Today I’d like to talk about startup achievements. These mean that you have to start the game up x times. I’ll talk specifically about Garry’s Mod and Universe Sandbox and exactly how to earn these achievements.

Startup Millenium:

Start Garry’s Mod 1000 times.

 

Startup Too Many:

Start Universe Sandbox 10^4 = 10000 times

 

You don’t have to actually sit down for 10 hours and repeatedly start the game up and exit it. For the Garry’s Mod Achievement: Create a file called gmod.bat on your desktop. Then create a shortcut leading to your Steam.exe (typically C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe) with parameter -applaunch 4000 ad call it GMOD. So it will look like this: “Target: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe -applauch 4000”

Now edit the bat file and copy the following into it:

ECHO “GMod laucher by @B0FH”

START  GMOD.lnk

ping -n 30 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1

TASKKILL /f /im “hl2.exe”

CALL gmod.bat

Let’s go over what it actually does. The first line is just a credit to @B0FH, who came with this great little script. The second line executes the shortcut, so it runs GMod. The third line pings your PC for 30 seconds (you can edit this number according to your PC’s performance – if you can run it faster, decrease the number, if you can’t run it in 30 secods, increase it) and forwards the output of the command to NUL, so it doesn’t spam your screen. Then the fourth line force kills Garry’s Mod and at the fifth line it goes back to the first line (calls itself).

The modification for Universe Sandbox is simple. Create another shortcut, this time with the parameter -applaunch 72200 and call it US. Then create a bat file again and call it us.bat. Edit it and put the following into it:

ECHO “Universe Sandbox laucher by @B0FH”

START  US.lnk

ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1

TASKKILL /f /im “Universe Sandbox.exe”

CALL us.bat

And just leave it running overnight (in case of GMod) or for a longer time (in case of Universe Sandbox ;-)).