CS2 float value and pattern seed: why one skin costs 3 cents and its twin $45,000

A Factory New MAC-10 | Bronzer is about as exciting as a brown paper bag, and its CS2 float value is the last thing anyone checks. The cheapest one costs $0.03 (Buff163, 9 Oct 2026). In June 2025 a collector paid $45,000 for one (private sale, reported by Dexerto and Hotspawn, 27 Jun 2025).

It was the same gun with the same finish, and Steam called it Factory New like every other copy. What the buyer paid for was the float: 0.00000000010431. At the time of the sale, no lower float had ever turned up in CSFloat's database.

MAC-10 | Bronzer (Factory New)From $0.03, compare prices

That number, plus a second one called the pattern seed, explains most of the strange prices in the CS2 market. Once you can read both, listings stop looking random. You'll also stop paying blue gem money for a skin that isn't one.

What a CS2 float value actually is

Each skin has a number from 0 to 1, and this number controls how worn the paint appears. A low number means it looks clean. A high number means the paint looks like it has survived a war.

The game rolls it once, when the item is generated from a case, a drop or a trade-up. After that it is locked. You can carry an AK through five thousand rounds of Mirage and the float won't move a single decimal place. "My skin got more worn from playing" is a CS:GO myth that refuses to die.

The wear name in your inventory is just a label stuck on top of that number.

CS2 float value ranges: the five wear tiers

Look at the widths. Factory New and Minimal Wear share the first 15% of the scale between them. Battle-Scarred gets more than half of it on its own.

This is why "Field-Tested" is close to useless as a description. A 0.151 FT can pass for Minimal Wear in a match. A 0.37 is a step away from Well-Worn and looks it. Both go out under the same name, and if you buy by name alone you'll usually get the worse one, because nobody who owns a 0.151 lists it at the FT average.

The flip side catches people too. A 0.069 and a 0.071 are visually identical. One is Factory New, the other is Minimal Wear, and the label can easily be worth more than the paint.

Every skin has its own float cap

Here's the part most guides skip. The 0 to 1 scale is the theory. Each finish gets its own minimum and maximum when it's designed, and plenty of skins never touch the ends.

AK-47 | Redline (Minimal Wear)From $120.72, compare prices

The Redline is the classic trap. There is no Factory New Redline and there never was. The cleanest you can own is a Minimal Wear, from $118.22 (skinweb, 9 Oct 2026). If someone offers you an FN one, close the tab.

AWP | Asiimov (Field-Tested)From $90.95, compare prices

The Asiimov starts at 0.18, inside Field-Tested. That's why the white-and-orange AWP everyone pictures always has a bit of grime on it.

★ Karambit | Crimson Web (Factory New)From $5,750.00, compare prices

The Karambit Crimson Web shows how a float cap drives price. Factory New only exists in the gap from 0.06 to 0.07, so clean copies are scarce. The cheapest Factory New was $5,750 (skinweb, 9 Oct 2026). Battle-Scarred costs a fraction of that.

How float value moves the price

The jump between tiers is the obvious part. The interesting money is inside a tier.

Buyers pay extra for the clean end of a band: a 0.001 Factory New, a 0.151 Field-Tested. The dirty end sells near the floor for its tier, because a 0.149 Minimal Wear is a Field-Tested in disguise. A handful of finishes look better beaten up, so a very high Battle-Scarred can carry a small premium of its own. That's the exception, not a strategy.

Then there's record chasing. Before the Bronzer, the record belonged to an AUG | Eye of Zapems at 0.00000000019395. It sold on 29 December 2024 for an undisclosed price, estimated at around $50,000 (private sale, reported by Dexerto, 30 Dec 2024). The buyer, collector Megalodon888, then stuck five Katowice 2014 NAVI Holo stickers on it at roughly $11,000 each (Dexerto's estimate, Dec 2024), which took the whole build to about $100,000. A normal Factory New one costs $5.82 (CSFloat, 9 Oct 2026). Nobody bought that AUG to play with it. They bought a world record that the next weekly drop could take away.

AUG | Eye of Zapems (Factory New)From $6.16, compare prices

Our take: outside skins that people actually collect, a "low float" premium is often wishful thinking. A 0.02 on a cheap Mil-Spec rarely resells for much more than a 0.05. On a popular rifle or knife it can be real money. Check recent sales before you pay for decimals.

What the pattern seed does

The pattern seed (also called paint seed or pattern index) is a whole number from 0 to 1000. Picture the finish as a big printed sheet. The seed decides which part of that sheet gets wrapped around the gun, and so which bit of the artwork ends up on the side you stare at in first person.

It's rolled at the same moment as the float, separately, and it never changes either. A perfect float can come with a boring pattern. A dream pattern can come in Battle-Scarred.

The skins where the seed is the price

On most finishes the seed barely changes anything you'd notice. On a short list it matters more than anything else on the item.

AK-47 | Case Hardened #661

AK-47 | Case Hardened (Factory New)From $399.35, compare prices

Community pattern lists put #661 at the top of the AK blue gems. The receiver is almost entirely blue on the side you look at all match. A StatTrak Minimal Wear copy sold for $400,000 on 16 April 2023 (private sale brokered by zipeL for Luksusbums, reported by PC Gamer). A lot of that was the stickers: four Katowice 2014 Titan Holos, valued at around $60,000 each at the time (PC Gamer, Apr 2023). Then a StatTrak Factory New #661 surfaced in January 2024 and sold on 5 June 2024 for an undisclosed price above $1 million (private sale brokered by roflm0nster and zipeL, reported by Dexerto). For scale, the cheapest ordinary Factory New AK Case Hardened costs $400.48 (skinweb, 9 Oct 2026).

★ Karambit | Case Hardened #387

★ Karambit | Case Hardened (Factory New)From $1,474.62, compare prices

The only known Factory New copy, at a float of 0.048 according to Dot Esports, belongs to a Chinese collector known as "Blue King". Dexerto reports he bought it in 2016 for just over $100,000 (private sale). In September 2021 he turned down an offer of €1.2 million in Bitcoin, roughly $1.4 to 1.5 million at the time, with a reply that became a meme:

"1.2 is low."

It has never sold, so every "$2 million knife" headline you see is an estimate. The cheapest normal Factory New Karambit Case Hardened costs $1,474.62 (skinweb, 9 Oct 2026).

Float value or pattern seed: which matters more?

Depends what you're buying. On a Redline or an Asiimov, the float is nearly everything and you can ignore the seed. On a Case Hardened, a Fade or a Marble Fade, flip that around. A tier-one blue gem in Field-Tested will beat a dull Factory New on price almost every time. At the very top of the market, the record-setters usually have both.

How to check float and seed before you buy

1. Ask for the inspect link, not a screenshot. Screenshots can be cropped, re-lit or simply of a different item. In game, the info icon on the inspect screen shows the wear rating and pattern.
2. Load the exact item. Paste the link into SkinWeb's 3D viewer or the inspect generator. The float, seed and stickers are decoded in your browser.
3. Turn it to the side that matters. For Case Hardened that's the play side. A gorgeous back side is a nice bonus and nothing more.
4. Hold it in game. Join a SkinWeb inspect server, paste the gen code in chat, and the skin is in your hands with the game's own lighting. You don't need to own it, which is the cheapest way to learn that a "clean 0.16" looks dirtier than you hoped.
5. Compare the price across markets. The same skin at the same wear can sit at very different prices on Steam, CSFloat, Buff163 and the rest.

Want to train your eye first? Drag the float slider in the 3D viewer across 0.07, 0.15 and 0.38 and watch what changes at each line. Or play a few rounds of Guess the Wear and find out how good you really are at telling 0.14 from 0.16. Most people are worse than they think.