What Is a CS2 Pattern Index?

A CS2 pattern index is a whole number from 0 to 1000 that the game rolls once when an item is created, and it decides where the skin's finish sits on the weapon. Two copies of the same skin in the same wear can sell for wildly different money because of that one number.

People also call it the paint seed. Same number.

What it changes

Every finish is a texture, and a lot of them are bigger than the part of the gun they cover. The seed picks the crop: which slice of the texture lands on the receiver, how it's rotated, how far it's shifted.

On a solid colour skin you'd never see the difference. On Case Hardened you see nothing else. The texture is marbled steel with blue, gold and purple running through it, and seed 661 (one of the seven AK-47 seeds tracked here as Tier 1 Blue Gems) lands a sheet of blue across the side you look at in game. Most other seeds put that same blue somewhere you'll never notice.

Here's how big the gap gets. On the Desert Eagle Heat Treated, seed 490 sold for $4,200 in Factory New on 2 May 2026. Nine days later a Well-Worn copy of seed 148, from the same Tier 1 group, went for $117.37. Same skin, same tier, and the price gap is roughly 36x. Wear did some of that (more on it in float values explained), but neither copy would be in the conversation with an ordinary seed.

Which skins it matters on

The market ignores the seed on most skins. It pays for it on a short list, and this site tracks groups for each of these:

Off that list, the seed is trivia and the Steam average for your wear is a fair starting point.

Why seeds are hard to price

Steam doesn't record the seed. Its price history for an AK-47 Case Hardened in Field-Tested throws the cheapest seed on the market and a Tier 1 Blue Gem into one average, and that average describes neither.

So seed pricing mostly runs on memory. Somebody half-remembers a Discord sale from two years ago and that becomes the number. I built this site because that's a bad way to price a four-figure item.

Every price here comes from completed CSFloat cash transactions, stored per pattern index with the float, the date and any stickers on the item. Steam Community Market prices aren't used anywhere. Here's one group as it stands today:

That card pulls live from the same data the group page uses, so the numbers can't drift away from it.

Tiers, and why they exist

Nobody wants to memorise a thousand seeds. So the community sorts them into tiers by how good they look, and this site builds its pages around those tiers.

The spread of group sizes tells you how rare the top is. On the AK-47 Case Hardened, Tier 1 Blue Gem has 7 seeds and Tier 2 has 6. Tier 3 jumps to 37, and Tier 4 has 81. Seven out of 1,001 possible seeds works out to about 0.7% of every AK Case Hardened ever unboxed. The blue gem tier guide lists every seed.

Checking your own item

Inspect the skin, copy the inspect link and run it through an inspection service. CSFloat gives you the paint seed and the float in one place. If the skin is on the list above, find its group from the weapons directory and see whether your seed appears. If it doesn't, you have a regular copy. For the AK-47 Case Hardened, the box below does the lookup for you.

The short version of where the data comes from is on how it works. Terms you don't recognise are in the CS2 pattern glossary.