Currently, there are again some drops available on Twitch for games that I either currently play or play every now and then. Since the distribution of the drops is limited in time, there is of course a FOMO feeling, the fear of missing something. On the other hand, I'm not a person who watches streams for hours. My girlfriend wouldn't be very enthusiastic and I have enough other content that I want to watch.

Splitgate demands an hour of watching, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt too. For New World there is a skin available right now, for which you have to watch four hours. And Albion Online... Here you can get up to seven crates with cosmetic items per week. The first one you get after 15 minutes of watching, for the other six you have to spend four hours per box in the stream. So, in total, 24 hours and 15 minutes per week, so rounded up 3.5 hours of Twitch watching a day. I don't know your free time schedule, but that doesn't fit into mine very well.

So do without the drops? Somehow that bugs me too. Sure, I can just keep Twitch running on my smartphone while I'm at work. Regularly check whether you have already reached the goal or the stream is still running including. To do this, the smartphone is blocked at the time or you interrupt watching. Then you just have to remember to turn the stream back on. You know me, I'm not good at this. So I need something to help me collect the drops, preferably without my intervention.

So I started the search engine of choice (Startpage) and looked for something that automatically collects the drops for me. Ideally, without having to watch a stream. And you know what, I actually found something. The TTVDropBot. The only requirement is that you have to have a Chrome-based browser installed. You log in and select the game you want to collect drops for. Or better: you set the displayless mode and define your favorite games in the settings file.

If you start the TTVDropBot now, it will check your game list if there are any uncollected drops. If so, then it looks for a qualified channel and collects the drops. If a stream goes offline, then another qualified channel is selected. If there is none, or you already have all the drops for a game, then it goes on to the next game. This way you collect the drops for your games fully automatically in the background. Have you collected the drops for your games and the bot is still running? Then it simply collects for all other games.

I have the TTVDropBot running on my notebook with Linux installed in the background. Unfortunately, the bot currently still requires a computer with x86 architecture. Hopefully there will be a version for the Raspberry PI soon. Then it would be really fully automatic. At least now I don't have to watch streams anymore.