Have you ever thought about how to install skins in CS GO? Naturally, it's free. Ideally, it would be displayed correctly for others forever, and you can save it in your inventory… But these are all rather pipe dreams. We are talking about real things here and offering a good budget option to admire the most expensive and top-end clothes on your account, albeit temporarily.
We offer a method that allows you to install any skin in CS GO, even a non-existent one.
What needs to be done for this — read further and you will understand everything.
How the installation procedure works
Starting with the appearance of the very first skins in the Arms Deal update, all data miners considered it their duty to delve into the game files in order to pull out these textures into the light of day and try them on their weapons. Subsequently, this interest grew into a full-fledged competition for the creation of unique skins, many of which are now available in the game at astronomical prices.
In other words, you can find dozens, if not hundreds of similar textures on the Internet. At the same time, not only game ones, but also copyright ones, which are not found in shooters. Naturally, many people want to install such CS GO skins in order to simply evaluate the work of the creator.
Our approach has only one problem — Only the owner can see the changed skin. During installation, only the client game files are changed, without affecting the server part. But you can take hundreds of screenshots from Dragon Lore, Gungnir and Asiimov to post on social networks later — no one forbids it. But others will only see standard weapons.
Main problems
The problem is not the complexity, nor the length of the process. The nuance lies in the file replacement itself. It will not be possible to install any skin in CS GO for the simple reason that the game client can perceive such manipulation as a cheat. Steam will often complain about making changes, client errors will appear, and in rare cases they may even impose a temporary ban.
First of all, immediately forget about official servers with an anti-cheat system — The ban will arrive instantly and without prior warning. Considering the speed with which Valve approves or refutes them — It's better not to take risks.
Play either with bots on a dedicated server, or locally with friends. In this case, the chance of getting a virtual slap on the head is minimal, and the account karma will not suffer.
Installation procedure
Where to put CS GO skins and what will have to be changed for this? You can bother with overwriting files in the Weapon folder yourself, but this is not our approach. There is a much more modern and simpler solution — CS:GO Skin Installation Tool.
This is a program that helps a lot with replacing original skins with those you downloaded from the Internet. And we really hope that there is no virus in the folder.
The replacement process is as follows:
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install the program on your PC;
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download any of the skins presented on the network, and then place it in the \Steam\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo folder
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run Skin Installation Tool;
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Press the Scan button and wait until the program detects a new texture that is different from the original one.
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select the weapon for which the new skin is intended in the pop-up list;
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click the Install button and wait until the software performs a full file replacement.
Among the main advantages we note:
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simplicity of the process itself;
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no need to delve into the game files yourself;
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You can delete changes at any time.
What to do if you want to replace the skin on your own CS GO server? And here we can help
How to install a skin on a CS GO server
There are two main categories of skins in the game:
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classic weapon skins;
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non-standard models that replace or complement the shooter.
We are interested in the second option. And to successfully implement them into the game, you need to take 3 steps:
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transfer all files to the server;
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register new storage paths;
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update content hosting.
The transfer process is quite simple. First, take a skin (character, location, item, weapon) and transfer it to the server. Please note that the archive contains two folders: FastDL and Gameserver. The first contains compressed models for uploading to the hosting. In the second — uncompressed. They are what we need.
The Materials and Models folders as part of Gameserver are sent along the path/csgo (or it all depends on the specific hosting)
Next comes the process of writing paths in the plugin, which will pick up new skins on the fly. Let's say that on your server unique content is available only to VIP users, which means the path should be as follows:
/csgo/addons/sourcemod/data/vip/modules/downloadlist.txt
If we talk about skins for the shop, then we write the following command:
/csgo/addons/sourcemod/configs/shop/skins_downloads.txt
Now open the previously downloaded archive with skins and open the file paths.txt (on some hosting sites the name may differ, but in all cases the principle is identical — specify the path to the skins).
You need to copy and paste everything into the desired download file. By default it is called downloadlist.txt.
Now all that remains is to update the content hosting. Just what is it and where is it located? Essentially — This is a storage with files for quick downloading directly from the server to the game client. If, for example, non-standard sounds, commands, maps, agents and other custom settings are installed on your server, you will need to create and configure a separate storage for these purposes. Otherwise, players simply will not see user content.
Let's look at Myarena as an example, since this is one of the most popular hosting sites for CS GO in general.
First, go to the FTP folder.
Copy the link to your content hosting, which must be pasted into server.cfg.
To the line sv_downloadurl “” you need to paste the copied link, or register via FTP.
Once everything is finished, update the content hosting so that the files from the server are downloaded in the compressed bz2 format. This way they will take up much less space so that they can be unpacked in the players’ client.
Don't forget to update your content hosting every time after the next changes. If suddenly instead of success there appears ERROR — An error occurred at one of the steps. We recommend checking everything again.
