L'encyclopédie des items CS2 — chaque catégorie, chaque axe, et leur impact prix

What the encyclopedia is

The CS2 encyclopedia is the structured map of every item that can appear in a Steam inventory: weapons, knives, gloves, agents, stickers, charms, music kits, sticker capsules, weapon cases, and the collections that produce them. The numbers are large — roughly 5,000 distinct skin SKUs, ~190 weapons across 12 categories, ~52 active and discontinued cases, ~55 collections, ~90 sticker capsules — but the structure is simple. Three things matter:

1. The category tree: which kind of item it is (rifle, knife, sticker, charm).
2. The per-item identity: weapon × finish × exterior × pattern, plus StatTrak or Souvenir flags where they apply.
3. The axes the market shops on: finish family, rarity tier, color, budget, side (T/CT), and "most expensive / cheapest / trending" rankings.

The rest of this guide walks each layer in turn, then explains how the per-skin pages are built — what data each one carries, what the FAQ blocks contain, and why this site ships per-skin pages with structured-data schemas other catalogues do not.

The 12 categories of CS2 items

CS2 ships items in twelve categories, each indexed at /items/[category]:

Each category page (e.g. /items/rifles, /items/knives — once the items DB ships) lists every weapon in the category, with quick filters for rarity, finish family, and color.

The per-weapon layer

A weapon page (/items/[category]/[weapon]) is the second tier. Each one collects every skin that exists on that weapon, organised by rarity and exterior availability. The per-weapon page exists for ~190 weapons across the 12 categories.

The per-weapon page answers four questions:

• What skins exist on this weapon? — full rarity-tiered list.
• What does each cost in the current market? — the Steam Market 7-day median per exterior, with a third-party comparison column when one of the major aggregators (Buff163, Skinport, DMarket, CSFloat) has the SKU.
• Which exteriors does each skin actually ship in? — float clipping is per-weapon; an AK-47 Redline never appears Factory New, an AK-47 Case Hardened never appears Battle-Scarred at the upper float. Per-weapon pages list only the exteriors that exist.
• What is the cheapest, most expensive, and most popular skin on this weapon right now? — programmatic ranking from the items DB.

Some per-weapon pages do extra work. The AK-47 page, for instance, has a Case Hardened blue-gem section and a fade % section because the AK is one of the weapons where pattern dominates; the Karambit page has a Doppler phase chart because phases are the dominant variable on Doppler knives.

The per-skin pages

The deepest tier is per-skin (/items/[category]/[weapon]/[skin]). Each one is a full inventory page on a single skin × weapon combination. We ship ~500 of these as fully-indexed in the first wave, with the rest sitting behind a quality gate (≥3 markets, ≥30 days price history, ≥80 word description, ≥5 hits in our inventory database) and indexing as the gate clears them.

Every per-skin page carries the same anti-thin sections:

1. Hero render of the skin at its peak exterior, with price tiles for FN/MW/FT/WW/BS plus StatTrak and Souvenir variants where applicable.
2. Multi-marketplace comparison table — Steam Market, Buff163, Skinport, DMarket, CS.Money, CSFloat. Minimum three markets per row, more where data is available.
3. Wear range bar (0.00–1.00) with float-clipping caps highlighted, so you can see which exteriors actually drop.
4. Container & collection links — which case or collection drops it.
5. Pattern info section — Doppler phase chart, Fade % distribution, blue-gem seed list, Crimson Web full-web map, or Marble Fade Fire-and-Ice tier list, depending on the skin.
6. First-party stat — "X% of CS2 inventories we have seen own this skin" + "median inventory value of owners: $Y", powered by our public inventory database.
7. Similar skins (3-6, same finish or same collection or same color).
8. Buy buttons with rel="sponsored" and disclosure.
9. ≥80 word skin description (history, designer, release date).
10. Inspect link steam://run/....
11. FAQ block — five questions covering price, float, pattern, where to buy, StatTrak/Souvenir difference. Marked up with FAQPage schema, eligible for SERP rich results. None of the major skin catalogues (csgoskins.gg, pricempire, steamanalyst, stash.clash.gg) ship FAQ blocks on per-skin pages — this is the SERP edge.
12. Pro players who use this skin (3+ if any), with links to the per-pro page.
13. Schema: Product + AggregateOffer + BreadcrumbList + FAQPage.
14. OG image generated from the skin name + price + render via next/og, dynamically.

The five sections that decide whether a per-skin page ranks are 2 (multi-marketplace), 6 (first-party stat), 9 (description), 11 (FAQ) and 12 (pros). Other catalogues hit at most two of those.

Browsing axes — beyond the category tree

The category tree (rifles → AK-47 → Redline FT) is the navigation buyers use when they know what they want. Most buyers do not. They are shopping by vibe — "show me all the orange skins under $50", "show me every fade in the game", "show me what a pro AWPer's loadout looks like at my budget". For that, the encyclopedia ships parallel axes.

By finish family — /items/by-finish/[finish]

A finish family is a visual identity the artist designed across multiple weapons: Doppler, Gamma Doppler, Fade, Case Hardened, Marble Fade, Crimson Web, Asiimov, Hyper Beast, Printstream, Bloodsport, Vulcan, Wildfire, Dragon Lore, Howl, Neo-Noir. Each gets its own page that lists every weapon × exterior combination of that finish, with prices.

Around 25 finish families have enough cross-weapon presence to justify dedicated pages. Doppler is the largest — it appears on 7 knife models and the Glock-18 — and the most navigation-heavy because of phases. Asiimov sits on AK-47, AWP, M4A4, P250, P90 and a few SMGs; the Asiimov family page is one of the highest-traffic pages on most CS2 catalogues precisely because buyers know the finish, not the gun.

This axis is where the encyclopedia has the cleanest shot at outranking competitors: stash.clash.gg has bare per-finish lists, csgoskins.gg has none, and our pages add the price comparison + pattern section + FAQ that turn a list into a useful page.

By rarity tier — /items/by-rarity/[rarity]

Rarity is the colour-coded quality tier Valve writes onto every weapon skin:

The same colour band applies to gloves (Industrial → Extraordinary instead of Covert) and stickers (paper → holo → foil → gold). Sticker rarities behave differently because the supply mechanism is different — paper stickers can be opened indefinitely while a capsule is in print; gold stickers come only from autograph capsules and are vastly rarer.

Rarity is a price proxy, not a price input. Two Covert skins on the same weapon can differ in price by 100×; rarity tells you "this is not a common skin", not "this is worth $X".

By color — /items/by-color/[color]

The color axis is exactly what it sounds like. Skins that are dominated by a single hue — orange (Asiimov, Wildfire, Acid Fade), blue (Hydroponic, Cobalt Disruption, Chromatic Aberration), green (Decimator, Emerald, Boreal Forest), purple (Neon Rider, Neon Revolution, Cortex), red (Bloodsport, Redline, Fire Serpent), pink (Bubble Gum, Pink DDPAT), black (Slate, Black Laminate, Howl), white (Crystal, Vandal, Frontside Misty), gold (Gold Arabesque, Howl, Vulcan). Thirteen color anchors cover the majority of buyer queries.

The color page is for buyers who want a specific aesthetic for their loadout. Most CS2 buyers compose loadouts by color, not by category — five guns and a knife, all in the same orange or red palette. The color axis is what serves that intent.

By budget — /items/by-budget/under-[X]

Eight budget tiers: under $5, under $10, under $25, under $50, under $100, under $200, under $500, under $1000. Each is a programmatic page that lists every skin currently trading below that price band, sorted by popularity inside the band. The pages refresh with the price feed.

Budget pages convert disproportionately well — the buyer who searches "best ak skins under 50" is at the bottom of the funnel. The encyclopedia's budget pages are the natural landing for those queries.

By side — /items/by-side/[side]

T-side and CT-side. Useful for loadout completers — buyers building a coherent T-side (AK + Glock + Tec-9) or CT-side (M4A1-S + USP-S + AWP) loadout. Most weapons are side-locked; the AWP and a few pistols (Desert Eagle, R8) sit on both sides, and they are the bridge skins for "matching" loadouts.

Most expensive / cheapest / trending / most popular

Four ranking surfaces, each shipping at the master level (/items/most-expensive, /items/cheapest) and at the per-category level (/items/rifles/most-expensive, /items/knives/cheapest, etc.). Trending and most-popular are powered by our first-party data — what people are searching for, what is moving up in our database, what inventories tend to actually own.

These are the four most-clicked surfaces on every catalogue we tracked during the audit phase. They are the encyclopedia's top-of-funnel traffic drivers.

Cases, collections, and capsules — adjacent indexes

The encyclopedia is items-first, but two adjacent indexes share its data:

• Cases at /cases/[slug] — every active and discontinued case, with the full drop pool, expected-value math, history, and the items that come out of it. ~52 cases live, with 30+ retired. Each case page links forward into the items it produces and backward into the operation or release event that introduced it.
• Collections at /collections/[slug] — every collection (Cobblestone, Cache, Train, Mirage, Italy, Inferno, Overpass, Office, etc.) with the skins that drop from it, the trade-up math, and the souvenir version where applicable. ~55 collections.
• Sticker capsules at /items/sticker-capsules/[slug] — every Major capsule + non-major capsule with the stickers it produced, the autograph variants where applicable, and per-sticker price tracking. ~90 capsules indexed.

These three adjacent surfaces share the encyclopedia's per-item model: each case, collection, capsule has an /items view that links into every skin it produced. They are the supply side of the items DB.

How the encyclopedia ships, and what is gated

Not every page in the items DB is indexable on day one. Indexing the full ~50,000 URL space (5,000 skins × 4-5 exteriors × StatTrak/Souvenir variants) before each page has enough content to justify it would trigger Helpful Content classifier issues — the long-tail rows would read as thin and drag the whole site's quality score down.

The encyclopedia therefore ships in waves, governed by a quality gate:

• A per-skin page is indexable when it carries: (a) ≥3 marketplace prices, (b) ≥30 days of historical price data, (c) ≥80 words of description, (d) ≥5 hits in our inventory database (someone, somewhere, owns the skin and we have valued it). Pages below the gate are noindex until they pass.
• Per-weapon, per-finish, per-color, per-rarity, per-budget axis pages are always indexable — the data is rich by construction (a list of skins with prices is content).
• Per-skin StatTrak and Souvenir pages indexable only when the base skin already passes the gate.

Realistic indexable counts: 800 per-skin pages at month +3, 3,000 at month +6, 5,000 at month +12. Aggregate axis pages (categories, finishes, rarities, colors, budgets) all index immediately because they are useful from day one.

How the encyclopedia connects to everything else on the site

Every page in the encyclopedia is part of a wider internal-link graph:

• Each per-skin page links up to its weapon, down to similar skins, sideways to its case and collection, and out to every relevant glossary term and pattern guide. A per-skin page on AK-47 Case Hardened links to /glossary/pattern-index, to the /glossary/case-hardened and /glossary/blue-gem entries (shipping in later waves of the glossary cocoon), and to the AK-47 Case Hardened blue gem tier list spoke.
• Each per-weapon page links up to its category, down to every skin on the weapon, sideways to the per-finish family pages.
• Each per-finish page links into the relevant pattern-guide spokes (Doppler guide, knife patterns guide) and into the dedicated /guides/cs2-patterns-floats-wear pillar once that hub ships.
• The encyclopedia master landing links to the homepage calculator, the inventory valuation guide, and the marketplaces guide.

The graph is what turns a catalogue into a place Google can crawl and reward. A flat list of items is a wiki; a wiki with a topic graph is a topical authority. The encyclopedia's job is to be the second one.

Why this encyclopedia is different from existing CS2 catalogues

The existing CS2 catalogue field — csgoskins.gg, pricempire, steamanalyst, stash.clash.gg, skin.land — has been settled for half a decade. Each one does one thing well: csgoskins.gg has the deepest historical price chart, pricempire is the best at multi-market arbitrage, stash.clash.gg has the cleanest visual reference, steamanalyst has the broadest per-skin SEO surface area. None of them ships:

• A FAQ block on per-skin pages with FAQPage schema. This is a low-cost, high-leverage SERP win. Google rewards FAQ rich results aggressively for transactional queries and the major catalogues have not added them.
• First-party "% of inventories that own this skin" data, which is structurally available to us because the calculator processes thousands of inventories per week.
• A per-finish family axis with cross-weapon coverage and price comparison. stash.clash.gg has visual references; csgoskins.gg has no per-finish pages at all.
• A glossary cocoon linked from every item page, giving the long-tail "what is X" queries a home that funnels back into the encyclopedia.

The encyclopedia is built to fill those gaps directly, on top of the table-stakes (full SKU coverage, multi-market prices, historical charts) that the existing field already does well. The launch wave gets the table stakes shipped fast; the differentiators (FAQ, first-party data, finish family axis, glossary cocoon) ship in lockstep so the encyclopedia is not a worse copy of competitors during the build-out.

How to use the encyclopedia, depending on what you came for

If you arrived from a search engine looking for a specific skin, the per-skin page (/items/[cat]/[weapon]/[skin]) is your destination — it has the prices, the pattern info, the FAQ, the buy links.

If you are loadout-shopping, the per-finish (/items/by-finish/[finish]) or per-color (/items/by-color/[color]) pages are the entry points. Pick the visual identity you want, browse across weapons, build a coherent set.

If you have a budget, the per-budget tier pages (/items/by-budget/under-50, etc.) are the funnel. They sort by popularity inside the band so you see what is actually moving at that price.

If you are checking the value of an inventory you already own, skip the encyclopedia and go straight to the calculator — it valuates your full inventory in one shot, then lets you click into individual rows that link back into the encyclopedia for the per-skin context. The encyclopedia is the buyer's tool; the calculator is the holder's tool.

If you are trying to learn the system — what float means, what a blue gem actually is, why Souvenirs cost so much more than StatTrak — the glossary is the entry point. Every term has its own page, every page links back into the encyclopedia, and the encyclopedia per-skin pages link out to the glossary terms that explain them. The two are designed to be navigated together.