M4A1-S | Night Terror (Field-Tested)

Field-Tested (FT) is the middle of the wear scale for the M4A1-S | Night Terror, not one of its edges. Red scrawls are spread across the rifle, and Valve's description calls them fragmentary thoughts from the head of someone who cannot sleep. This wear covers floats 0.15 to 0.38. It is a Restricted skin that drops in CS2 from the Dreams & Nightmares Case.

What the M4A1-S | Night Terror looks like in Field-Tested

The base is dark, gray-olive and scuffed, with bare metal showing through the paint in places. Blood-red marks run over it on the carry handle, both sides of the receiver, the barrel, the suppressor and the magazine. The magazine itself is gray, smeared with red, with a brown-gold panel on the side.

The red strokes form angular tags and rune-like symbols, but not one word can be read. The densest cluster sits on the receiver side above the magwell, and next to it is a blurred dark figure that looks like a head with hair. A red ring sits at the front of the suppressor and a red stripe runs along the bottom of the grip.

In Field-Tested the red lines go first. They are thin and lie along the edge of the carry handle, the back of the magazine and the receiver ribs. The base looks scuffed from the start, so new scratches on it barely register. The flat side of the receiver keeps the scrawls longest.

Where the M4A1-S | Night Terror came from

The finish was drawn by a Steam Workshop artist who goes by Madara. He published the submission, titled "M4A1-S: Insomnia", on October 18, 2021. The collection was released on January 21, 2022.

In the submission text the author presented the series as the work of a fictional company, Eternity, and added lines of verse about the night. Valve used one of those lines in the item description, so the caption on the skin is Madara's own words.

Valve's update note says the case holds seventeen skins selected from the CS:GO Workshop. The skin's number in Valve's catalog is 1130.

What to check before buying

When choosing a listing of the M4A1-S | Night Terror, these matter:

• float: past 0.30 the red strokes on the raised edges break and merge with the scuffing;


• the edge of the carry handle and the back of the magazine, where the paint comes off first;


• the name tag and stickers this M4A1-S | Night Terror already carries.

The M4A1-S | Night Terror has no pattern variance: what one listing shows, the rest show too.

Between 0.15 and 0.38 there is enough of a difference to make comparing a few listings worthwhile.

What the M4A1-S | Night Terror costs in Field-Tested

For comparison, the other wears:

• for Factory New you pay two and a half times as much;


• Minimal Wear costs about a third more;


• Well-Worn and Battle-Scarred are a few percent dearer.

So this skin's price no longer falls as the wear drops: both lower wears cost no less and look worse.

Among Restricted M4A1-S skins, this wear of the Night Terror is third from the bottom by price, out of ten. Only M4A1-S | Nitro and M4A1-S | Emphorosaur-S are cheaper. M4A1-S | Electrum costs almost twice as much, M4A1-S | Glitched Paint a little more than twice, and M4A1-S | Liquidation three times. The top of the rank is three skins, one of them M4A1-S | Basilisk.

Getting the M4A1-S | Night Terror

The first route is the Dreams & Nightmares Case. The second is a trade-up: the contract takes ten skins of the next rank down from the same collection.

StatTrak and Souvenir

The M4A1-S | Night Terror comes with StatTrak. Souvenir copies of the finish exist as well, though no Souvenir Packages were released for it: those were made only for tournament map collections. Such copies are built through the Souvenir-O-Matic, which puts gold tournament stickers and a player autograph on an ordinary skin from your inventory.

Stickers and craft on the M4A1-S | Night Terror

This is a difficult base. The body is already busy with small graphics, and a sticker on it competes with the artwork. Only large, single-color stickers work: black, white, cool shades. Small logos get lost among the scrawls. As a sticker craft in CS2, this is one of the most awkward finishes on the M4A1-S.

Who this wear suits

Buying the M4A1-S | Night Terror in Field-Tested makes sense in three cases:

• you want an inexpensive rifle with hand-drawn graphics for CS2;


• you want to pick a specific wear value, since the band runs from 0.15 to 0.38;


• you want the kill-counter version and the cleaner wears are out of budget.

There is one downside: toward the top of the band the red strokes on the raised edges are already broken. A clean look holds until about 0.30.