How it works
Make Steam start pending game updates in the hours you choose. What Better Steam Autoupdate does, what it’s built with, and how far along it is.
The premise
Steam’s "Always keep this game updated" leaves updates for games you haven’t played lately in a Scheduled list, sometimes for days, and its own schedule setting gives one window for every day. Better Steam Autoupdate is a Windows tray app that starts every pending update inside windows you set for each day of the week, through Steam’s own download engine. It never asks for your Steam password.
It drives Steam through the client’s local debugger when Steam runs with debugging on, the same calls the Downloads page makes, and otherwise falls back to editing the games’ manifest files while Steam is shut down, with a journal so every change is put back. It holds off while you’re playing, on battery or on a metered connection. Version 0.1.0 is built and tested against mocks and real Steam library files, but not yet against a live Steam debugger, and there’s no installer to download yet. The source is MIT-licensed.
What’s included
A weekly schedule with as many windows a day as you like, including ones that cross midnight
Holds off while a game is running, on battery, or on a metered connection
Two ways to drive Steam: its local debugger, or manifest edits with a restore journal
Lifts Steam’s download throttle during a window and restores it after
Optional wake timers that wake the PC two minutes before a window
How it’s built
Better Steam Autoupdate is built on Rust, Tauri, JavaScript and Windows.
The repository is 72% Rust, 12% JavaScript, 9% NSIS, 3% HTML, 3% CSS by volume.
It carries 1 commits since Oct 2026, most recently changed in Oct 2026.
How the work is done
Every project here starts as a written spec, and the spec stays the source of truth once there’s code. The repository keeps a build plan with current status, an append-only decision log of where the code departed from the plan, and a handoff document that describes where things stand, including the unfinished parts.
That’s how one person keeps this many projects moving, and it’s what this page is written from.
Current state
Prototype. Works, but isn’t finished.
The source is public, so you can check anything on this page against it.
Next
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