Market Bot
The bot page, item groups, and the loop that turns settings into Steam orders and listings.
A Market Bot is trading logic bound to exactly one Steam account. It buys with buy orders and sells with listings on the Steam Community Market, using prices it derives from Steam's own price history.
A worker is required
The bot only decides what to do; every Steam call is made by the worker attached to the same account. Set the worker up first — cloud or self-hosted — otherwise the bot's jobs just queue up.
Creating a bot
- Set up a worker for the Steam account, if it has none.
- Open Market bots and press Add bot.
- Pick a Steam account. Only accounts without a bot are offered — one account, one bot.
- Open the bot, create an item group, add items to it, then switch the group and the bot on.
Two switches, not one
The bot switch and the group switch are independent. A bot that is on does nothing while every group inside it is off, and an enabled group does nothing while the bot is off.
The bot page
Header
| Element | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Worker: on/off | Live state of the process signed into the Steam account. Without a running worker nothing reaches Steam. |
| Bot: on/off | Master switch for this bot. Turning it off pauses delivery of queued jobs; jobs already handed to the worker still finish. |
| In queue | Number of jobs waiting for the worker (price analysis, order placement, listing, cancellation). |
| Tariff | Billing plan of the bot. An unpaid bot is marked Not paid. |
Capital
Four numbers describe where the account's money currently sits:
- Balance — the Steam wallet. The value in brackets is the amount on hold.
- On sale — the value of active listings.
- Inventory — the value of items sitting in the inventory.
- In orders — money committed to open buy orders, shown against the limit.
Steam allows open buy orders worth up to ten times the wallet balance; the progress bar shows how much of that limit is used.
Activity log and Steam Guard
While a worker is attached, the page streams its activity log and any pending Steam Guard confirmations, which can be accepted or declined straight from the page.
Item groups
Everything below the header is a list of item groups. Each group card offers:
| Control | Effect |
|---|---|
| Group name (pencil) | Rename the group. Names are only labels; sorting is alphabetical. |
| Toggle | Enable or disable trading for the whole group. |
| + | Add items: from the catalog, from an imported file, or all missing items of a game. |
| Settings (tune) | Open the settings panel described in Group settings. |
| Delete | Delete the group with all its items. |
Expanding a group shows its item table — see Items and bulk actions.
Adding items
- From catalog — search the item catalog and add items one by one.
- Import file — upload a file of item names for a chosen game.
- Missing items — add every item from the selected game's inventory, listings and orders that is not in the group yet.
The trading loop
For every enabled item in an enabled group of an enabled bot, the worker repeats this cycle:
- Analysis. Steam price history is pulled and turned into a buy price and a sell price, see Pricing algorithms. The interval is set by Analysis interval; a price calculated less than 20 minutes ago is reused.
- Filters. Trend, sales-per-day, order-book and listing-position checks decide whether the item may be bought at all.
- Buy. If the item's Buy switch is on and the filters pass, a buy order is placed at the calculated buy price for the configured quantity.
- Sell. Copies in the inventory are listed at the calculated sell price while the item's Sell switch is on.
- Maintenance. Undercutting, removal of stale listings and cleanup of unconfirmed listings run on their own intervals.
Prices only move when the bot is allowed to move them
Calculate prices must be on and Markup must be above 0, otherwise the group is never queued for analysis and the prices you see stay exactly as they are.