Understanding Items: Rarity, Float and Pricing

Rarity tiers

Every skin belongs to a rarity tier, and each tier has a colour that players recognise instantly. From most common to rarest, weapon skins run Consumer Grade (white-grey), Industrial Grade (light blue), Mil-Spec (blue), Restricted (purple), Classified (pink) and Covert (red). Above all of those sits the Rare Special tier — knives and gloves — marked in gold.

One detail trips up a lot of people: in the underlying game data, knives and gloves are also tagged "Covert". They are only distinguishable by their item category and by the fact that they live in a separate list inside each container. The simulator handles this correctly, which is why gold-tier items appear at their true 0.26% rate rather than being quietly replaced by ordinary red skins.

Float and wear

Float is a number between 0 and 1 that describes how worn a skin looks. Lower is cleaner. It maps onto five named wear bands: Factory New below 0.07, Minimal Wear below 0.15, Field-Tested below 0.38, Well-Worn below 0.45, and Battle-Scarred from 0.45 upward.

Those bands are not equally wide, and that has a consequence most simulators get wrong. Battle-Scarred alone covers 55% of the 0–1 scale, so drawing a float uniformly at random would make more than half of all drops Battle-Scarred. The real game does not behave that way. This simulator therefore picks a wear band first using realistic weights — roughly Factory New 3%, Minimal Wear 24%, Field-Tested 33%, Well-Worn 24%, Battle-Scarred 16% — and only then picks a float inside that band.

Each individual skin also has its own float limits. Some finishes can never be Factory New; others can never be Battle-Scarred. The generated float is scaled into each item’s real range, so those constraints are respected.

Pattern index

Alongside float, every weapon gets a pattern index (also called a paint seed) between 0 and 1000. It decides how a finish is positioned on the model — how much blue a Case Hardened shows, or how complete a Fade is. For some skins the pattern matters more to the price than the float does. You can see the pattern of any item you own in the inspect window.

How prices are estimated

When live market data is available, the simulator builds the exact market name for the item — including its wear band and any StatTrak™ or Souvenir prefix — and looks the price up directly. When live data is unavailable, a simulated price is derived from the rarity tier and adjusted for wear and StatTrak™.

All prices shown anywhere in this simulator are estimates for entertainment purposes. Real market prices move constantly and depend on factors — pattern, stickers, float rank, sticker placement — that this project does not model.