Steam Favourites and Server History: The Feature Everyone Forgets

You found a good server two months ago. You played on it for a week, stopped, and now you cannot remember its name. You have searched the list three times and everything looks the same.

The server browser has been recording every server you have ever connected to, in a tab most people have never opened. It also has a favourites list, a blacklist, and a direct-connect field, and together they solve most of the recurring problems of finding somewhere to play.

The four tabs

Every Source-engine server browser, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Garry's Mod, Left 4 Dead, Day of Defeat and their relatives, has the same four:

Internet. Every server the master list knows about. Enormous, slow to populate, and the tab everyone uses exclusively.

Favourites. Servers you have marked. Small, instant, and the one worth maintaining.

History. Every server you have connected to, automatically. Nobody has to remember to use it, and almost nobody knows it exists.

LAN. Servers on your local network. LAN and offline servers covers when this is useful.

History is the one that solves the actual problem

You do not need to remember the server's name. You connected to it, so it is in History, with the map you were playing and roughly when.

This is the answer to "what was that server called" in about four seconds, and it works for anything you have joined in the past several months. On games where the list is unreliable or the master server is flaky, it is frequently the only way back to a server you liked.

Two habits that make it better:

Favourite anything you enjoyed, immediately. History fills up and eventually rolls over. Favourites do not.

Check History before searching. If you played it once, it is there.

Favourites, used properly

A favourites list of four is useful. A favourites list of sixty is the Internet tab with extra steps.

Keep it to the servers you return to. Six or eight.

Prune it. Servers close. A favourites list where half the entries are permanently offline is a list you stop looking at.

Favourite the specific server, not the network. Large networks run many servers and favouriting the wrong one sends you to a mode you did not want.

Use it as your first stop. The whole point is that it loads instantly and shows you, in one screen, which of your usual places has people on it right now. That is a far better way to decide where to play than scrolling the Internet tab.

Direct connect

The field that always works when the browser does not.

In most Source games, the console command is:

connect 1.2.3.4:27015

Bringing up the console needs it enabled in settings first, which is worth doing once. Some games have a "connect by IP" box in the browser instead.

When you need it: the master list is not returning servers, the in-game browser is broken or empty — which it is on several older titles, or somebody has given you an address directly.

It is not a fallback so much as the reliable path. On many older games the in-game browser surfaces a fraction of what exists, and connecting by address is how people actually get to servers. Connecting to a server by IP covers the specifics per game, and in-game browser versus external list covers why the browser stopped being sufficient.

The blacklist

Less known and useful.

Servers can be blocked so they never appear in your results. This is the answer to redirect servers, servers whose names are advertising, and networks whose entire business is filling the browser with near-identical entries.

Cleaning ten of those out of your view makes the Internet tab noticeably more usable, and it persists.

Where the lists live

Two files, and knowing this is occasionally useful.

Favourites and History are stored locally by Steam, per account, in the client's own configuration. They follow you between machines when you sign in, and they do not follow you to a different account.

Practical consequences:

A new machine has your favourites, once Steam has synced. A borrowed one does not.

Reinstalling the game does not clear them, because they belong to the client rather than to the game.

They can be lost, rarely, when a Steam configuration is reset or corrupted. If you have a small number of servers you rely on, keeping the addresses written down somewhere is thirty seconds of insurance.

They are per-game in the browser view but stored together, which is why the same server can appear under a game you no longer have installed.

If you are attached to a particular set of servers, the durable version is a note with the addresses rather than the client's list, and pairing it with connecting by IP directly means you can always get back regardless of what the browser is doing.

Why the browser is not enough on its own

Worth understanding, because it explains why external lists exist at all.

It shows the current moment. A server empty when you look is filtered out mentally, and most community servers are empty for most of the day. There is no history, no peak-hours view, no way to tell a small server at 3pm from a dead one. Peak hours is the thing the browser structurally cannot show you.

It has no uptime record. A server that has been up for months and one set up yesterday look identical.

It has no description. The name is all you get, which is why server names became so decorated.

On several older games it is broken or partial. Master server changes over the years left some titles with browsers that return very little. Finding servers for games everyone says are dead is largely about this.

The practical arrangement most people converge on: an external list to discover servers, with their history and their descriptions, and the in-game favourites to return to the ones that worked.

Why the Internet tab is so slow

Worth understanding, because it explains a lot of behaviour people read as the browser being broken.

The browser asks a master server for a list of addresses, then queries each one individually for its name, map and player count. On a game with eleven thousand servers that is eleven thousand small network requests, sent from your machine, over your connection.

The consequences:

It fills in gradually, and sorting before it has finished sorts an incomplete list. Waiting ten seconds before sorting by population changes the results considerably.

Servers appearing and disappearing as you look is queries arriving and timing out, not servers going down.

A high ping shown on first load is frequently the queue rather than the route. Refreshing a single server gives a truer number.

Filters applied before loading finishes discard servers that had not answered yet.

It gets slower on a poor connection, because the bottleneck is your own machine issuing thousands of requests.

None of this affects Favourites or History, which is a large part of why they are so much more pleasant to use, a handful of queries returns instantly. It is also why external lists exist: querying every server on a schedule from a server rather than from your machine is simply a better arrangement, and it is what makes uptime history and peak-hour charts possible at all. How those figures are produced covers the cadence.

Games with their own systems

Minecraft has a server list you maintain by hand — add by address, and it pings each entry when you open it. There is no discovery in it at all, which is why the address has to come from somewhere else. The Minecraft servers guide covers finding them.

FiveM has its own browser with favourites, and the same recency problem. The FiveM guide.

Rust uses the Steam browser plus its own in-game list, with favourites shared between them.

Minecraft Bedrock and console versions are considerably more restricted, and on some platforms adding an arbitrary server is not straightforward: Bedrock or Java covers the difference.

Sharing a server with someone

Three ways, in decreasing order of reliability.

The address and port. Always works, works in every game, and works when the browser does not. 1.2.3.4:27015 pasted into a Discord message is the most robust thing you can send someone.

A Steam connect link. steam://connect/1.2.3.4:27015 launches the game and joins directly. Excellent when it works, and it does not work everywhere, some clients strip the link, and some browsers refuse to hand it to Steam.

The server name. The least reliable, because names change, because several servers share similar names, and because a name with decorative characters is difficult to search for accurately.

And the listing page, which is the version worth sending to someone deciding rather than someone joining; it carries the description, the rules, the uptime history and the peak hours that an address alone does not.

The practical habit: send the address for someone who wants to play now, and the listing for someone who asked what the server is like.

A five-minute tidy-up

Worth doing once:

1. Open History and look at what you have played. It is usually a longer list than you remember.
2. Favourite the ones you liked, including the ones you had forgotten.
3. Prune favourites that are permanently offline.
4. Blacklist the redirect and advertising servers you keep seeing.
5. Enable the console so direct connect is available when you need it.

After that, checking whether anywhere you like has people on it takes one click rather than a scroll through eleven thousand entries — which is, in practice, the difference between playing somewhere you enjoy and playing wherever was busiest when you looked.