What is SamRewritten?
SamRewritten is a tool that lets you unlock and relock achievements on your Steam account. It can also edit statistics for games and apps that expose them. While achievements carry no financial value, they are widely used for collection progress and bragging rights. SamRewritten ships with both a polished GTK graphical interface and a scriptable command-line tool.
Features
- Lock and unlock specific achievements with a single click
- Bulk lock/unlock achievements for all or selected apps
- Schedule achievement unlocks over a custom period
- Copy another user's unlock timings and replay them on your account
- Edit game statistics in real time
- Per-app or bulk import/export of achievements and stats (JSON)
- Idle apps: appear in-game until you toggle it off
- Advanced stats: library totals, a per-day unlock activity heatmap, and average completion over time (see below)
- Review of unlock bursts that look irregular, so you can see what stands out in your own history
- Optional local history of every change SamRewritten makes, with one-click undo
- Light and dark themes
- Translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese (in addition to English)
- Full-featured CLI that does not require GTK (read the guide)
Advanced stats
Click your Steam profile in the sidebar to open a page about your library rather than any single game. Everything on it is computed locally, from the achievement records Steam already keeps on your disk — so it is exactly as complete as those records are.
- Library totals — games owned, achievements unlocked, average completion, perfect games and total playtime.
- Unlock activity — a calendar heatmap, one square per day, with a year switcher. Hover any day to see how many achievements it holds and which game they came from.
- Completion over time — your average completion across the games you have started, from your first unlock to today. It dips whenever you start something new, which is the honest shape of a library.
- Irregular activity — runs of unlocks that arrived too fast or too neatly to look like ordinary play, each with a short note on why it stands out.
- What SamRewritten changed — opt-in and off by default. Turn it on and every unlock, relock and stat edit the app makes is recorded to a local file you can review and undo.
Irregular activity flags candidates, never verdicts. A game that grants its whole catalogue on first launch looks exactly like a bulk unlock, and the page says so rather than guessing.
How SamRewritten compares to other Steam Achievement Managers
How SamRewritten stacks up against other Steam Achievement Managers and unlockers — the original Steam Achievement Manager (SAM) by Gibbed, Samira, and Steam Game Idler. SamRewritten is the only one of the four with full support for Windows, Snap, Flatpak and native Linux Steam installs, and the only one with JSON import and export. It is free, open source and ad-free, with no paid tier.
| Feature |  SamRewritten |
SAM (Gibbed) | Samira | Steam Game Idler |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supported Steam installs | ||||
| Windows | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Snap | Yes | No | No | Partly, see notes1 |
| Flatpak | Yes | No | No | Partly, see notes1 |
| Native / package | Yes | No | Yes | Partly, see notes1 |
| Features | ||||
| Timed unlocksUnlock gradually over a chosen period | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Copy user timingsReuse another user's unlock order and delays | Yes | No | No | Partly, see notes2 |
| Import/ExportBack up and restore progress as JSON | Yes | No | No | No |
| ScriptableAutomate from a command line, without the GUI | Yes | No | No | Partly, see notes3 |
| Card farmingIdle games to collect trading card drops | No | No | No | Yes |
| Ad-freeNo ads in the app | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partly, see notes2 |
| Project | ||||
| GUI stackWhat the interface is built with | GTK 4 / libadwaita | WinForms (.NET) | Tauri (React) | Tauri (Next.js) |
| LicenseWhat the project is released under | GPL-3.0 | zlib | GPL-3.0 | Elastic-2.0 |
Last checked October 2026 against each project's repository and documentation.
- Steam Game Idler has run on Linux since version 6.1.0 and needs no local Steam client, so it works whichever way Steam is installed. On Linux it can only sign in to Steam directly, which leaves Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, CS2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 out of reach.
- Steam Game Idler's free tier shows ads and can't import timings. Removing ads takes a paid PRO subscription, from $2 a month; importing timings takes the $4 a month Gamer tier.
- Steam Game Idler is a graphical app; its engine, SteamUtility, is a separate standalone CLI. That CLI is Windows only: the Linux build doesn't include it.
Installation
Windows
Download the official installer from the Releases page and launch SamRewritten from the Start menu. A portable ZIP is also available.
Linux
SamRewritten runs on every Linux distribution — as an AppImage, from the Snap Store, or from the AUR. See the install instructions for the option that fits your distribution.
Frequently asked questions
Does SamRewritten work on Linux?
Yes. It provides Linux AppImages and is on the AUR (samrewritten-git). It supports Snap Steam,
Ubuntu/Debian multiarch and .deb installs, and Steam-runtime distros such as Gentoo and Arch.
What is a Steam Achievement Manager?
A Steam Achievement Manager (SAM) lets you unlock and relock achievements on your Steam account and edit game statistics. SamRewritten is a modern, open-source SAM for Linux and Windows.
Is SamRewritten free and open source?
Yes — it is free and open source, hosted on GitHub. It is not affiliated with Valve Corporation or Microsoft.
Does SamRewritten support Flatpak Steam?
Yes. SamRewritten works with the Flatpak version of Steam. Snap and .deb installations of Steam are supported as well.
Can SamRewritten show my Steam achievement statistics?
Yes. Click your profile in the sidebar to open a stats page with your library totals, a per-day unlock activity heatmap with a year switcher, a graph of your average completion over time, and a review of unlock bursts that look irregular — see Advanced stats. Everything is computed locally from the achievement records Steam already keeps on your disk.
Can I use SamRewritten from the command line?
Yes. The CLI does not require GTK and can list apps/achievements/stats, lock/unlock in bulk, edit stats, import/export JSON, and idle apps. Every command prints JSON, so it scripts well — see the CLI guide for the full reference.
How does SamRewritten compare to other Steam Achievement Managers?
SamRewritten runs on Linux and Windows and works with Windows, Snap, Flatpak and native Steam installs. The original Steam Achievement Manager by Gibbed is Windows only, and Samira is Linux only with no Flatpak support. SamRewritten also adds timed unlocks, copying another user's timings, JSON import and export, and a command-line interface. Steam Game Idler shares some of those features, but its free tier shows ads and some of them need a paid subscription. See the full comparison.
Acknowledgements
SamRewritten is heavily inspired by Steam Achievement Manager by Gibbed and Samira by jsnli, and by the legacy version of SamRewritten. Thank you to all contributors, users, and stargazers.
SamRewritten's translations are written by its community. You don't need to be a programmer to help: translating is mostly just filling in a text file. Contributions for any language are welcome — see the translation guide to get started.