How Card Farming Works
Card Farming runs in two phases, switching between them automatically as needed:
- Building playtime — not every account needs this
- Some Steam accounts may have restrictions on getting card drops until a game passes a certain amount of playtime, while others can drop cards immediately with no wait at all. Account restrictions usually aren't permanent and it can change over time (e.g. refunding a game can turn a previously unrestricted account into a restricted one — see below).
- Games that haven't cleared this threshold yet are idled in batches of up to 32 first to get the necessary playtime needed to start dropping cards.
- You can, and should test this yourself by following the How To Check If Your Account Is Restricted steps below to see if your account is restricted or not. If you've confirmed your account isn't restricted, go to Settings → Card Farming and set Hours until farmable to
0to skip this phase entirely.
- Farming — once a game has enough playtime, Card Farming switches to farming it on its own until all of its remaining cards have dropped, then moves on to the next game that's ready. If no games are ready, it will go back to the first phase and continue building playtime until a game is ready to farm again.
During both phases, Card Farming will periodically start and stop games to ensure that Steam registers playtime correctly, and can even help promote card drops. It is recommended you set your Steam status to "Offline" or "Invisible" to prevent spamming your friends with status updates. You may also see SteamUtility processes starting and stopping in your desktop's task manager, this is normal and expected behavior.
How To Check If Your Account Is Restricted
Since there's no way to look this up directly, the only reliable way to know for sure is a short test
This isn't a one-time answer. Restriction status can change (requesting a refund is a common trigger), so it's worth repeating this test occasionally rather than assuming your first result holds forever.
Pick 3-5 games you own that have card drops remaining and zero recorded playtime. Go to the Games With Drops tab and click the button on each of those games to add them to your whitelist
Go to Settings → Card Farming and temporarily set Hours until farmable to 0
Also make sure Farm multiple games at once is disabled so that only one game is farmed at a time
Click Card Farming in the sidebar, then click Start to start farming those games
Monitor the progress of each game for roughly 30-60 minutes
- If any of them dropped a card within roughly the first 30-60 minutes, your account isn't restricted, and you can leave Hours Until Farmable at
0 - If none of them dropped anything for several hours, your account is likely restricted. Note roughly how long the first drop took and set Hours Until Farmable to match —
3is a reasonable starting point if you'd rather skip testing altogether