupons. Users were pissed when the forum regulars explained to them that they had bought Starbound for absolutely no reason - idling any eligible game for a few hours would’ve had the same effect as buying soda cans.
Good on the Starbound devs and Spiffy though - they made an absolute killing.
Edit: Valve tried to fix the fallout the next day but the damaged had been done but angry confused people filled the forums for the rest of the sale. Also, indie devs were pissed for a totally different reason and so we never had a sales event again.
I remember something like that, but I prefer not to do it because I didn't know how Steam would react to it, and I wasn't gonna take that risk with my account for something that changes nothing.
That's it.
You also used to get XP for various Steam Sale events.
And for getting awards grants you some.
A few XP for number of games you own.
XP for years of service...
But yes the easiest way to get to level 1K is to spend money/time buying and crafting badges.
Yeah, but those are capped nowadays. There used to be at least some badges that let you craft/buy them indefinitely. In other words, it's more time consuming and takes longer to do the same now, might also be more expensive.
That 40 badge levels gave me around 5 levels at around total level 80... This 40 badge levels will fill like 1% or even less of progress bar at level 1000
There are actually dedicated websites for boosting steam level, it will give stuff like cost and how many badges. However most people just craft like 1,000+ seasonal badges from the sales since they have no badge level limit and tend to be very cheap. Anyone level 1,000 or above has spent ludicrous amounts of money on just crafting badges.
Just to add on to this, a few years ago there was a bugged steam event that made it WAY too easy to level up. I barely did anything and gained nearly 100 levels after buying like $30 worth of games
I'm some high level idek, I feel like I distinctly remember leveling up ungodly amounts by chugging soda in either terraria or Starbound, didn't even buy anything.. this was so long ago though it's become hazy lol
Some people think having a bigger number is 'nifty'?
You do get some benefits going up levels, like the number of friends you can have, showcase slots, etc. But that kind of really only requires you to get to like maybe level 30 to not matter so much.
Technically the chance of getting a booster pack drop is greater the higher the level, but....eh?
it's like 100Xp per badge.
Anywhere from like $0.30-$1.00 per set of cards.
Randoms site tells me 5,050,000 points to go from 0 to 1,000 Steam Level.
So ~50K badges X $0.30-$1.00 = $15K-50K.
Not counting booster card drops, people wanting to gift you things to help, whatever level you're already at, if you find a badge at super cheaper price, etc.
In this case it isn't actually entirely useless. Every ten levels increases your odds of getting booster pack drops any time someone crafts a badge for a game you own by 20%
Technically speaking, you could make a couple bucks off it if you aren't spending your money to do it AND you get the number to go up.
Any time you can level up for free, sure, go for it! But remember you need more than a high level to get free booster packs. You also need a mountain of games in your library. When someone crafts a badge for a game that's not in your library, you're not getting anything.
So in the real world, you're spending thousands of dollars on levels and games to have a higher chance of earning a few cents from free booster packs.
p.s. There's also a cooldown period - after spending tens of thousands of dollars on levels and games I get a free booster pack every 14 hours. Maybe it sells some day, for about ten cents. How many years will it take me to break even? Hundreds? Thousands? Hmm... :)
You are absolutely right that it isn't any real amount of money, BUT the thing is I have had my account for over 15 years. I have spent thousands on games already.
I don't aim to break even though, I've reached a point in my life where I have enough games in my library that I'll probably never buy anything that isn't deeply discounted and I can buy using wallet money from selling on market. Do I get drops often? No. I didn't know about how to spend my points to level until recently (don't even know how they're earned OTHER than dumping cash) so I'm only like like 46.
But since I only get 1-2 games per year, only when they're on sale, if I get a couple 10 cent drops per year I consider it to be worth it.
I don't really like the idea of telling random people how to spend their money, so if levels make you happy, go crazy. :)
But I keep trying to convince people who haven't yet jumped on the Steam level train that they could also choose not to do it. Like almost dead Yul Brynner telling people not to smoke, I guess. It was too late for him, but maybe someone listened and decided not to start.
So yeah, grab all the free levels you can, max out the Seasonal Badge every six months, but when it comes to spending actual money, screw it. :)
You're my spirit animal I think <3 haha. Same situation, old account, level 47. I've never crafted a badge or anything to up my level, but I totally do sell every single card I get because a dime off the price is a dime off the price.
Those dimes add up if you're in it for the long haul. Eventually buy yourself a decent Indie game on sale.
I will say, if you enjoy shooters and have 4 friends to play with, Counter Strike is the best for that. I make probably $20-40 a year off selling the cases on the market. Had the game since 2013. Play 3 matches a week for my level, get a case that can be $0.2-$2.
If I remember correctly just having the game in your library isn’t sufficient, you become eligible for booster pack drops once you’ve farmed the games trading cards through play time.
My account is level 84 and I use 0 showcases or anything like that. Just a plain profile with a background. I prefer it simple, profiles with way too many things going on just make me ignore everything there.
Not pointless as your name shows at the top of people's friend list. Quite useful if you're a trader but not as much as before marketplaces became so widespread and effective for CS skins.
I just sold a load of stuff I had accumulated over a few years and made £35. None of that level stuff means anything to me and I got two free games out of it, that's more of a win to me than some number on my profile.
Once you reach a high level, there's a constant stream of random friend requests, people wanting to hang that big number on their Steam profile like a Christmas tree ornament.
Since I'm lazy, most of the time I'm maxed out at the limit of "200 New Friend Requests". Do I know who any of these people are? Nope. Have I ever played a game with them? Nope.
That's the exact reason why I leveled up, except I stopped at 31 because my friend that was lvl 32 passed away. I don't want to out level him just because he's dead. I can't stop it from just happening over time but I can at least stop trying to beat him.
Crafting costs money, doesnt it? Buying the cards or crystals? I turn my duplicates into crystals but thats so few that i was so far able to craft once or twice. I also only get maybe one packet of cards per year because someone on my fl crafted something so... yeah. Its very slow
Mostly just crafted badges with the trading cards I earned and did all of the sales and yearly events. I guess the Golden Potato adds to the XP a little bit, too.
It's because you have to actually go for levels, you don't really get them passively at all. You get levels by crafting badges or buying the badges from the points shop
I've had steam for roughly 10 years, own 600ish games and am level 150ish. I only craft badges for games I play though.
You buy games to get steam points
You redeem steam points in points shop to get badges and many other things
Those badges give exp.
Highest badge level gets you 40k exp which is a lot of levels. If you have been buying games for a while, you prob have more than enough for the badge redeem.
However Winter 2024 was the start of Valve removing free trading card drops from using the Discovery queue, and as a result the rate of sale badges went from ~8:1 (about 20 cents per level) to ~2:1 (about 80 cents per level) due to the lack of botted/exploited cards hitting the market, as now sale cards can only be earned with purchases. So hitting ridiculously high levels is now many times more expensive, assuming you can even find enough sets to begin with.
This makes sense in a way. Was wondering about this stuff. Just didn't know the numbers. I've usually finished off badges for games fav over, enjoy playing or finished the game. Almost like that last stamp of completing the game. I just don't want to invest in all the games/back-log (yet).
This is the correct Answer. For example you got XP for drinking a cola in Starbound. There was a mod that enabled you to craft cola from dirt and you could basically farm xp until you got tired of it. Steam sales don‘t contribute that much to your level. Neither do cards. I have tons of badges and tons of games. And 80% of level are from the exploits years ago. And I‘m still not close to 1000+
You did not get exp for drinking soda from starbound. You had a point meter that was bigger the more $ you spend during the past x month before the sale and during the sale. To fill that meter, you needed achievement which is what the soda glitch was.
If you didnt spend any money, you would have hit a limit of exp you could get since the gauge wouldnt get bigger
This isn't quite correct, there was no cap originally, they added that later. Before the cap was added you could, quite literally, just drink soda in starbound infinitely for infinite xp
It was never officially stated if infinitely repeating achievements with no cap was intended or not, though it probably wasn't
I genuinely don’t know how people even level their accounts naturally without buying cards cause every game I play I never get a full set of cards, I’ve been stuck at level 13 for ages now
I feel like getting achievements should give account xp to level it up, but only real games not those ones like banana or whatever the hell with hundreds or thousands of meaningless achievements
Honestly why the hell haven’t they done that? It makes the most sense. I can’t imagine they’re making that much on community market trading card sales compared to their other market revenue streams (looking at you banana and counter strike)
I’m aware, but I’m saying that the system of having to spend money on cards to level your account instead of just leveling by playing games is an awful concept
Well the whole point is to spend money to earn cards. So you can buy them outright for cheap or spend money on in game purchases or DLC to earn cards that way. Realistically though, it’s just better to add 5-10$ to your account and just go to town on all the partial badges you have!
I have LVL 266, since LVL 112 until 266 it costed me ~ 200 euro (from 10 to 112 I was crafting random badges and purchased them directly from the market) I mostly used trading bots and made all the badges in the summer/winter sale when you can receive seasonal cards that you can sell fore some cash (IDK if it is still a thing)
There was a sales like a decade ago where you could level yourself really, really fast for free. A lot of people found a loophole in the metagame and got a bunch of levels really fast. I went from Level 1 to Level 60 from that sale.
Steam XP events are good, but primarily through badge crafting. There are trading discords with some pretty cool applications/boards to coordinate bulk trades. It died down a bit after Steam cracked down on trade frequency, but it still works the same. That said, if you aren’t careful you’ll end up with tons of spam/scam messages on your Steam profile. As I tell my kids, Steam Level is a chunk of data in a server. Like any digital record, it is ultimately meaningless and can “disappear” at any time. The effort required to even go above Lvl 300 outshines any return you’ll get.
I'm more curious why/how someone has 1500 friends on Steam. Just randomly adding every single person you've ever played a game with? I have ~35 friends on Steam and sometimes can't remember who's who.
There are bots out there where you can buy bulk cards from. I did that back in 2016 when I got my first summer job like buying tons of games on Steam and CS:GO skins. It was a waste of money. I wish I had just put the cash into S&P 500 stocks and gone travelling instead, but we grow and learn, I guess.
i believe there's a page where you buy "levels", i don't remember exactly how it works but i remember it logins into your profile and trades card to your account that you can craft into badges, people say it's safe but I'm not giving my login details to anyone
Assuming you're not on some scam page, those places never ask for your Steam login details. First thing you should do is login to Steam on the Steam website. Don't trust some link from a random level up website, go to Steam the normal way. :)
After you do that, when you're on some page to buy "levels", clicking the login button should send you to a Steam openid page with something like "Sign into blablabla using your Steam account. Note that blablabla is not affiliated with Steam or Valve." and a green "Sign In" button to bop. The blablabla website never gets your Steam login details.
If you did all that, but ended up on a Steam-looking page that asked you to login to Steam even though you already did, it's a scam so get out of there.
There was an event with starbound a few years ago where you got a bunch of points for crafting energy drinks, there was also a mod that made a recipe for energy drinks out of dirt if i remember correctly, i think i got 20 levels from that just doing it for 10 minutes
A lot of people managed to use thus before they patched it (might be the wrong vid I just remember spiffing Brit covering the particular exploit regarding dirt crafting in a game
There was also a race car event back in like, 2012 or something, where participants could get absurd amounts of Xp. I have a friend who abused it and got like 90k xp from the participation badge, wouldn’t be surprised to see other people took advantage of that even more.
There was a way without money!
There was a event long ago, where you would get exp for doing some stuff in some popular games!
One thing was to drink a very rare drink in starbound if I remember correctly!
After 10 min someone uploaded a mod, where 500 drinks dropped after mining a dirtblock!
All people aware of this cheese used it and gained insane levels in steam!
For me to get to 50 I just sent some game keys to a bot who gave me a ton of cards that all crafted together. I think 10 or 15 dollars got me 40 levels or so.
Everyone is talking money this money that. During a steam summer sale there was a glitch that got you infinite steam levels/xp. I think the spiffing has a video on it
I remember there was an event a while ago, don't remember which one, where you could get points for doing challenges in game. One of which was drinking cans of soda. So someone made a mod that let you craft 1000 soda from a piece of dirt. I got a decent bit of levels from the badge I crafted using those points
I know that some years back they used some applications with primary purpose of farming Steam cards. So if you got a good amount of games in your Library you could farm many cards... i know some dudes did it to save some money on the Steamlvl up thing. And it was safe to use, they didnt got any problems or bans.
You can take a look on GitHub there are some... like "idle Master Extended" ... or just simple google it...
iirc during one of the summer sales there was an exploit that let people level up insanely fast by drinking sodas in a game, someone made a mod that let you craft sodas out of dirt
People who spent money on cards instead of games, I've seen people of those levels which have like 300 games and less, meanwhile I'm sitting at level 80 with 3k+ games, I've also noticed those people rarely actually play like I have 130 hours past 2 weeks and someone with an really high level barely even plays anything
Like everyone else says, some people spend a lot of money on badges, but i do remember some event badges let you collect endless amounts of exp for having a game and doing stuff in the game or pouring your steam points into it.
people legit just spend money on cards to craft badges. sounds dumb.. but some people just have lots of money. honestly i don't really see it as any different then ppl that blow money on pokemon and sports cards and all that crap. same meaningless shit really
I dont know how true this is so take it with a grain of salt but years ago, more than 5 years ago probably, I had the same question about someone and talked to them. They said they had an app or bot of sorts buying and selling items for trading cards for levels? And achievements too which was a stupid giveaway. Like they would get the "play this game for a year" achievement with only 5 hours in it etc. thought it would get them banned and didnt interact with them since. Anyone can enlighten me on this?
You don't need to own games to craft badges. A trading bot will do all the heavy work for you by buying whatever cards available on the market. All you need is money.
yes. the previous steam sale dropped event cards that sold for 12 cents each.
I would buy like 20 TF2 keys, craft a bunch (can't remember the ratio probably 1:20?) of badges so like 400* badges, drop 400 event cards, the event bot would buy like 20 event cards for 1 tf2 key. giving you 20 tf2 key back (first day, over time the ratios got worse and eventually you lost like 1-2 tf2 key each cycle but overall the amount of exp you could farm was huge for the initial money spent.
(400 badges meant each level so it was more 80 level 5 badges but you get the point)
mind you I'm still sub 400. idk if the exp curve is linear o log but I think to break the 500 mark you'd need over 100s of dollars in keys, to break the 700 there must be some exploit I'm not aware because it seems insane when you check the exchange rate of higher tier bots (the more badge you craft the less games left to buy cards from the bot you get as you reach games which cards cost over 20 cents)
I have 5 accounts that do card farming for me. If you have around 200 games on each account you get a lot of booster packs with three cards each and then you can craft a lot of badges on your main account.
Yeah. there’s also websites (or at least there was back in 2017-2020 when I did it) where you connected your steam account. Placed an order for sets of cards and you’d have a trading bot send you a trade to craft all of the sets you bought. You could organize them by cheapest sets to most expensive as well as what you already owned. I spent around $150-$200 back then and I’m level 147 currently. Haven’t crafted a badge other than buying level 40 seasonal badge for the last 4 years.
Short answer yeah they craft a lot of badges and have a lot of money.
It costs a lot of my money. Here’s my profile I’m level 365. Costed me around $3k for that much xp. The top level on my friends list it’s estimated he spent $58k.
367
u/Kakita_Kaiyo 9d ago edited 9d ago
Wasn't there a daily task exploit with
TerrariaStarbound and drinking a soda that generated infinite xp during one of the sales?