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About SteamTools.games

Why this site exists, who runs it, and what it is not.

Last updated: 2026-06-29

SteamTools.games is a small, free, no-account utility for grabbing the manifest and Lua files that SteamTools needs to unlock a game by App ID. This page is the short version of why it exists, who keeps it up, and what it is not.

Why it exists

SteamTools is a popular fork of Steam that lets you manage an offline library. To use it, you need two files per game: an appmanifest_<APPID>.acf and a matching Lua script. The official SteamTools documentation links to these files via a generator hosted on a third-party domain, but that generator has been down or unreliable often enough that a community member decided to spin up a more resilient alternative.

That alternative is this site.

Who runs it

SteamTools.games is operated by a small group of SteamTools community members, not by Valve, not by the SteamTools project itself, and not by SteamDB. The generator is open source on GitHub (the repo URL is in the footer and on the Discord), and the source is small enough to audit in a sitting — there is no build step beyond pnpm install and pnpm dev.

What it is not

  • It is not a piracy tool. The generator produces manifest and Lua files, which are derived from public Steam data. The service does not bypass Steam's authentication, license checks, or any other DRM.
  • It is not a SaaS. There is no account, no email, no payment, no trial, no upsell. The site is one HTML page and two API routes.
  • It is not affiliated with Valve. The Steam name, the Steam logo, and any other Valve trademarks are property of Valve Corporation. We use them here for descriptive purposes only, under fair use.
  • It is not endorsed by SteamTools. We are independent operators and any opinion expressed on this site is ours, not theirs.

What we promise

  • The site stays free.
  • The site does not require an account.
  • The site does not sell or share your data.
  • The site does not run third-party analytics or ad networks.
  • If the service ever needs to come down for any reason, a notice will go on the blog and a banner will go on the home page first.

What we ask of you

  • Be patient with the rate limit. It is 1.5 s per IP for a reason: it keeps the service usable for everyone, including people on mobile networks in regions where Steam's API is throttled.
  • Report broken App IDs in the Discord, not in a 1-star review on a third-party site. We cannot fix what we cannot see.
  • If you are embedding the service in a tutorial or a video, link to the canonical URL and the Discord, not to a mirror you scraped yesterday. Mirrors die; canonicals do not.

A note on the "open source" part

The full source of the site, including this page, the generator, the API routes, and the message files for both English and Chinese, is published on GitHub. The repo is small (around 30 source files) and dependencies are minimal. If you want to host your own copy for some reason, the entire setup takes about ten minutes on a fresh VPS.

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