How to put skins in CS:GO

Have you ever wondered how to put skins in CS:GO? For free, of course. Ideally, it would be forever, and others displayed correctly, and in the inventory can be saved… But this is all rather pipe dreams. We are talking about real things here and offer a good budget option to admire the most expensive and top gear on your account, albeit temporarily. 

We offer a method that allows you to put any skin in CS:GO, even non-existent.

What to do — read on and you will understand everything.

How the installation procedure works

Since the appearance of the very first skins in the update Arms Deal, all datamayner considered it their duty to dig into the files of the game to pull out these textures and try on their weapons. Later this interest grew into a full-fledged contest to create unique skins, many of which are now available in the game at cosmic prices.

In other words, you can find dozens, if not hundreds of such textures on the Internet. And not only in-game ones, but also author's ones, which are not found in a shooter. Naturally, put such skins CS:GO want many to simply appreciate the work of the creator. 

The problem with our approach is only one — to see the modified skin can only the owner. The installation only changes the client files of the game without affecting the server part. But you can make hundreds of screenshots with Dragon Lore, Gungnir and Asiimov to put then on social networks — nobody forbids. But the rest of us will only see the standard weapons.

The

main problems

The snag is not the complexity, nor the length of the process. The nuance lies in the file replacement itself. Put any skin in CS:GO will not work for the simple reason that the client game can perceive such manipulation as a cheat. Steam will often swear at changes, client errors will appear, and in rare cases they may even throw a temporary ban.

.

First of all, forget about official servers with anti-chit system — ban will come instantly and without prior warning. Given the speed at which Valve approve or deny them — it's best not to take any chances.

Play either with bots on a dedicated server, or locally with friends. In this case, the chance to get a virtual spanking is minimal, and the karma of the account will not suffer.

Installation procedure

Where to

install

CS:GO skins and what will I have to change for this? You can mess around with overwriting the files in the Weapon folder yourself, but that's not our approach. There is a much more modern and simple solution — CS:GO Skin Installation Tool.

This is a program that helps a lot with swapping the original skins to those that you downloaded from the Internet. And we really hope there is no virus in the folder.

The replacement process is as follows:

• install the program on your PC;

• download any of the skins presented on the web, and then place it in the folder \Steam\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo

• run the Skin Installation Tool;

• click the Scan button and wait for the program to detect a new texture different from the original one.

• select the weapon for which the new skin is intended from the pop-up list;

• click the Install button and wait for the software to make a full-fledged file swap.

Among the main advantages we note:

• simplicity of the process itself;

• no need to dig into the game files yourself;

• remove changes can be removed at any time.

And what to do if you want to replace the skin on your own server on CS:GO? And here we can help

How to put a skin on the server CS:GO

There are two main categories of skins in the game:

• classic skins on weapons;

• 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 do 3 steps:

• transfer all files to the server;

• assign new storage paths;

• update the content hosting.

The process of transferring is quite simple. First, take the skin (character, location, item, weapon) and flip it to the server. Note that there are two folders in the archive: FastDL and Gameserver. The first one contains re-compressed models for uploading to hosting. In the second — uncompressed. That's what we need.

The Materials and Models folders in the Gameserver are sent to the path/csgo (or it all depends on the specific hosting)

.

Next comes the process of specifying the paths in the plugin, which will pick up new skins on the fly. Let's assume that on your server the unique content is available only for VIP-users, so the path should be as follows:

/csgo/addons/sourcemod/data/vip/modules/downloadlist.txt

If we talk about skins for the shop, then 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 the name may differ, but in all cases the principle is identical — to write the path to the skins).

It is necessary to copy everything and paste it into the necessary download file. By default, it's called downloadlist.txt.

Now all that's left is to update the content hosting. Just what is it and where is it located? Essentially — is a repository with files for quick download directly from the server to the game client. If your server has, for example, non-standard sounds, commands, maps, agents and other custom features, you will need to create and configure a separate repository for these purposes. Otherwise, players simply will not see user-generated content.

Let's look at the example of Myarena, since it is one of the most popular hosting for CS:GO in principle.

To begin with, go to the FTP folder.

Copy the link to your content hosting, which should be pasted into server.cfg.

 

In the sv_downloadurl line “” you need to paste the copied link, or write it through FTP.

As soon as everything is finished, update your content hosting so that the files from the server are downloaded in compressed bz2 format. This way they will take up much less space to be unpacked already in the players' client.

Don't forget to update the content hosting every time after another change. If suddenly instead of success ERROR — an error occurred in any of the steps. We recommend double-checking everything again.