Active3 years, 6 months ago
I recently find myself needing to start Steam in offline mode rather frequently (my wife is hogging my account to play Plants Vs. Zombies, and most of what I play doesn't really need to be online).
Most games require an initial start-up while connected to the Steam Network before they will work in offline mode. If your game's status is '100% - Ready', but you receive the message 'This game cannot be started in Offline Mode' when attempting to play offline, the Steam client and/or game files need to. May 13, 2003 Steam is holding my entire game library hostage. I used to be one of their biggest proponents, But now I'm starting to wish I could just get my games out of their grasp. I try to start it up, And it asks whether I want to start in offline mode, And when I say yes, It tells me I can't do that in offline mode.
I was wondering if there is some way to launch Steam in offline mode without first logging in (and selecting it from the menu), since that usually beats the purpose.
While I know that killing my network connection before launching Steam is an option, I am looking for a more 'civilized' way, such as a command line switch or something of the sort.
user27134
AubergineAubergine14k1717 gold badges8686 silver badges162162 bronze badges
2 Answers
I can confirm that creating/editing steam.cfg (in the same directory as the Steam executable) with the following lines works, as long as you've set Steam to remember your password (thanks DarkAnime):
If you want to manage this with a command-line parameter, you could create a script to do something like the following (Windows .bat file):
It used to be that you could hit 'Cancel' while Steam was starting up and it would allow you to start offline mode from there, but that no longer works.
Matthew ReadMatthew Read16.8k99 gold badges8181 silver badges143143 bronze badges
New, working solution (2016-04-01 and it still works):
Make sure you've set Steam to remember your password. Now open
<Steam_installation_dir>/config/loginusers.vdf
and change value of WantsOfflineMode
to 1
. Default location of this file:- Windows (32-bit):
C:Program FilesSteamconfigloginusers.vdf
- Windows (64-bit):
C:Program Files (x86)Steamconfigloginusers.vdf
- Linux:
~/.steam/steam/config/loginusers.vdf
- Mac:
~/Library/Application Support/Steam/config/loginusers.vdf
If you don't want warning about launching Steam in offline mode just do the same with
SkipOfflineModeWarning
. If you can't see those values, just add them so it looks like this:There can be of course more users listed.
You can change those values back to
0
to launch Steam in online mode. NOTE: Steam will automatically reset
SkipOfflineModeWarning
to 0
when it closes. To prevent this you can set the file to read-only, but then you can't switch back easily to online mode nor make Steam remember another user. Alternatively you can use some script to change those values for you.To automate this on Windows machines, save
as
steam.vbs
in your Steam directory and make two shortcuts to it. Add offline
as parameter to one of them and it's done. I have two Steam shortcuts on my desktop now. Steam Online
with path 'C:Program Files (x86)Steamsteam.vbs'
and Steam Offline
with path 'C:Program Files (x86)Steamsteam.vbs' offline
.I added support for games, so you can launch them in offline mode. Just start
steam.vbs
with app id as parameter. Example: 'C:Program Files (x86)Steamsteam.vbs' 440
launches Team Fortress 2 in offline mode.Tithen-FirionTithen-Firion
protected by Community♦Dec 16 '11 at 20:45
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