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12

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).

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.

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Hm, this would have been useful to know when Steam went down worldwide for three hours yesterday, preventing everyone everywhere from playing any of their steam games! – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Jan 6 '12 at 20:24

1 Answer

up vote 22 down vote accepted

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):

BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable
ForceOfflineMode=enable

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):

IF "%1"=="offline" (
    IF EXIST steam.cfgx (
        rename steam.cfgx steam.cfg
    )
)
ELSE (
    IF EXIST steam.cfg (
        rename steam.cfg steam.cfgx
    )
)
start steam.exe

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.

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Either I didn't really understand your instructions, or this method doesn't work anymore. – Aubergine Mar 30 '11 at 21:40
3  
@Matthew: When I tried to press cancel then steam simply shut itself down. Regarding the .cfg method, I am a little reluctant on following the unconfirmed advice of a banned steam forum member. – Aubergine Mar 30 '11 at 21:52
2  
I am neither a banned steam member, nor do I know the poster, but I can confirm that the 2 edits he is suggesting are not in any way dangerous to you, your computer or your livelihood, nor is the simple copy and replace batch file he posted. – horatio Mar 31 '11 at 16:34
1  
i can confirm that this works.. just create a steam.cfg and put: BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable ForceOfflineMode=enable but you need to have checked: remember my password first. then this works great :) thnx for the info mate ^_^ – user11785 Aug 17 '11 at 15:24
1  
@chris, that file isn't there by default, you have to create it. I don't know that it ever was there by default, in fact. – goldfire Dec 16 '11 at 21:21
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