facepunch/facepunch.steamworks

Facepunch.Steamworks is a C# library that lets game developers talk to Valve's Steam platform from their own code. Steam offers a large set of features for PC games, including friends lists, achievements, cloud saves, workshop item downloads, player authentication, and in-game voice chat. To use any of that, game code needs to communicate with Steam through an official interface called Steamworks. This library wraps that interface in a way that feels natural for C# developers rather than feeling like a raw collection of low-level calls. The library was created by Facepunch Studios, the company behind Garry's Mod and Rust. The author describes it plainly as frustration with existing C# Steamworks wrappers. Those older options relied on external native files, were not fully up to date with the Steam API, could not be compiled into a standalone library for use in Unity, or carried restrictive licenses. Facepunch.Steamworks compiles to a single C# DLL, requires no additional native dependencies beyond Steam itself, supports Unity including Unity's IL2CPP compilation mode, and is released under the MIT license. The README is largely a code sample reference, showing how to do common tasks: reading the current player's Steam name and ID, listing friends, looking up achievements and unlocking them, recording and sending voice data, verifying that a player legitimately owns the game via auth tickets, reading and writing files to Steam Cloud, querying workshop items, and accessing the Steam inventory system. Initializing the library is a single function call with the game's App ID. It works on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit targets. The project is open source and hosted by Facepunch, and pull requests and bug reports are welcomed. Documentation beyond the README lives on a Facepunch wiki. The repository has over 3,600 stars.