The CS2 drop pool: how the weekly drop, rotation and Care Package work

In short: how it works

• Once a week a Prime account receives a Care Package — a set of four rewards, two of which you pick.
• What can appear is decided by the drop pool: cases from the active pool, skins from the active drop collections and graffiti.
• The cooldown resets every Tuesday at 17:00 Pacific time. The reward does not stack: a week you skip is a week you lose.
• Without Prime there is no drop at all — no cases, no skins, no graffiti.
• The pool changes with game updates: a case moves from the active pool to the rare pool, then leaves the drop. From that point no new copies appear, while every opening destroys one case forever.

The Care Package: what actually drops after matches

The weekly reward in CS2 is not tied to a specific match or to winning. It is tied to levelling up your profile. The level grows from experience, and experience comes from matches on official Valve servers. The first level-up after the weekly reset opens a Care Package: the game offers four rewards and lets you keep two.

1. 1
   Play on Valve servers

   Experience comes from Premier, competitive, casual, Wingman, deathmatch and arms race. Community servers and workshop maps award no experience, so they do not bring you closer to a drop.

2. 2
   Earn experience and level up

   Weekly experience is awarded at a boosted rate up to a point, after which the rate drops — that is the reduced experience line at the end of a match. It does not affect the drop itself: a single level-up is all you need.

3. 3
   Receive the Care Package

   The package holds four entries: cases from the active pool, skins from the active drop collections and graffiti. You pick two; the other two go to nobody.

4. 4
   The item lands in your Steam inventory

   Skins from the drop come with a random wear and a random pattern, cases arrive as ordinary items. Everything can be sold, traded or opened right away, subject to the usual Steam trade cooldown on new items.

What the drop pool is made of

The drop pool is the list of everything that can end up in a Care Package. It has four tiers, and they are worth keeping apart: only the first two hand out items regularly.

• Active case pool — recent cases that drop with the main weight. Usually the last few releases, and the only cases whose chance is expressed in meaningful percentages.
• Active drop collections — skin collections handed out alongside the cases. Roughly half of the total drop weight goes to them, the other half to cases.
• Rare drop pool — older cases with a very low chance. Valve introduced this tier in 2018 so that old cases neither disappear from the giveaway at once nor keep pressing on the market.
• Discontinued — cases that do not drop at all. The only way to get one is to buy it on the Steam Market or trade for it.

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Sealed Dead Hand Terminal32.0%Sealed Genesis Terminal17.0%Kilowatt Case17.0%Revolution Case17.0%Dreams & Nightmares Case17.0%

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The percentage next to a case is its share of the whole weekly drop, not its share inside the case list. The full picture with collections, per-entry percentages and the date each entry joined the pool is on the drop pool page; the contents of every collection are broken down in the collections section.

When the drop cooldown resets

The weekly cycle resets every Tuesday at 17:00 Pacific time, on the clock of Valve headquarters. That moment resets both your Care Package entitlement and the boosted experience rate. Because the United States switches to daylight saving time, the reset moves by an hour in UTC twice a year.

Why Prime is required

Prime Status is a paid account status. It gives a separate matchmaking pool, souvenir items and, the part that matters here, eligibility for the weekly drop. An account without Prime receives no cases, no skins and no graffiti after matches: experience is still awarded and the profile level still grows, but no Care Package is granted.

Prime used to be earnable for free by reaching a certain profile level; today it can only be bought on Steam. If you have come back to the game and cannot work out why nothing drops after matches, check Prime first and the drop pool second.

How cases enter the pool and leave it

Every case follows the same path. The only difference is how long it spends on each step: months for some cases, years for others.

1. Release. The case is added to the active pool with an update. The drop chance is at its highest, millions of copies appear, and the price sits at the market minimum.
2. Move to the rare pool. The case is still in the giveaway, but the chance falls by an order of magnitude. The inflow of new copies practically stops, even though the case is formally still dropping.
3. Leaving the drop. The case stops dropping entirely. Supply is frozen: whatever was handed out is all there will ever be, and every opening subtracts one case from that number.

The transition dates come from the public Steam drop pool guide and from our own observations: on every pool update the lists are compared and the differences are written into an event log. The same events are marked on the price charts, so you can see how the market reacted to each one.

What rotation does to a case price

While a case is in the active pool, millions of players receive it for free every week. Supply is replenished faster than cases are opened, so the price sits at the minimum — often a few cents. Leaving rotation flips that picture: the inflow stops while openings continue, and supply can only shrink.

Do not expect an instant jump, though. For the first months after leaving the pool the price usually stands still: investors hold stock and sell it into the market. Noticeable growth tends to start later, once that stock has been drained by openings. The full supply-and-demand breakdown is in the guide on why CS2 cases go up in price.

What discontinued actually means

A discontinued case does not drop after matches at any chance. It is not removed from the game: it can still be bought, traded and opened with a purchased key, and its contents stay the same. Only one thing changes — the source of new copies is gone. This is the group that the most expensive CS2 cases come from.

1 CS:GO Weapon Case $100.35 20132 Operation Bravo Case $52.66 20133 eSports 2013 Case $42.99 20144 Operation Hydra Case $27.20 20175 CS:GO Weapon Case 2 $19.18 20136 eSports 2013 Winter Case $12.25 2014

The full list of discontinued cases with release and removal dates sits at the bottom of the drop pool page. Contents, odds and live prices for every case are in the cases section, and how much of a budget survives an opening is shown by the case return checker.

How to check what is dropping right now

1. 1
   Open the drop pool page

   The active pool comes first on the drop pool page: cases and collections with their percentages and the date they joined the giveaway.

2. 2
   Read the percentages

   The number on a card is the chance of getting that exact entry in the weekly drop. Hover over it for the breakdown and the number of items in a collection.

3. 3
   Check the rare pool and discontinued cases

   Further down the same page are the rare drop pool with its very low chances and the full list of discontinued cases with release and removal dates.

4. 4
   Watch the timer

   The countdown at the top of the page shows how long is left before the cooldown resets and what time that happens in your own zone.

5. 5
   Look at the rotation history

   The rotation history section answers the what happened last time question: median price changes after each type of pool event.

Drop pool myths

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