Troubleshooting common generator errors

The generator is a thin layer over Steam's public APIs, so the errors it returns are usually a thin translation of errors from upstream. Here is the short list of what you are likely to see, what they actually mean, and what to do about each.

1. "A valid numeric App ID is required"

The most common error by a wide margin. Three things usually cause it:

• You typed a name into the field, not a number, and then clicked Generate before the dropdown had a chance to resolve. The dropdown collapses on blur, and the empty App ID gets submitted.
• The App ID you typed has a typo (a letter, a leading zero, a space).
• The field is empty — the form allows an empty submit if you press Enter very fast.

Fix: type or paste the digits only. No letters, no leading zeros, no whitespace.

2. "App <id> was not found in the Steam store"

The App ID you entered is well-formed, but Steam's appdetails endpoint did not return a record for it. This almost always means one of three things:

• The ID is wrong by a digit or two. SteamDB is the fastest way to confirm.
• The ID is for an app that is only in a different region than cc=us. Some apps are gated to a single store. We are adding more regions; for now, try the same ID with the regional store URL in your browser to confirm the app exists.
• The ID is for an app that has been delisted from Steam entirely. SteamDB keeps the record but appdetails no longer returns it.

Fix: confirm the ID on SteamDB. If it shows up there but the generator still rejects it, drop a line in the Discord and we will add the missing region.

3. "Steam search failed (429)"

We hit Steam's rate limit. The generator enforces a minimum interval of 300 ms per IP for search and 1.5 s for generate, and Steam's own upstream also rate-limits. If you see this, the right move is to wait a few seconds and try again — the limit is per-IP, not per-account, and resets quickly.

Fix: wait 5–10 seconds, retry. If you are scripting against the API, see the Discord for the rate-limit headers so you can back off cleanly.

4. "App ID is too long"

You pasted something with more than 10 digits. Steam App IDs are 32-bit unsigned integers, so the maximum is 4,294,967,295 — but in practice nothing real exceeds 7 digits, and most are 4–6. If you are seeing "too long", you probably pasted a URL fragment or a chunk of a SteamDB JSON, not an ID.

Fix: copy the ID itself, not the URL or the JSON.

The one fix that solves most of them

About 80% of all the support messages we get resolve to: "the App ID you typed is wrong, the actual ID is X". The most common cause is grabbing the wrong number from a SteamDB page. SteamDB shows four numbers on every app page: the App ID, the package ID, the depot ID, and the build ID. You want the App ID. The other three are different.

If you are ever unsure which number is which, the page header on SteamDB always links back to the canonical store URL (store.steampowered.com/app/<APPID>/...) — that is the one to use.

If the error message is not on this list

The generator is a TanStack Start server route; the full error message is returned in the response body as { "code": -1, "message": "..." }. If you see a message not in the list above, copy the whole string and post it in the Discord — it usually takes under an hour to diagnose.