Until October 2025, a knife in CS2 came from one place: the gold slot of a case, at 0.26% per opening. Valve’s update on 22 October 2025 added a second route. Five Covert skins can now go into a trade-up contract that returns a knife or a pair of gloves. Here is how that contract works, what decides the result and when it makes sense.
How the knife trade-up works
The classic trade-up contract takes ten skins of one rarity and returns one skin from the next rarity up. It stops at Covert, because knives and gloves were never part of that ladder. The October 2025 update added a separate recipe on top:
- Input: exactly 5 Covert (red) skins.
- Output: 1 knife or 1 pair of gloves.
- Pool: the rare special items (the gold slot) of a case that one of your inputs comes from.
You open it the same way as any contract: right-click a Covert skin in your inventory, choose the trade-up option and fill the five slots. The ten-skin contract for lower rarities still works as before.
Which knife you get
You do not pick the knife. You pick the pool. Each input decides one fifth of the result, so the output comes from the gold pool of the case behind one of your five skins.
- Five Coverts from one case lock the result to that case’s knife or glove pool.
- Mixed cases add a step: first the case is chosen (each input gives its case a 1 in 5 share), then an item from that case’s pool.
- Only case skins make sense as inputs. A Covert from a collection without a knife or glove pool gives you nothing to aim at.
Within the pool, the exact knife type, finish, Doppler phase, pattern and float are all rolled when the item is created. A trade-up cannot target a Blue Gem or a Ruby.
That is why some Coverts jumped in price. Inven Global reports that the MP9 | Starlight Protector rose from about $3 to $65 after the update, because it is one of the two Coverts in the Dreams & Nightmares Case, whose pool includes Butterfly Knives. Our knife list shows which case holds which knife.
StatTrak and float rules
StatTrak: normal and StatTrak skins cannot be mixed in one contract. Five StatTrak Coverts return a StatTrak knife. Gloves have no StatTrak version, so a StatTrak contract never gives gloves. A normal contract can return either.
Float: the output float is the average float of your five inputs, scaled into the float range of the skin you receive. Clean inputs give a clean result, and five Battle-Scarred inputs will not produce a Factory New knife. Knife finishes have their own ranges (Doppler knives, for example, only go up to 0.08), so the same inputs can land in different wear tiers depending on what you get.
What it did to knife prices
The update made knives far easier to produce, and prices reacted. Dust2.us reported that the skin market, worth about $6 billion according to Pricempire, fell to about $3 billion within 38 hours before recovering to over $4 billion. Inven Global puts the typical drop for knives and gloves at 20 to 50%, with some items briefly down 70% or more.
Entry knives took the biggest hit. Inven Global’s 2026 figures:
| Knife finish | Before the update | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Safari Mesh | about $100–130 | about $40–60 |
| Boreal Forest | about $100–130 | about $40–65 |
| Scorched | about $90–120 | about $40–65 |
| Forest DDPAT | about $80–110 | about $40–60 |
Rare knives held up better: Case Hardened Blue Gems, Doppler Sapphires and Rubies, Gamma Doppler Emeralds and low-float classics.
Is a knife trade-up worth it?
Treat it as a gamble with a known price, not a shortcut. The market has largely priced it in: Inven Global notes that the cost of five eligible Coverts now sets the floor for entry knives, so the average outcome tends to be worth about what you put in. A contract makes sense when:
- you want a knife from one specific case and are fine with any item in its pool,
- your Coverts are cheap for their case (often low-demand finishes),
- you check the floats first, because a good finish in Battle-Scarred is worth much less.
If you want one exact knife, buying it on the market is usually cheaper than chasing it through contracts. To see how rare a knife from a case really is without spending anything, try our free case simulator, which uses the real odds.
Before you try one
Trade-ups happen inside the game, in your own inventory. You never need to log in to a website or give anyone inventory access to do one, so ignore any “knife trade-up” site that asks for your Steam login. Pick your five Coverts, check the case each one comes from and their floats, and decide how much you are willing to lose if the roll lands on the cheapest knife in the pool.
