So obviously leveling up your account requires earning XP!
You start out by needing 100 XP per level up!
Every 10 levels you need an additional 100 XP to level up once.
This stacks indefinitely, so getting higher levels will get more and more expensive!

As an example:
Level 1-10 need 100 XP per level, so 1000 XP would get you to level 10.
Level 90-100 however needs 1000 XP per level, so a whopping 10k XP instead to level up 10 times!

It is mostly just a number, but there are a few benefits.

- Every 10 levels you gain a 20% increase in your boosterpack dropchance

Whenever some other user crafts a badge, a single boosterpack for that game will drop randomly on any account eligible for it.

Eligible means that you own the game and have gotten all the card drops from playing this game. They drop just by spending time in the game.
(or leaving it idle until all drops happened)


- Additional slots in your friendslist

You gain 5 more slots in your friendslist for every level up. You start out by having 250 slots and can raise it endlessly by leveling up your account, though it will get more expensive the more you level up due to the increase in XP needed every 10 levels.


- Additional Showcases

Showcases are the different ways of showing of stuff on your profile.
These range from your favorite games, completed games and achievement in games - all the way to stuff on steam, like your favorite groups, guides, items or just showing of your favorite badges that you crafted.
You gain an additional showcase every 10 levels.

There are lots of different ways, though the most XP will be gained by spending money.

I'm going to list all the different ways of earning XP, starting with whats free!
I'll start with the easiest first and end with the main way (most expensive way) to level up!

The easiest way to earn XP ist the Community Badge!
Free 500 XP!
The full badge only requires you to do 27 out of the 28 tasks, so even if there is something on there you don't want to do, it is still possible to get!
As you can see, I never linked my Youtube and posted a video, because I don't do any videos myself.

There are problems linking your Youtube to Steam for a while now though. If you still want to link your account, you gotta do so shortly after the servers reset each day. You got about 10 minutes before the servers break again and give you an error.
(The rest happens at 12AM Pacific Time)
This seems to be fixed now! But I'm keeping this in here in case it breaks again in the future!

The first badge is for recieving awards and the second one is for giving other people awards.

Awards are given by spending your Steam Points, which you aquire by purchasing games or DLC on Steam.

If you recieve an award from another user, you will gain 10 XP for the first 100 awards and 1 XP for every award following that.
You always get a third of the Steam Points it cost the one gifting you the award.

So if you get the "Wholesome-Award" for example, you will gain 100 Steam Points, because it costs 300 Steam Points to give.

Points aren't given instantly, you'll need to wait 2 weeks before you'll get them, but the badge will update immediately and award your XP the moment you get an award.

If you gift somebody an award, you will also get 10 XP for the first 100 awards and 1 XP for every following award given.

You also get 50 XP for every year your account existed. Its not a lot in total, but passive XP you'll get without doing anything!

Just a few example pictures!







They do this every year, towards the end of it.
Participating and doing the mentioned tasks will upgrade the badge. Every full badge will give you an additional 100 XP!

Recently, Steam started giving its users a "Year in Review" about their gaming habits and which games they bought/played etc.
This seems to be another yearly badge going forward!





Just viewing your "Year in Review" will award you with 50 XP!

Ever since the "Points Shop" got introduced (or maybe shortly after), Steam also added another badge that changes twice a year! In the big Summer and Winter Sales.

You buy these badges in the Points Shop in the Seasonal Badge Tab.



In the screenshot it looks like every additional level costs more points, but that isn't true, it simply adds all the levels together! There is a total of 40 levels for this badge!

So every level costs 1000 Steam Points! Which means that it costs 40k Steam Points to level it all the way to level 40!



Each level gives another 100 XP to your profile!

If you want the full badge, thats pretty expensive, but a few level probably won't hurt anyone!
I'd say that if you don't plan on using your points in any other way, that is a relatively cheap way to get some additional XP!

I'd always keep some in case I want something from the Points Shop though!

Yep, you also earn XP by buying games!
It has a few different rules though!

There exist different tiers and you gain less XP per game, the more games you own!

Your first game will be worth a total of 100 XP!
(94 + 6 actually, since it is 6 per game at first and a set amount for the badge)

I won't go over the entire math, there are other guides for that, but it'll eventually drop down to the badge giving you 250 XP + every game you own giving an additional 1 XP.



As you can see at this point in time I owned 553 games that are counted towards the badge, which translates to 250+553 XP = 803 XP

Free games do not count towards the total games badge and restricted games also do not count.
There are some other rules and exceptions, just know that you'll most likely end up having a different total game count in your account and on your badge!

Sometimes Steam does special events that also reward XP, the amount always differs, there are no rules as to when they do it, just keep an eye out for any extra events, mostly bundled while some kind of Sale is going on. Be it the big Summer/Winter Sales or something smaller inbetween, like Lunar Sales or Black Friday week etc.

A few examples of what I mean:











As you can see, the amount of XP I earned differs a lot. Some events are easier/better than others. Just keep an eye out!
Usually it'll be all over the shop, so its hard to miss if you launch steam multiple times a week!

Now onto the 2 main ways to earn XP!

A lot of games on Steam will drop Trading Cards! You can actually check the shoppage for it, it'll be shown if a game has drops or not in most cases.
Unless the game just recently got card drops added! It'll take a long while before the shoppages update..

If you want to make sure, you can check Steamcardexchange[www.steamcardexchange.net] to see if a game has carddrops or not and even how many a full set needs, how expensive they are and everything they can drop when crafting badges!

Every game needs either 5-15 cards per set to craft a badge.
There are 5 levels for each badge, each level awarding 100 XP!
For a total of 500 XP per game!

Foil Cards also exist, but they are much more expensive and crafting a Foil Badge also only gives 100 XP. So only craft those, if you're doing it because you want them for how they look, not for XP!

Those are the badges that get crafted the most for earning a lot of XP very quickly!

Every big Sale (Summer and Winter Sales) Steam also drops Sale specific trading cards!
You get a card for free every day, by looking through your discovery qeue in the shop, by spending money in the sale to buy games or by crafting other games badges!

They also award 100 XP per level, but they have no limit!





These are usually pretty cheap, since there is a bunch of drops and people want to sell their cards on the market to get some free pennies.
Though there are games that have cheaper sets, due to the Sale-Sets always needing about 10-12 card per badge or something around that, while some games have cheap cards aswell only needing 5 cards to complete a set!

I guess now you see, why you earn most XP by "spending money".
Obviously Steam wants you to spend money and only gives a few freebies here and there, but thats fine!

Why? Because it really isn't that important to level up. You don't really gain that much from it, you still can play all the games and have a pretty big bunch of people on your friendslists regardless!

Its a fun little thing to do on the sidelines, if you like collecting stuff.
Or maybe giving some extra pennies to the devs, since they get a cut for every card purchased from the market!

You don't have to participate in it and thats a good thing!

Thats it!

If I missed anything important, please let me know!
I will try to update this guide to keep track of all the ways to earn XP that may get added in the future!