Valve is finally tackling one of the oldest annoyances in PC gaming: you finish a game, collect every achievement, and then a new expansion quietly knocks your hard-earned 100% back down to 87%. Steam Achievement Sets, now live in the Steam Client beta, let developers split a game's achievements into separate groups, each with its own progress bar and its own completion trophy. If you finish a set, it stays finished. That holds even when the developer adds more content later.
What an Achievement Set actually is
Until now, every game on Steam has had one flat list of achievements. That made sense when games shipped once and stayed finished. It makes far less sense in 2026, when a strategy game might get a dozen expansions over five years and a live-service shooter rotates new content every season. Each addition dumped more entries onto the same list. Returning players struggled to spot what was new, and completionists watched their perfect games turn imperfect overnight.
Achievement Sets break that list into collections the developer defines. Valve leaves the structure up to each studio. One game might split single-player and multiplayer, while a class-based RPG could give each class its own set. You still unlock achievements by playing normally. The difference is in how Steam organises and displays them afterwards: each set tracks its own progress, and clearing one adds a "set complete" trophy to your profile.
The important rule is that a completed set stays complete. When a developer ships new content, they can put its achievements in a brand-new set rather than appending them to an old one, so your existing completions survive untouched and the new challenges show up clearly as something fresh to chase.
Base game sets and DLC sets
Valve has introduced two types of set. Base Game sets cover achievements anyone who owns the game can earn, and they display in blue. DLC sets hold achievements that require paid add-on content, and they display in purple. The colour coding carries through the progress bars and trophies on the new achievements page.
The bigger change is how DLC sets count. Their achievements are left out of your overall progress for a game until you actually own that content. If you never buy an expansion, its achievements no longer drag your completion percentage down. You can still browse every possible achievement, DLC included, from the game's achievements page, which doubles as a handy preview of what an add-on contains.
Seasonal and time-limited achievements
Developers can now also archive individual achievements or whole sets. That opens the door to genuinely temporary achievements, such as season-based challenges in a live game or a holiday event that only runs for a few weeks. Valve's guidance is that any achievement players can no longer unlock should be archived.
Archiving works in the player's favour. If you earned an archived achievement, it stays on your profile. If you missed it, it vanishes from your view entirely and no longer blocks you from completing the set or the game. A missed event no longer means a permanent gap in your collection.
A rebuilt achievements page
To tie all this together, Valve has rebuilt the achievements page, which you can open from the Games List on the web or from any game in your Steam Library. It opens with an overall summary, then shows your progress in each set and the details of individual achievements. Global unlock percentages, which used to sit on a separate page, are now a simple toggle. Search gets filters for specific sets and for locked or unlocked achievements.
Friend comparison has also been upgraded. You can now line your progress up against as many as three friends at once, including rare unlocks, completed sets and DLC progress. Steam also uses a new, more accurate total for each player, counting only the achievements that player can actually earn. Because that depends on which DLC each person owns and which achievements have been archived, two friends' totals for the same game can legitimately differ.
Smaller changes across Steam
Set progress now shows up in more places across Steam, including the Recently Played section of your profile, your Games List and your Library. The Perfect Games tab has been renamed Completed and now includes games where you have finished at least one set, not just games at 100%. Games with completed sets also qualify for the Completionist Showcase on your profile.
Family Sharing gets two quiet fixes as well: games you play through Family Sharing now appear in your Games List, and friends who have played a game through Family Sharing can be included in comparisons. Store and Library pages will also flag whether a game uses achievement sets.
Which games support it, and how to try it
The feature is in beta for players and developers alike, so you need to opt into the Steam Client beta from Steam's settings to see it. Several games already support 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, Forza Horizon 5, Flock Around, He is Coming, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, PowerWash Simulator and its sequel, Victoria 3, and Valve's own Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2.
The same beta client update also turns Steam on Linux into a 64-bit application running inside a Steam Runtime container, and it adds a Display Style option for Remote Play streams that don't match your screen's aspect ratio. Valve says it will keep refining Achievement Sets throughout the beta, and more games should start showing sets as developers adopt the new tools.
