Background games redeemer

Background games redeemer is a special built-in ASF feature that allows you to import given set of Steam cd-keys (together with their names) to be redeemed in the background. This is especially useful if you have a lot of keys to redeem and you're guaranteed to hit RateLimited status before you're done with your entire batch.

Background games redeemer is made to have a single bot scope, which means that it does not make use of RedeemingPreferences. This feature can be used together with (or instead of) redeem command, if needed.

Import

The import process can be done through two ways - either by using a file, or IPC.

File

ASF will recognize in its config directory a file named BotName.keys where BotName is the name of your bot. That file has expected and fixed structure of name of the game with cd-key, separated from each other by a tab character and ending with a newline to indicate the next entry. If multiple tabs are used, then first entry is considered game's name, last entry is considered a cd-key, and everything in-between is ignored. For example:

POSTAL 2	ABCDE-EFGHJ-IJKLM
Domino Craft VR	12345-67890-ZXCVB
A Week of Circus Terror	POIUY-KJHGD-QWERT
Terraria	ThisIsIgnored	ThisIsIgnoredToo	ZXCVB-ASDFG-QWERT

Alternatively, you're also able to use keys only format (still with a newline between each entry). ASF in this case will use Steam's response (if possible) to fill the right name. For any kind of keys tagging, we recommend that you name your keys yourself, as packages being redeemed on Steam do not have to follow logic of games that they're activating, so depending on what the developer has put, you may see correct game names, custom package names (e.g. Humble Indie Bundle 18) or outright wrong and potentially even malicious ones (e.g. Half-Life 4).

ABCDE-EFGHJ-IJKLM
12345-67890-ZXCVB
POIUY-KJHGD-QWERT
ZXCVB-ASDFG-QWERT

Regardless which format you've decided to stick with, ASF will import your keys file, either on bot startup, or later during execution. After successful parse of your file and eventual omit of invalid entries, all properly detected games will be added to the background queue, and the BotName.keys file itself will be removed from config directory.

IPC

In addition to using keys file mentioned above, ASF also exposes GamesToRedeemInBackground ASF API endpoint which can be executed by any IPC tool, including our ASF-ui. Using IPC could be more powerful, as you can do appropriate parsing yourself, such as using a custom delimiter instead of being forced to a tab character, or even introducing your entirely own customized keys structure.

Queue

Once games are successfully imported, they're added to the queue. ASF automatically goes through its background queue as long as bot is connected to Steam network, and the queue is not empty. A key that was attempted to be redeemed and did not result in RateLimited is removed from the queue, with its status properly written to a file in config directory - either BotName.keys.used if the key was used in the process (e.g. NoDetail, BadActivationCode, DuplicateActivationCode), or BotName.keys.unused otherwise. ASF intentionally uses your provided game's name since key is not guaranteed to have a meaningful name returned by Steam network - this way you can tag your keys using even custom names if needed/wanted.

If during the process our account hits RateLimited status, the queue is temporarily suspended for a full hour in order to wait for cooldown to disappear. Afterwards, the process continues where it left, until the entire queue is empty or another RateLimited occurs.

Example

Let's assume that you have a list of 100 keys. Firstly you should create a new BotName.keys.new file in ASF config directory. We appended .new extension in order to let ASF know that it shouldn't pick up this file immediately the moment it's created (as it's new empty file, not ready for import yet).

Now you can open our new file and copy-paste list of our 100 keys there, fixing the format if needed. After fixes our BotName.keys.new file will have exactly 100 (or 101, with last newline) lines, each line having a structure of GameName\tcd-key\n, where \t is tab character and \n is newline.

You're now ready to rename this file from BotName.keys.new to BotName.keys in order to let ASF know that it's ready to be picked up. The moment you do this, ASF will automatically import the file (without a need of restart) and delete it afterwards, confirming that all our games were parsed and added to the queue.

Instead of using BotName.keys file, you could also use IPC API endpoint, or even combining both if you want to.

After some time, BotName.keys.used and BotName.keys.unused files will be generated. Those files contain results of our redeeming process. For example, you could rename BotName.keys.unused into BotName2.keys file and therefore submit our unused keys for some other bot, since previous bot didn't make use of those keys himself. Or you could simply copy-paste unused keys to some other file and keep it for later, your call. Keep in mind that as ASF goes through the queue, new entries will be added to our output used and unused files, therefore it's recommended to wait for the queue to be fully emptied before making use of them. If you absolutely must access those files before queue is fully emptied, you should firstly move output file you want to access to some other directory, then parse it. This is because ASF can append some new results while you're doing your thing, and that could potentially lead to loss of some keys if you read a file having e.g. 3 keys inside, then delete it, totally missing the fact that ASF added 4 other keys to your removed file in the meantime. If you want to access those files, ensure to move them away from ASF config directory before reading them, for example by rename.

It's also possible to add extra games to import while having some games already in our queue, by repeating all above steps. ASF will properly add our extra entries to already-ongoing queue and deal with it eventually.

Remarks

Background keys redeemer uses OrderedDictionary under the hood, which means that your cd-keys will have preserved order as they were specified in the file (or IPC API call). This means that you can (and should) provide a list where given cd-key can only have direct dependencies on cd-keys listed above, but not below. For example, this means that if you have DLC D that requires game G to be activated firstly, then cd-key for game G should always be included before cd-key for DLC D. Likewise, if DLC D would have dependencies on A, B and C, then all 3 should be included before (in any order, unless they have dependencies on their own).

Not following the scheme above will result in your DLC not being activated with DoesNotOwnRequiredApp, even if your account would be eligible for activating it after going through its entire queue. If you want to avoid that then you must make sure that your DLC is always included after the base game in your queue.