Reference
The vocabulary of Counter-Strike 2 skin trading, written for humans. Bookmark this page, or jump straight to a term.
A hidden 0.00–1.00 number that decides how worn a CS2 skin looks.
Every CS2 skin is generated with a float value between 0.00 (pristine) and 1.00 (destroyed). The number is permanent: a 0.0001 Factory New AK-47 will look noticeably cleaner than a 0.0699 Factory New of the same skin, even though both share the same wear tier. Collectors pay heavy premiums for extreme floats — both very low (clean) and, on some skins, very high (extra battle-scarred) — because they are rare across the full population.
The five human-readable buckets stacked on top of the float value.
Valve groups float values into five wear tiers: Factory New (0.00–0.07), Minimal Wear (0.07–0.15), Field-Tested (0.15–0.38), Well-Worn (0.38–0.45) and Battle-Scarred (0.45–1.00). The Steam Market lists skins by wear tier, but two skins in the same tier can look completely different — which is why float-aware tools like BagOfSkins matter for serious collectors.
The seed that decides where the texture lands on the gun.
Each skin instance has a pattern index from 0–1000 that anchors the texture to the model. On most skins it changes nothing visible, but on a handful — Case Hardened, Fade, Marble Fade, Doppler — the pattern index is everything. A Blue Gem AK Case Hardened (pattern 661, 387, 555…) can be worth fifty times a normal Case Hardened of the same float.
A counter that tracks kills with the weapon.
StatTrak weapons display a kill counter that increments every time you frag someone in matchmaking. The version is rarer than the non-StatTrak counterpart and usually trades at a 30–80% premium. The counter resets only if you trade-up or apply a StatTrak swap, and a high-kill StatTrak (10k+) on a popular skin can become a collectible in its own right.
Tournament drops with permanent stickers from a Major.
Souvenir skins drop from special souvenir packages during CS Majors. Each one is decorated with the tournament's stickers, the player whose MVP moment caused the drop, and the team logos. Most souvenirs are cheap, but a souvenir Dragon Lore with the right autographs has sold for hundreds of thousands of euros.
A skin with stickers applied — sometimes worth more, often worth less.
Players can apply up to four stickers to most weapons. Holo, Foil and Gold tournament stickers from old majors (Katowice 2014 is the classic) can multiply the value of a skin many times over — a so-called 4× Katowice 2014 craft. On the flip side, applying a cheap sticker usually destroys resale value, because the buyer can't choose the layout. Always know what your craft is worth before you click 'Apply'.
The colorway you got out of a Doppler knife or glove.
Doppler skins (and their cousins, Gamma Doppler) come in random phases: Phase 1, 2, 3, 4, Ruby, Sapphire, Black Pearl, Emerald. Ruby and Sapphire can be worth ten or twenty times Phase 4. The phase is decided at unboxing and can only be confirmed by inspecting the pattern in-game or via the Steam inspect link.
A locked container that needs a key to open.
Cases drop randomly at the end of matches. Each case contains a fixed pool of skins at known odds: roughly 80% mil-spec blue, 16% restricted purple, 3.2% classified pink, 0.64% covert red, and 0.26% for one of the case's special items, which is almost always a knife or glove. Opening a case requires a key purchased from the Steam Market or in-game store.
The colored bar at the bottom of every skin.
From cheapest to rarest: Consumer (white), Industrial (light blue), Mil-Spec (blue), Restricted (purple), Classified (pink), Covert (red), and Contraband / Knives & Gloves (gold). The colors are sometimes called by their hex feel — 'blues', 'pinks', 'reds', 'golds' — and they map directly to drop odds inside cases.
Convert ten skins of one tier into one skin of the next.
Submit ten skins of the same rarity from the same collection (or mixed collections) and the contract outputs one skin of the next rarity up, with an averaged float. Smart trade-ups can be profitable when one specific collection has very expensive outputs; reckless ones are an excellent way to lose money in seconds.
Valve's official skin exchange.
The Steam Community Market is the only first-party marketplace for CS2 skins. Sales settle in Steam Wallet funds, which can't be cashed out, but they can be spent on games, gifts, or other items. Prices on third-party sites like Skinport, Buff or DMarket are often cited as the 'real' market, but Steam Market prices remain the universal reference — and they are the prices BagOfSkins uses by default.
An open bid on the Steam Market.
Instead of buying the cheapest listing right now, you can post a buy order at the price you're willing to pay. When a seller drops to that price or below, the order fills automatically. The highest buy order is what people mean when they say a skin's 'bid' — and the gap between buy and ask is the spread you pay for liquidity.
How quickly you can sell a skin at a fair price.
A popular AK at $20 has deep liquidity: dozens sell every hour, and the spread is small. A 0.00 float pattern-perfect knife has terrible liquidity: maybe one trade per month, and the spread can be 30% wide. Liquidity is the silent tax on rare items and the reason headline prices on high-end skins can be misleading.
A frozen copy of your inventory and its market value at a moment in time.
BagOfSkins takes a snapshot of your tracked inventory once per day, captures the market value of every item, and stores it. That is what the portfolio chart is plotting — not a live tick, but a clean daily curve. Snapshots are how you actually see whether you are up or down across weeks and months instead of just panicking with every market wobble.
Cases and skins that are no longer dropping in-game.
Valve periodically retires cases — moves them from 'Active' to 'Discontinued'. Those cases (and the keys for them) can become quietly valuable over time, because supply stops growing while collectors keep opening. Most of the historical price spikes in skin trading come from discontinued case rotations.