★ Survival Knife

The ★ Survival Knife is the Survival Knife in CS2 with no skin. The listing reads "Not Painted", and the knife carries Covert rank, with the ★ mark. It has no wear, no float and no pattern, and copies cannot be told apart.

What the ★ Survival Knife looks like

The blade is wide with a clipped point, and a small hook is cut into the spine near the tip. A long slot runs along the blade, and serrations sit on the edge near the heel. Light and dark patches of steel alternate across the flat of the blade.

The handle is dark gray, made of panels with finger grooves and screws. The butt has a lanyard hole. The color of the knife comes from the steel and the gray scales.

How the plain ★ Survival Knife differs from a skinned one

A skinned listing is judged by wear and artwork, while a listing without a skin is judged differently:

• there is no wear, so no float band is quoted;


• there is no pattern, so copies are identical;


• a name tag is supported, but there are no sticker slots;


• listings can be compared by price alone.

One question remains: a regular knife or one with a counter.

What the ★ Survival Knife costs

Among the skins of this model, the plain knife sits near the bottom: by starting price only six are cheaper and eighteen are pricier. Just below it come Night Stripe (almost level), Forest DDPAT (1.04 times cheaper) and Scorched (1.05 times cheaper).

Above it are Urban Masked (3 percent more), and Stained and Ultraviolet (both 14 percent more). The top of the row belongs to the Doppler gems: Sapphire costs 6.6 times as much, Ruby 9.3 times and Black Pearl 10.8 times.

Is there a StatTrak version

Yes: the ★ StatTrak™ Survival Knife is sold as a separate item. Its counter tracks kills made with this exact knife and never resets. For this model the markup over the regular version is noticeable, about a fifth.

Getting the ★ Survival Knife

The Survival Knife drops from three cases: the Shattered Web Case, the Fracture Case and the Fever Case. The Shattered Web Case came out on November 19, 2019, together with the operation. The unpainted knife sits in the rare special item pool, so getting one is down to chance.

The other road is a trade-up contract: five Covert skins from one collection give one rare special item. You can choose neither the model nor the finish.

Who it suits

The plain ★ Survival Knife is worth buying when:

• you want a sturdy knife with a slot in the blade and no artwork;


• you would rather not deal with wears and patterns;


• you like the shape of the model, and paying seven to eleven times more for Doppler gems makes no sense to you.