CS2 Season 5 Update Adds Arabesque & Spy Tech Collections
Valve just launched the CS2 Season 5 update, kicking off Premier Season Five with a refreshed Active-Duty map pool – Cache is officially back, taking Overpass’s spot. Bomb damage has also been completely reworked: explosion damage is now precomputed and baked directly into each map, and the shockwave now rapidly expands outward from the blast center instead of applying instantly, dissipating around corners rather than passing through walls. Your health bar will flash a preview of how well you would survive the blast.
A few smaller fixes came along with it too – picking up dropped weapons through the Buy Menu no longer occasionally fails to complete, sticker rotation on the application screen now supports half-degree increments for finer placement, and a material blending glitch that made textures like the dirt on Inferno Banana’s barrels disappear when you got too close has been fixed.
Alongside these gameplay changes, Valve put out a call to the community for new weapon and sticker collections, and today we get the results: two new weapon collections, Arabesque and Spy Tech, plus two new sticker collections, Fruits & Veggies and Auto Racing, all available now through the Armory.
So, let’s jump right in!
The Arabesque Collection
The new Arabesque Collection is available through the Armory. It contains 17 new skin finishes designed by the community, following an ornamental Middle Eastern theme - think gold mosaics, lattice patterns, and Arabic calligraphy, with a few nods to Arabian mythology sprinkled in throughout.
The Spy Tech Collection
The new Spy Tech Collection is also available through the Armory. It contains another 17 new skin finishes, also designed by the community, following a covert espionage theme – camo panels, hidden cameras, glitchy digital readouts, and gadget-y finishes named after spy tropes like Ghost Protocol, Dark Operative, and Black Site.
The Fruits & Veggies Stickers
We also get a new sticker collection themed around fruits and vegetables, containing 27 new stickers across Paper, Holo, Foil, and Lenticular rarities. Expect a lot of produce puns and mascots, think banana characters, a cucumber secret agent, and various juicy wordplay like B’nana Strike and Scratch N’ Whiff.
The Auto Racing Stickers
And last but not least, the Auto Racing sticker collection brings 28 new stickers, also spread across Paper, Holo, Foil, and Lenticular rarities. It leans into motorsport culture with checkered flags, racing tires, dashboards, and nitro boosts, mixed with CS-flavored wordplay like Bunnyhop Hydraulics, Defusal Sprint, and Sniper Ahead.
Armory Rotation
As these four collections join the Armory, a few older ones have rotated out. The Train 2025 and Sport & Field weapon collections, along with the Sugarface 2 and Elemental Craft sticker collections, are no longer available to purchase.
Map Changes
The community map rotation has also been reshuffled. Warden, Stronghold, Alpine, and Sanctum have been removed from all game modes, while Boulder, Fachwerk, and Shelter join Competitive, Casual, and Deathmatch, and Debris and El Dorado have been added to Wingman.
A handful of official maps also got clipping and visual fixes: Cache received various clipping adjustments, Dust II fixed a pixel gap and a clipping issue Outside Tunnel, and Inferno fixed a clipping bug that let players get a pixel boost at Top of Mid.
Beyond that, Valve updated the game’s engine to the latest version of Source 2 and reduced the performance cost of showing the scoreboard. It shipped improvements to the Workshop’s Custom Paint Job Extended tool, adding a dedicated overlay mask texture option and independent overlay UV randomization for community skin creators. Enjoy the new skins, stickers, and Season 5 changes!