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Utilities

The Utilities feature provides general-purpose information about the current Steam runtime, application, environment, server time, and language settings.

These functions are intended for lightweight environment checks and supporting logic used across other Steam features.

Main Capabilities

  • Check whether the Steam client is running
  • Check whether the plugin successfully initialized Steam
  • Detect Big Picture mode
  • Detect whether Steam is running in VR
  • Retrieve the current Steam App ID
  • Retrieve Steam server time
  • Calculate the Steam server-to-local UTC time offset
  • Retrieve the current Steam build ID
  • Read the Steam UI language
  • Read the current Steam game language
  • Retrieve the user's country code as reported by Steam

Basic Workflow

Utilities are synchronous queries and can generally be called directly whenever the current Steam environment needs to be inspected.

Common examples include:

  • Calling Is Steam Initialized during startup validation
  • Reading Get Steam Build ID for diagnostics or version reporting
  • Using Steam language information to coordinate localization behavior
  • Comparing Steam server time with local UTC time

For practical Blueprint workflows, see Examples.

Steam Runtime State

Is Steam Running checks whether the Steam client is running.

Is Steam Initialized checks whether Steam was successfully initialized by the plugin for the current process.

These are different checks: a running Steam client does not necessarily mean initialization succeeded for the game.

Time and Application Information

Steam server time is returned as a Unix timestamp.

Get Steam Server Time Offset reports the difference between Steam server time and local UTC time in seconds.

Application queries expose the current App ID and Steam build ID associated with the running game.

Language and Country

The feature exposes:

  • Steam UI language
  • Current game language selected through Steam
  • User country code based on Steam's IP-derived information

These values come from Steam and should not be treated as replacements for your project's own localization or legal-region systems unless that behavior is explicitly intended.

Important Notes

  • Utility values reflect the current Steam environment and client state.
  • Server-dependent values may be unavailable or less meaningful without Steam backend connectivity.
  • Steam language settings and in-game localization settings are not automatically synchronized by the plugin.
  • Country information is based on what Steam reports and is not a precise location service.