Achievements are gaming’s version of badges of honour. And only the most elite of players earn certain achievements.
Steam has a feature where, anyone who has reached level 10 can go to their profile, and select an “Achievement Showcase” that displays their rarest achievements. Using this, players can easily tell what percentage of people have earned an elusive achievement. Recently, folks on r/Steam started sharing what their most exceptional Steam achievements are, and I thought they were worth sharing. Here are some of the rarest Steam achievements that people own:
Goat Simulator: “An Unnecessary Journey: Throw the dwarf Bilbo into the lava.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.6%.
Alien Isolation: “One Shot: complete the game without dying.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.37%.
VVVVV: “Less than 50 deaths.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.5%.
Civilisation V: “Discoverer: Playing as Italy in Scramble for Africa, earn the VP for finding two Natural Wonders.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.2%. Funnily enough, Civ v has a TON of rare achievements, because most people never play scenarios.
Europa Universalis 4: “Lion of the North: Start as Sweden and lead the Protestant League to victory against the Emperor.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.1%.
Endless Space: “Don’t even think about it: Create a custom faction with -195 points or less, and win a game with it on Endless difficulty.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.2%.
Crusader Kings 2: “Seven Centuries: Play a game all the way through from 769 to 1453.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.08%.
Nidhogg: “Trapped in Donkeyspace: play a match lasting longer than 20 minutes.” Percentage of players who own it: .34%
Stanley Parable: “Go Outside: Don’t play The Stanley Parable for Five Years.” Percentage of players who own this achievement: 6.9%. Incidentally, the game has only been out on Steam for a little over two years. Dun dun dun!
Batman: Arkham Origins: “I Am The Night: Completed the game on New Game Plus without dying.” Percentage of players who own it: 0.75%.
Super Hexagon: “Hexagon: Complete the Hyper Hexagonest stage, and witness the end.” Percentage of players who own it: 3.0%
Dark Souls II: “The Dark Soul: Earn all achievements.” Percentage of players who own it: 1.9%
What about you, what are some of the rarest Steam achievements you own? Let us know in the comments, using the same format as above: Game: “The name of the achievement, and what you have to do to get it.” Percentage of players who own it: %.” Anecdotes welcome!
Comments
75 responses to “What’s Your Rarest Steam Achievement?”
Mine is the ‘Socializer’ achievement for Torchlight II, apparently. I’m not sure what was involved with it and I don’t know how I got it, might be something as dumb as being friends on Steam with >10 people that have the game, but only 2% have it apparently.
Best of the rare ones I have is ‘Totally Fact Up’ in Ys Origin. Playing with Hugo Fact, there’s a sequence toward the end of the game where you get stupidly powerful and then fight a boss that you can one-hit kill. Achievement is for dying on the boss. 😛
Heh, mine is also from Torchlight 2! Cartophile – use 100 maps. Apparently only 0.33% of people have it!
I’m one of them 🙂
That tf2 carnival of carnage bumper cart one. Got it legit too.
Unlike other people……
Sleeping Dogs: “Goodie Monster: Find all the Evidence Collectibles.” Percentage of players who own it: 1.0%
My other ones are for more obscure games that I’ve hardly played, where as with Sleeping Dogs I’ve put in 52 hrs.
Sleeping Dogs is one of only two games I have a 100% achievement clear on. It was such a good game, I’ve been back and replayed it 3 or 4 times and I love it every time.
Yeah I still fire it up and mess around in it.
I’m not one for collecting achievements, so if I get one then cool, but I’m not out hunting for them.
Defcon: “Lone Warrior” (win a 6 player MP game without ever being in an alliance) – 0.78% of players
This one is a hell of a grind. Spelunky is a somewhat tricky game to begin with and I decided to get so deep into it that I have all achievements. I’ve even tried my hand at speed runs, score runs and novelty runs in this game.
Anyhow, Low Scorer is generally considered one of the harder achievements in Spelunky. It turns a hard game where anything can kill you into a super hard game where picking up any gold can kill you. You have to steal from shopkeepers if you want any items, which means that there will be one guarding the exit of each level for the rest of the game.
This one took more than a few tries and there was one where I was fighting Olmec (the boss) and one of the bombs I used caused a small chunk of gold to fly into me. Literally the last possible chance to get gold and I somehow managed to do it.
Another fun achievement from this game is Good Teamwork (0.8% of players have it). To get it, you have to complete a co-op game with both players alive. By itself, not too difficult. The fun part comes from there being no official online co-op. If you don’t know someone else who’s okay at this game, you have to play both characters yourself.
I played both characters myself.
It’s less impressive than it sounds. You can kill one character off and revive them just before the boss fight. Still tricky though.
Yeah, fuck that. I gave up in frustration trying to get the *high* scoring one.
That one is pretty easy if you can get a jetpack and a mattock/a couple of bomb boxes. Once you spend more than 2min 30sec in a level, the ghost spawns. When she passes over gems, they turn into diamonds worth $5k. Each area of the game has a vault full of gems. Once they’re ghosted they’re worth $60k-120k.
Ghosting a level (turning all gems into diamonds) can produce around $100k on average as well.
Then again, there are people who speed run the achievement by taking a shitload of bombs to the City of Gold and destroying Yama’s throne. Speedrunners make this game look silly.
See, I know this. But so many times I had it all there before me and just had to go through the motions, only to get cornered stupidly by the ghost, or piss off a shop-keeper despite being nowhere near him, or… you get the idea. I was getting angry, rather than enjoying it, and that’s when I decided that my time was done.
Fair enough.
I think the trick with going for Big Money is to know when to cut your losses. $500k really isn’t that much. Being greedy is only really necessary when you’re going for $2m+ scores.
Pissing off the shop keeper is pretty mandatory though. Learning how to consistently rob them and then deal with them at the end of levels will go a long way to making the whole ordeal less frustrating.
My two toughest that map to Steam were probably Super Meat Boy’s “I am a golden god” and Dark Souls’ “The Dark Soul”. No idea of percentages, partly because I actually got those achievements on 360 😛
Also, I think the platinum trophy for Velocity 2X I obtained on vita has something like 0.1% – but that’s skewed because it was a freebie on Playstation Plus (also not available on Steam anyway).
Bioshock Infinite “Scavenger Hunt” achievement for finishing 1999 Mode without purchasing anything from Dollar-Bill stations. 1.2% of players. That was a tough one!
Met one of the devs who programmed the final zeppelin battle and told him I did it on 1999 and he didn’t believe me at first! Mainly because he said it was full of bugs.
Civ 5: King of the Mountain – Beat the game on any difficulty setting as Pachacuti. 2% of people. Pffft I was hoping for something better…
MIne is for XCOM – Enemy Unknown : An Army Of Four – Beat the game without buying a Squad Size upgrade (Classic+ difficulty)
Mine would have to be Legendary War Mage on Orcs Must Die! Apparently 2% have this achievement
Heh this one’s easy.
Secret of the Magic Crystal: End Game (0.78%)
Real Platinum God on the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, at 1.7%
Oh god…. How many hours did that take? I’m working towards it on PS4 but its completely bugged and trophies aren’t always registering. There’s meant to be a patch for EU territories to fix it but it’s on hold or something silly and no idea when it will be released.
@Nick Nicely done sir
@waldofoo It took me around 180 hours to get Platinum God on the original BoI, havent dared pick up Rebirth yet……………
It took me ~120 to 130 hours (roughly half of my playtime was offline and I have 60 ish hours logged on Steam). Also, it took me something ridiculous like 250 hours to get the platinum in the original, after having played on and off for a year before trying to finish it
Bioshock Infinite, The Whole Story, 0.73%
I have a holy shit rarest of rare achievements 😛
Monday Night Combat
Uber Streak
0.06% of players have it :3
My god did I love that game
2 other notables I have from the same game that I have are
Keep ’em down
0.32% of players have it
Ringouts
0.64% of players have it
Civ 5: Radio Free Europe – Adopt the Freedom Ideology and fill 10 Broadcast Towers with Great Works.
0.43% of people. Seems like a relatively straightforward one but I guess people haven’t been bothered…
Dark Souls: The Dark Soul, apparently only 0.53% of people. I’m feeling pretty good about now.
*high five*
Thank you, sir.
Never got into Achievement hunting except Left 4 Dead.
Nothing Special was my victory moment (2.4% people). All 4 survivors must last the entire campaign without taking damage from special infected, and Tanks and Witches are counted as SI.
It took a lot of coordination and good teamwork to sort this achievement! When I got it it was under 1% of people who had it.
I don’t know about rare but the biggest pain in the ass was the Little Rocket man Gnome achievement in Half Life 2. I think that one broke my desire for achievement hunting,
Did you cart him all the way there, then continue expecting to get it at the end of the game, then overwrite all your saves, only to find that you were meant to shut the fricking door? Yeah… me either…
probably bioshock Infinite: scavenger hunt – 1999 mode, no vending machines (1.2%), and taffer’s delight – episode 2 dlc, 1998 mode (0.5%)
It would be nice if there was an easy way to find this out…. anyone got a system?
You can edit your steam profile and include an achievement showcase ranked by rarest.
If you aren’t level 10 yet you can get an idea here http://astats.astats.nl/astats/ if you enter your username (Will need a public profile)
That will tell you your rarest, then you just need to check steam for the steam % of users
My rarest achievements are pretty much all puzzle pirates achievements
Army of darkness 0.00%
Heavyweight of strikes 0.01%
Sublime rigger 0.02%
Otherwise
Underdog – Puzzle quest 2 0.2%
Swamp Challenge: Gold – Reus 0.4%
Which reminds me, I really should get the rest of those reus challenge achievements
I really wanted to like Reus more than I did. I might give it another try sometime though.
It really is designed for multiple playthroughs. You need to get achievements to unlock the things you need to get more achievements which unlocks…….
Also if you do give it another go remember that the pause button is your friend. You can issue commands to all your giants while paused and then they can all trundle off and do those
I think my most impressive Steam achievement is probably never having looked at my Steam achievements. I don’t think I’d even know where to look.
Civ V:
All 1%
What’s Yours is Mine
Wanna Be the King of the Zulus
Master of the Universe
In Hoc Signo Vinces
Tablet Tech Pioneer
(Yep, I played a l lot of Civ)
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
Allies to the cause .93%
From the Co-op campaign, I guess no one played it lol.
All the DoW2 achievements are really rare because everyone finished playing the game before achievements were patched in with the removal of GFWL.
My rarest of those at 0.17% is Purist: Complete a mission on the Space Hulk with 4 Terminators in Chaos Rising.
Outside of DoW2 my rarest is for Endless Space. 0.38% The Way Of Harmony: As Amoeba, win a game without building any ships containing weapons. This is in a 4X game where you generally build ships and destroy enemy civilizations.
Mine would have to be Mount & Blade: Warband – Manifest Destiny with 0.65%
Nice, I’ve played a lot of M&B but never finished a game.
HOARD
Fire vs. Magic: Kill a wizard tower using a bomb wagon. (0.9%)
Not very spectacular. :S
Also Goat Simulator: Tony Goat – Finish all Manual tasks (3%)
I’m going to chime in, although my achievements are PSN trophies 😛
Platinum trophy in Skylanders SWAP Force (PS3) – 0.3%
Platinum trophy for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine – 0.4%
Platinum trophy for Thief (PS4) – 0.5%
Squash hope for winning the amateur league in Racket Sports – 0.6%
Some of the trophies in the Pigsy DLC for Enslaved – 0.6% – 0.7%
Trophies for completing the trials and Paladin difficulty in the Castlevania Lords of Shadow Resurrection DLC – 0.7%
Ain’t No Cavalry Coming – have a soldier survive every mission in X-Com Enemy Unknown – 0.7%
Platinum trophy for Knack – 0.8%
Platinum in Assassin’s Creed III Liberation – 0.9%
Civ V – Strength Through Joy (2%)
Bollywood (2%)
Tear Down This Wall (2%)
…,Yeah I play a lot of Civ V
Metal Slug 3 – Collector:
Unlock all illustrations
0.47% of players have this
CIV V – Party in hattUSA (0.52%)
Not the rarest (not even in the game itself) but the one I worked the hardest for was definitely the “Little Rocket Man” achievement in HL2 ep2, that’s pretty much the only achievement I ever pursued to the point of frustration. The “Neighborhood watch” achievement (the rarer of the two in the game) was actually a lot of fun.
Little Rocket Man was an awesome achievement to get. Though the most fun is when the penny drops as to what it actually entails…
‘Send the garden gnome into space’ – Oh, that’s easy, I’ll just put the gnome into the spaceship before launch. Wait…. the garden gnome….. the one from the start of the game? O_O
The car level was absolute hell! lol….
Neighborhood watch also would be damn hard from my memory of that part of the game. Wow.
Though, the top one is currently ‘Get Some Grub’. I actually attempted that on my run through, and gave up halfway through, with the knowledge that there was no real way to know if I had missed one a few hours back and was just wasting my time. THAT one seems insane! [and its at 2.5%!!!!]
Haha, yeah. 1 day I’ll get that one, but bloody hell last time I was counting and I missed it by 2. Neighborhood watch is definitely difficult (it counts the saw mill as a building) but once you figure out where everything spawns and which striders go for which building it becomes an inceredibly fun mad dash to each site. Quick saves are your friend at that point 🙂
Monaco: Play it again Sam (0.48%)
Identified (0.97%)
Dishonoured: Silent Ways (1%)
Sonic Generations – Can’t touch this – defeat the final boss without getting hit – 1.4%
Bad Rats – Bad Rats King – Complete all levels – 3%
Cave Story+ – Happy Birthday Pixel! – Log in on Pixel’s Birthday – 3%
Mine aren’t very rare and were easily achieved but the first one at least was fun.
Team Fortress 2: Conga Line – Do the Conga with 10 or more players at the same time.
4% of all players have it
Half Life 2: Vorticough – Discover the hidden singing vortigaunt cave in chapter Water Hazard.
5% of all players have it
I’m still only level 4 after two years on Steam, and it’s my primary gaming platform. How the hell do you level up???
Your level is based on XP points awarded for obtaining various badges. Most badges you craft (when you collect the full set of Steam trading cards for a game that has that feature enabled, you turn them into a badge) others are associated with special events (eg Steam sales) and there are a couple of special badges that grow in XP value based on the age of your Steam account, the number of games in your library etc.
Basically, play games with trading cards.
Aaah I see. I’ve always sold my trading cards on the market pretty much as soon as I got them.
Just Cause 2
Trying Anything Once
Drive all 104 vehicles.
1.2%
Completionist for Borderlands 1 and Pick Up After Yourself for Alan Wake, both 1% achievements so not that rare by most standards.
Surgeon Simulator: “There Is Nothing More To Teach…”
Completed every achievement. Now go save lives!
I got that achievement, put the game down and said ‘I’m done’. To this day, I still have not touched it again.
Free game’s on Steam count yeah?
No Room in Hell
Blinded By the Light – 0.1%
Waiting for the Worms – 0.1% &
Solder This – 0.1%
I became a bit of a achievement whore with this game
Rocksmith 2014 – Mission 214. 0.70% of players have it… but I feel Rocksmith is kindof a copout answer. Seeing as there are a lot of people who’d have picked it up and stopped, either out of learning they really don’t want to learn guitar, or had issues getting it working with external interfaces.
My current top ones are:
Alan Wake – Cardboard Companions – 2% [When I first got this, it was around 0.8%]
Homefront – Drone Expert – 2% [Gosh I miss that game….]
GRID Autosport – Holeshot – 2%
Metro 2033 – Explorer – 2%
Deus Ex: HR “Pacifist” 2.6%
My rarest is;
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD
“Braveheart”
Deliver the final blow to Mordekai with the Knife.
7.1%
Considering the kind of players Serious Sam players are, I’m happy with that.
My 3 are BRINK “brinkmanship” 1% of players — Complete an Operative Primary Objective within 5 seconds of breaking disguise
The Stanley Parable “Commitment” 1% of players — Play The Stanley Parable for the entire duration of a Tuesday.
Dying light “Enlightenment” 1% of players — Blind 25 enemies in the Light Trap
My two rarest are
Culture Vultures: Payday 2 “In the Diamond job, secure 10 bags of additional loot” 2.0%
Got the Moves Like Jagger!: Orion Prelude “Roll out of a T-Rex chomp” 1.1%
King’s Bounty: Dark Side
Deputy Field Marshal
Complete all Military Department quests
0.1%
The missus is a Kings Bounty nut.
Well, according to my pissed off son, who’s account we use, it’s apparently my completion of Gatling Gears on easy! With only about 0.35% of the Steam population having done so! lol!
He’s not a happy camper as his previous top achievement had something to do with Counter Strike… XD
As a future topic, can we do how many games we have in our Steam library? I think we just hit 320! And to think only 11 years ago I was like “Pfffft! Who’d download a game you’ve PAID FOR??”
Mine was not even hard to get at all. It’s from Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II and the achievement is Emperor’s Champion: Kill a boss using only your Force Commander in Dawn of War II. Somehow only 0.19% have it.
Winning as Norway in Civ V, which remarkably only 0.6% of players have done. Maybe it’s in an expansion not many people own, or possibly it’s just a really boring civ to play as!
DOWII:
The Swarm: Win a Ranked Team Battle with 3 different Tyranid heroes on the team. (0.53%)
Defenders of the Imperium: Win a Ranked Team Battle with 3 different IG heroes on the team (0.68%)
Chaos Favor: Win a Ranked Team Battle with 3 different Chaos heroes on the team. (0.85%)
We stand together: Win a Ranked Team Battle with 3 different Space Marine heroes on the team. (1.0%)
Veteran Victor: 100 ranked wins. (1.0%)
Hammerwatch:
Full House Beat both the Castle Hammerwatch and the Temple of the Sun campaigns (0.61%)
I havn’t played DOW2 for years…I wonder when DOW3 is releasing?
Steams % score is pretty crap. Look at Payday 2, only 65% of people have the achievement for putting your mask on for the first time…. so 30% of people that own it never even started the game.
Likewise with games like TF2 that practically everyone in the world owns courtesy of Orange Box makes the % for recently added events even smaller.
These things make my top scoring achievement nothing to be proud of. Most of them are TF2 ones for recent content updates, or achievements in a free Source deathmatch mod, or for running a single game of Capture the Flag in Path of Exile.
Achievements I’d show off would be Golden God in Super Meat Boy and Platinum God in Binding of Isaac. I’m sure there are others but those two I really feel I earnt.
Stormbringer for Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, play on Revengeance difficulty and get S rank for every battle. Last I checked, it had around 2% of people collecting it. Was my first Platinum game, so yeah, I spent some time on it.
Pretty sure mine are some Duke Nukem Forever achievements – probably because I was one of the few people to play it through to the end lol.
I have a few rare Payday 2 achievements too I think.. but not the rarest ones. Lots of hacking in that game too so the rare ones are probably rarer than listed.