Steam card farming starts with checking how many drops you have left. We looked at the Badges pages of 9,571 FastGG customer accounts that own games with trading cards, and only 14% of them could still get any cards.
Among the accounts with drops left, half have 14 cards or fewer to go, and only 230 have more than 50.
Where to check your remaining card drops
Open your Steam profile and go to Badges. Every game with trading cards shows its remaining drops in the top-right corner, for example “1 card drop remaining”. Once the drops run out, it says “No card drops remaining”.
A game drops about half of its card set. Duke Nukem 3D in the screenshot has 2 of 6 cards and one more drop to come. The other three come from the Community Market or trades with friends. Selling a dropped card does not bring the drop back. The rules are in the Steam Trading Cards FAQ.
Why are no cards dropping?
- The game has no drops left. Playtime keeps growing, so it looks as if farming is broken.
- The game is free to play. Free games drop cards only for in-game purchases.
- Several games are running at once. Cards barely drop that way, which is why ASF and FastGG farm one game at a time.
- Card drops are restricted on the account. Restricted accounts get cards only after at least 3 hours in a game, while an unrestricted one gets its first card after about 30 minutes, according to the ASF developers.
Our data shows the free-to-play rule most clearly. Counter-Strike 2 is on 9,344 FastGG customer accounts, and only 47 of them can still get cards in it. In Dota 2, nobody can. Paid games keep their drops much more often: from 15% of owners in Rust to 63% in Don’t Starve Together.
If you bought a game recently and might refund it, do not farm it. Steam refunds a game only within 14 days of purchase and with less than 2 hours played, and farming adds those hours. The exact terms are in Steam’s refund policy.
Local farming or a cloud service?
To farm locally, you run a program on your own computer, most often ArchiSteamFarm (ASF). It finds the games with drops left and runs them without downloading the game files. You install and configure it yourself, and the computer has to stay on the whole time. Common setup questions are answered in the ArchiSteamFarm FAQ.
A cloud service does the same on its servers, so you can turn your computer off. Before paying, check that the service actually farms cards: many only boost hours. On FastGG, card farming comes with the Base and Plus plans of the Steam hours boost service. The bot runs the games with drops one at a time, and your boosted games are paused in the meantime. Once the drops run out, the bot goes back to boosting hours on its own.
ASF | FastGG | |
|---|---|---|
Where it runs | Your computer | FastGG’s server |
Computer on | The whole time | Not needed |
Setup | You do it: install, configure, sign in to Steam | Connect your account and pick the mode in the dashboard |
Price | Free | Base and Plus plans |
What to do when the drops run out
Stop farming that game. No new cards will drop, however many hours go by.
A full set can be crafted into a badge. It gives 100 XP, a random profile background and emoticon from the game, and sometimes a discount coupon. Spare cards can be sold on the Community Market.
Once all drops for a game are collected, your account can get a booster pack for it. Steam hands these out at random and only to users who have signed in to Steam in the past week, so farming will not speed them up. The rules are in the Steam Trading Cards FAQ.
How to boost Steam hours
Steam counts playtime while a game is running on your account, and your own computer does not have to be on for that. On FastGG, a bot signs in to your account and runs the games you pick on our server, so time adds up in all of them at once. Steam Guard stays on. When you sit down to play yourself, the boost pauses and resumes after your session.
The free plan never expires: one game on one account, and your Steam status shows a service label instead of the game name. Paid plans run more games at once: Starter 3, Base 10, Plus 32. Base and Plus also have the card farming mode described above.
You can try our cloud idler for Steam hours for free. It starts about 10 minutes after you connect your account.
