A new AK animation, Train updates, and more came with the Dec. 18 CS2 update.
Valve developers have been hard at work leading into the Christmas holidays today, shipping an update to CS2, and we've got the full Dec. 18 patch notes below.
Included in the update is the champion sticker capsule from the Shanghai Major, as well as a few changes to Train and a few warmup updates. Read on for more!
Train receives minor update as rumors of Active Duty pool changes swirl
Train has had a sweep of collision fixes and prop updates following its debut at the Shanghai Major in the show match. A few stuck spots and gaps were closed up, as well as an update to wetness levels in areas of the map affected by rain.
It might not look like much but many have taken the updates to be evidence of Valve preparing to move the map into the Active Duty pool. At this time, Train can be played in competitive matchmaking but not in Premier.
But with the professional scene wrapping up for the year, the time is now for Valve to make changes to the map pool before the season begins next year. Much of the community is foreseeing Vertigo getting dropped in favor of the Train remake, but we'll know for sure when Valve actually promote the map.
Also included in today's update were a few more bug fixes based around explosions affecting weapons, some quality-of-life adjustments to changing teams during warmup, and the addition of Map Guides for those developing maps on the Steam Workshop.
The full changelog for the CS2 Dec. 18 patch notes can be found here. We've covered the biggest changes below!
Full CS2 patch notes for Dec. 18
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Shanghai Major
- Shanghai 2024 Major Champions Capsule is now available for purchase. The capsule features autographs for each member of the winning team in normal, glitter, holographic, and gold. 50% of the proceeds go to the players and organizations.
Gameplay
- Adjusted the threshold at which death notice displays attacker as "flashed."
- Explosions will now more reliably throw weapons around even if multiple weapons are dropped on top of each other.
- Weapons will no longer drop on the ground when changing teams during warmup.
- During warmup, changing teams now has a two second cooldown.
- Added server settings controlling which items drop on the ground during warmup period: mp_warmup_items_drop_policy, mp_warmup_items_nocost, mp_warmup_items_nocount_policy.
- Community servers that run with free non-droppable weapons during warmup can set these settings as follows: mp_warmup_items_drop_policy 0, mp_warmup_items_nocost 1, mp_warmup_items_nocount_policy 251.
- Give command will now always drop the held weapon if the given weapon needs an empty primary/secondary weapon slot to be used. For legacy behaviour, which would drop the new weapon on the ground, developers can use "-keep_gear" flag, e.g. give weapon_awp -keep_gear.
Maps
- Train
- Improved collision fidelity on various props.
- Updated and fixed surface types on several props.
- Adjusted wetness levels on some surfaces.
- Fixed various gaps in map.
Map Guides
- Map Guides are now supported in the Steam Workshop for submission and subscription.
- Added a selector to pick which map guide gets loaded in practice mode.
- Annotations nodes are now visible in the radar.
- Added a tool (via console command "workshop_annotation_submit") to submit a map guide to the Steam Workshop.
Miscellaneous
- Added a setting for CPU Cores Usage Preference to control how high performance and power efficiency cores are used by the game on CPUs with variable cores.
- Fixed a case where graphics driver could render a corrupt graphics image for weapons in inventory item tiles.
- Improvements to weapon inspect animations (see above!).
- Improvements to display of extra-long custom weapon names in UI.
- Stability improvements.
- Added all-new 2025 Service Medal which will be available starting January 1.
- Workshop Tools:
- Fixed bug on shadows for low sunlight angles.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for more CS2 news and updates.
