Valve beta tests Steam Achievement Sets to tidy up trophies

Valve is beta testing Steam Achievement Sets, a new way to group a game's achievements into collections. The announcement was published on Steam News under the title "Steam Achievement Sets Now in Beta" Steam News.

Achievements are digital awards for doing specific things in a game, from finishing a chapter to finding a secret. Developers can now organise them into sets. They decide how many sets a game has and what each one is for.

Each set gets its own progress bar. Finish every achievement in a set and a "set complete" trophy lands on your profile. That trophy stays yours. If a developer later adds more goals to a finished set, your completion still counts.

There are two types of set. Base Game sets hold achievements any player can earn by playing the game, and show in blue. DLC sets hold achievements tied to extra paid content, known as downloadable content, and show in purple. Those DLC achievements do not count towards overall game progress until you have access to that content, according to details reported by Eurogamer.

Developers can also archive a single achievement or a whole set. This covers dead, broken or retired goals that can no longer be earned. If you already unlocked an archived item, it stays on your profile. If you missed it, it will not appear on your page and it will not block you from completing the set or the game.

Finding and tracking them is changing too. The updated achievements page is reachable from the Games List on the web and from games in the Steam Library. Steam Search has new filters for specific achievement sets and for locked or unlocked achievements. You can compare your progress with up to three friends, including rare achievements, completed sets and DLC progress.

The Perfect Games tab is now called Completed. It lists fully completed games alongside games where you have finished sets. Games played through Family Sharing, Valve's system for letting family members share a game library, now appear in the Games List. Steam Store and Library pages will show whether a game uses achievement sets.

Two strategy games, Against the Storm and Age of Wonders 4, have already added sets. For fans, this means long lists should be easier to read. Hunt the base game first. Chase DLC later. And keep credit for what you finished even as games grow.