How to Use Steam Notes
Valve has added an incredibly useful yet simple tool to Steam’s overlay. Whether you just do some light gaming or spend hundreds of hours on your favorite game, almost anyone can find a great use for this note-taking feature that’s easily accessible.
Here’s how to use the new Steam Notes app and a bunch of things you can do with it.
What Is Steam Notes?
Steam Notes is part of theJune 2023 Steam updatethat overhauls the whole look of the platform. It also adds plenty of new features, including many quality-of-life features. However, what we’re interested in is the in-game overlay notes app.
It may sound boring at first, but this simple addition has so much potential to improve players’ enjoyment of the game. Steam Notes is quite a powerful text editor; it features formatting options, hyperlinks, code text, spell-checking, pinning, and a few more.
If you want to take advantage of Notes to improve your gameplay experience, we’ll show you how to use it and some scenarios where it would prove useful.
How to Access Steam Notes
In order to access Steam Notes, you need to turn on the overlay. It’s on by default, but in case you turned it off in the past, here’s how to turn it on again with the new settings page:
Click onSteamon the upper-left side of the app, then clickSettings.
In the Settings window, head toIn Game, then turn on the Steam overlay.
To open Notes in-game, open up any game of your choice and hitShift+Tabto open the overlay. On the bottom section of the overlay, you’ll find apencil icon; clicking on that opens the Notes tab.
Alternatively, checking the game details also lets you create and check your notes for that game.
How You Can Take Advantage of Steam Notes
There are plenty of ways to use Steam Notes as it’s a very simple and versatile tool. All it requires is some creativity and ingenuity. Here are a few ways we’ve found the feature quite useful, and we hope this gives you some ideas on how you can use it yourself.
List Down Requirements and Recipes
This is probably the most obvious use for Notes, but we’ll show you how it can be more than just to type random things on.
In this first example, we have the requirements to construct a building in Dinkum. Unlike recipes for tools, you’re able to’t pin the requirements to your quest menu. In this case, clicking on thepinon the upper right of the Notes tab will make it visible even after closing the overlay.
Ahalf-filled circlewill appear next to the pin after you pin a window, and this adjusts the opacity of the window so it won’t obstruct your experience as much.
Remember Locations With Screenshots and Images
Besides pinning things to your screen, you can also take screenshots and paste images into Notes. In this example, we have Counter-Strike grenade lineups with the location description and image of the lineup.
You could also use this to visually note the locations of secrets that you have to come back to. Instead of taking time to describe the location in words, you could quickly take a screenshot, paste it into a Note, and get back to playing.
This is especially useful for theSteam Deck, as typing on it can be quite tedious; pasting screenshots is a lot easier.
List Server Commands and Custom Keybinds
Valve has created many easily modifiable games like Garry’s Mod, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2. Valve knows how much its players like to mess around with custom servers, custom keybinds, and cheat commands in these games.
These commands can be quite overwhelming if you’re just getting started, but Notes can make the learning curve a lot easier. Through the code text formatting button, you can input lines or blocks of code that you can copy and paste easily into the console.
Write a Guide While You Play
Notes is quite a powerful yet simple text processor. You have basic formatting features like headings, hyperlinking, indentation, emphases, and bullets. These are most of the features you need to make a structured guide or article.
The image above is an example of a guide I suddenly thought of while playing CS:GO. Sometimes, the inspiration just comes to you all of a sudden, and the best thing to write with is the most accessible tool you have with you. Steam Notes allows you to take action immediately while the thoughts are still fresh.
You can then paste your guide into Steam’s Guides feature, where players share their knowledge. Here’show to post your own guide on Steam.
Steam Notes Is a Feature We Didn’t Know We Needed
Valve surprised us with this new Notes feature and over-delivered by adding text formatting and image pasting, while being integrated so seamlessly. It’s such a simple concept, but it has so much potential to improve almost every Steam user’s experience in many ways.
Notes is a feature we didn’t know we needed, but we’re glad it’s here. We hope the examples we provided will inspire you to come up with your own unique way to use it.
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