Copper Steam Idler
A Qt 6 / C++ port of Idle Master Extended — idles your Steam games to earn trading card drops the quickest possible way.
This is a faithful reimplementation of the original .NET WinForms app (idle_master_extended by jshackles / JonasNilson) using Qt Widgets. It keeps the same workflow, settings, idling modes and (best-effort) the same Steam Community scraping behaviour, while replacing the bundled .NET steam-idle.exe helper with a small native C++ helper.
Requires the Steam client to be running and signed in. Card drop data is read from the Steam Community website using your saved login cookies.
Download
Pre-built Windows binaries are published on the Releases page. Documentation and help live on the Wiki.
Repository: https://github.com/MohamedSubarashi/CopperSteamIdler
Steam group: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/coppersteamidler
Support / donate: https://ko-fi.com/mohamedsubarashi
How it works
Two executables are produced:
Executable Role
CopperSteamIdler.exe The Qt GUI. Signs in to the Steam Community, scrapes your badge list, and drives the idle loop.
copper-steam-idle.exe A tiny helper. It sets SteamAppId and calls SteamAPI_Init() (loaded from steam_api64.dll), which makes Steam report you "in-game" for that AppID. One helper runs per idled game.
There is no IPC: the GUI simply launches/kills one helper process per AppID. Because SteamAPI_Init is resolved from the DLL at runtime via GetProcAddress, no Steamworks SDK is required — only steam_api64.dll (shipped in libs/).
Building
Requirements (already present on the reference machine):
Qt 6.12.0 (MinGW 64-bit) with the Widgets, Network, Svg and Sql modules
MinGW GCC 13.1 (C:\Qt\Tools\mingw1310_64)
CMake 3.21+ and Ninja
Sign In uses your default browser and needs no extra Qt module: for Firefox (cookies readable) the login page opens in the browser you already use and the steamLoginSecure cookie is captured from cookies.sqlite automatically. Chrome/Edge encrypt their cookies (App-Bound Encryption), so for those an optional DevTools sign-in window is offered. Qt WebEngine is optional and, when present, is used instead (embedded browser). Manual cookie entry is always available.
cmake --preset mingw
cmake --build --preset mingw
The binaries are written to build/mingw/. To produce a self-contained folder with the Qt runtime, either run the helper target:
cmake --build --preset mingw --target deploy
or add Qt's bin directory to PATH before launching.
Configuration
Settings are stored as an INI file:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Copper Steam Idler\CopperSteamIdler\settings.ini
Diagnostics are appended to error.log next to the executable.
Signing in
Logging in now uses a single value — the Steam Community steamLoginSecure cookie. The old sessionid / steamparental cookies are no longer required and are stripped automatically when found.
Quick Login (recommended) — choose File → Sign In…. The Steam login page opens in your default browser (no separate app window). Firefox's cookies.sqlite is polled and the steamLoginSecure cookie is captured, validated and saved automatically once you are signed in. For a Chromium-based default browser an optional DevTools sign-in window is offered.
Manual entry — pasting the steamLoginSecure value is always available via Settings → Advanced; it is validated against the Steam Community before being saved.
The stored session is validated by fetching /profiles/<steamid64>/?xml=1 and checking the returned SteamID matches the cookie. Invalid stored sessions are refreshed (via login.steampowered.com) before the user is prompted to sign in again.
Feature overview
Steam-running and login status indicators.
Automatic Sign In using your default browser (Firefox cookie capture), with a DevTools sign-in window for Chromium and an embedded WebEngine browser used when available.
Badge list scraping with blacklist support.
Game selection (independent of strategy): all card-eligible games, a hand-picked list, or your whole Steam library.
Idling strategies: fast, one game at a time, many-then-one, one-then-many; up to 30 simultaneous games.
Custom simultaneous idling duration (default 6 minutes).
Time-played goals: optionally idle each game until it reaches a target number of hours, even after card drops run out.
Pause / resume / skip, "blacklist current game", per-game drop counters and a progress bar.
Manual drop-check trigger (click the "card drops remaining" text).
Start minimized to the system tray, resizable window with saved size, dark theme with white icon variants, minimize-to-tray and prevent-sleep.
When idling completes: do nothing, shut down, sleep or hibernate.
Session + lifetime statistics.
Robustness notes
Several long-standing upstream issues are addressed at the application level:
A network / HTTP failure while checking card drops is never treated as "no drops left"; the game is retried instead of being skipped.
Steam Community requests are throttled and backed off when rate limiting is detected.
A missing/unavailable game banner shows a placeholder instead of aborting the idle loop.
Helper processes are monitored and restarted if they exit unexpectedly.
Unhandled exceptions in the event loop are logged instead of crashing the app (error.log).
Only one instance runs at a time.
Translations
All user-facing strings use tr(). To add a language, copy the source catalog into i18n/ and translate it:
lupdate src -ts i18n/copper_de.ts
Then build — any i18n/*.ts files are compiled to .qm automatically and loaded at startup based on the saved language setting.
Directory layout
src/core/ settings, logging, HTTP + cookies, HTML scraping, processes
src/ui/ main window, dialogs, theme
src/helper/ the native idle helper
resources/ app icon, Open Iconic assets, Qt resource file
libs/ steam_api64.dll
i18n/ translation catalogues
Credits & license
Copper Steam Idler is maintained by MohamedSubarashi. It is a port of Idle Master Extended by jshackles and JonasNilson, itself based on the original Idle Master. Icons are from Open Iconic.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (see LICENSE). See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for third-party components.
Official GitHub page
