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CSGO skin tradeups explained, plus how to guarantee factory new

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William Davis Published 12/01/2022
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Tradeups are a great way to get new skins in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, as long as you understand how they work. That’s where we can help.

Opening new cases and ranking up your profile aren’t the only ways to get skins in CSGO. Tradeups are a volatile, but potentially very rewarding, option to get the gun of your dreams. But the rules for tradeups aren’t as simple as they may first appear. If you’re looking to make some risky tradeups or to clear out your inventory after Operation Riptide, it helps to understand exactly what you’re doing. Here’s everything you need to know about gun skin tradeups in CSGO.

How do tradeups in CSGO work?

Tradeups in CSGO work like this: The player selects a weapon from their inventory and selects the tradeup option. This opens a new menu with all the players skin on the left and the tradeup box on the right. From there, select 10 gun skins of the same rarity that you want to use in the tradeup. After confirming their selection, the game will destroy the chosen cosmetics and grant one skin of a higher rarity.

The exact skin that you get from the tradeup is determined by the skins consumed to generate it. If all of the gun skins come from the same collection, the result is guaranteed to be from the same set. If you pick five from one collection and five from another, you have a 50/50 chance to get a new weapon from either collection.

For example, let’s say you select five blue Riptide skins from the 2021 Dust 2 collection and five from 2021 Mirage. You will have an equal chance to get a M4A4 | Red DDPAT, MAC-10 | Case Hardened, USP-S | Orange Anolis, XM1014 | Elegant Vines, AUG | Sand Storm, or Glock-18 | Pink DDPAT. That’s a pretty wide spread of results, with some expensive skins and some cheaper skins included as potential rewards.

How to guarantee factory new from CSGO tradeups

The skins you use for the tradeup decide more than just which cosmetic you’ll receive. The wear value of the tradeup skin is determined by the gun skins used to craft it. For example, if you use 10 battle-scarred pink skins in a tradeup, the red reward is almost guaranteed to have a battle-scarred float. If you want to guarantee a factory new tradeup skin, you’ll need to factory new tradeup skins.

The exact float value of the product is determined by a somewhat complicated formula. The game averages out the float value of the skins used in the tradeup relative to how high or low they can potentially go. It then compares the relative “cleanliness” of those skins to the possible float range of the crafted skin. Trading up 10 minimum wear AK-47 | Redlines can result in a field-tested AWP | Asiimov or a factory new AUG | Chameleon.

While this technique guarantees a skin of the highest float category, it will not work for some skins. Popular options like the Redline series and some of the Asiimovs do not have factory new versions. You will still need to trade up factory new skins to get the best float value in CSGO tradeup contracts.

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