Covert skins can now be traded up for knives in game

In a significant Counter-Strike 2 update earlier today, Valve dropped a massive bomb shell on the in-game trade up mechanism. Counter-Strike 2's knives and gloves were the rarest of drops one could get from opening a case but with today's update, the trade up system which stopped at coverts are now extended further to rare special items- knives and gloves. Five covert skins can now be traded up for a knife in-game.

This brings the rarity factor of these special items by a big margin. Anyone putting in enough in-game time can now trade up step by step from weekly drops all the way to a knife. Retakes are added to Counter-Strike 2 as a playable game mode. Retakes work similarly to its Counter-Strike: Global Offensive counterpart, setting up the Ts and CTs in a post plant plant situation with predetermined loadouts.

Among the changes are modifications to interaction logic between smokes and molotovs to address an issue where smokes would sometimes not extinguish active molotovs, various map changes and quality of life upgrades to the game's UI. Here are Valve's patch notes:

GAMEPLAY

• Adding Retakes as official game mode supporting Defusal Group Alpha and Defusal Group Delta maps on official matchmaking servers.

• Fixed Molotov and Smoke interaction logic in cases when multiple smokes are active in the map.

MAPS

• Updated Golden to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop

• Updated Palacio to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop

• Updated Rooftop to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop

Inferno

• Adjustments to top of Quad and under Balcony to improve visibility.

• Various optimizations.

CONTRACTS

• Extended functionality of the "Trade Up Contract" to allow exchanging 5 items of Covert quality as follows:

• 5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided

• 5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided

MISC

• Performance optimizations when the game is in the main menu and item inspect UI

• Fixed inventory item icons sometimes rendering in blurry state or not rendering

• Fixed several server-only sound events to not start multiple times

• Stability improvements