
Counter-Strike's cosmetic catalogue is usually discussed in terms of prices, which tends to obscure how the thing is actually built. Underneath the market there is a fairly rigid classification system, and it has barely changed since 2013.
Every finish in the game carries a weapon, a rarity tier, a wear condition and a collection. Those four properties determine almost everything about how an item behaves.
Sorted by those properties rather than by price, the catalogue looks quite different from the way most people picture it.
Knives Are More Than a Quarter of Everything
The single most surprising figure is how much of the catalogue is taken up by items that are not guns. Melee finishes vastly outnumber the finishes for any individual firearm.
If you browse every CS2 skin through CSDB, an independent database with no connection to Valve, the totals come to 2,062 finishes across the whole game. Rifles account for 471 of those, pistols 425, submachine guns 293, heavy weapons 210, gloves 72 and a further seven sit outside the usual categories.
Knives take 584 on their own, which is more than the entire rifle category. Several individual knife types carry 36 finishes each, including the M9 Bayonet, the Karambit and the Butterfly.
Each entry lists the finish name, its rarity, the float range it can occupy and prices broken out by wear condition, drawn from more than a dozen marketplaces. Filters run across the seven rarity tiers, the five wear conditions and individual weapons, so narrowing to the 58 AK-47 finishes or the 49 that exist for the AWP takes a click.
The pricing is aggregated rather than official, and the site is upfront that none of it comes from Valve. What it does provide is a complete view of a catalogue that the game itself only ever shows you in fragments.
Seven Tiers, and One of Them Is Closed
Rarity runs across seven named grades, from Consumer and Industrial at the bottom through Mil-Spec, Restricted, Classified and Covert, with Contraband above all of them. Each has an associated colour, and players tend to refer to the colours rather than the names.
Contraband is the odd one out because it is not a tier anybody is designing for. It exists because a single collection was withdrawn, and nothing new will ever be added to it.
The rest map straightforwardly onto drop rates. The vast majority of items pulled from containers land in the two lowest weapon tiers, and the top tiers are correspondingly thin.
Wear Is a Separate Dimension
The second axis catches out anyone coming to the game fresh. A finish is not one item, it is five, since every copy carries a float value between 0.00 and 1.00 that places it in a wear band.
Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn and Battle-Scarred are the five, and the price difference between the ends of that scale can be enormous. It is the same artwork, applied with a different amount of simulated damage.
Not every finish exists in every band either. Some are capped by their float range and can never appear in the cleanest condition, which is a design decision rather than an accident.
The Spread Across Weapons Is Uneven
Attention is not evenly distributed, and the catalogue reflects that. Weapons people actually buy in a competitive round have far more finishes than weapons that sit unused in the shop.
Pistols do better than most would guess, with 57 finishes for the Glock-18 and 56 for the P250, largely because they appear in almost every collection. Submachine guns cluster similarly, with 55 for the MAC-10 and 51 for the P90.
Gloves are the scarcest category at 72 in total, split evenly across a handful of types. They also arrived far later than everything else, which explains the small number.
Prices Do Not Follow the Tiers
A common assumption is that rarity determines value, and it does not. Plenty of Covert finishes trade for less than a well known Restricted one, because desirability is about the design and the collection rather than the label.
Supply matters more than grade. A finish from a container that millions of people opened will be cheap regardless of what colour its name is printed in.
Valve has never published price guidance, and the Counter-Strike 2 listing itself says nothing about item values. Everything anyone knows about pricing comes from watching the market.
The Short Version
Weapon, rarity, wear and collection describe every cosmetic item in the game between them. Learn those four and the catalogue stops looking arbitrary.
Cosmetic systems have become part of the furniture in competitive shooters, and the arguments they generate turn up in news coverage across the genre with some regularity. Counter-Strike simply has the largest and oldest example to look at.
The numbers are worth glancing at once, if only for the knives. Nobody expects a quarter of the catalogue to be melee weapons until they see it written down.
