CS2 Update Adds Pet Chickens & New Starjunk 95 Music Kit
Today’s CS2 update comes with a surprise that Valve didn’t even mention in the official release notes: pet chickens! You can now raise your very own chicken, all the way from an egg to a fully grown hen. The update also ships a new Music Kit from the artist Starjunk 95, featuring the song “Industrial Sunset Memories”. On top of that, it introduces Rush, a new fast-paced 3v3 queued game mode, changes the Premier map selection process, and brings a bunch of gameplay and quality of life improvements like silent reloads, upgraded crosshairs, and the return of Clan Tags.
The New Pet Chickens
Chicken Eggs have just started showing up in the Weekly Care Package, and the community has dug up the rest from the game files. Since nobody’s egg has hatched yet, most of the details below come from those files and not from real pets, so Valve can still change them.
A Chicken Egg can show up as one of the options in your Weekly Care Package. Picking it uses both of that week’s rewards, so you get the egg and nothing else. You can only have one pet per account, and eggs, feed, and chickens can’t be traded or sold – the only way to get a pet is to raise one yourself.
According to the game, an egg hatches “in a week or so” after you get it, which is why nobody has a chick or a hen yet. After hatching, your pet grows from a chick into a pullet and finally into a hen, as long as it has food. Based on the game files, it stays a chick for 22 days, a pullet for 28 days, and a hen for 90 days.
A chick is too young to join you in matches, so it stays in the main menu, where it walks around next to your agent. Once it grows into a pullet, its breed and colors come in and it’s cleared to deploy with you in your matches. There are three breeds – Catalana, Silkie, and Polish – with 34 colors between them. The color is random, and according to the game files some colors come up more often than others.
Pets need to be fed to stay around. Chicken Feed also comes from the Weekly Care Package, and the game warns you when your pet is running low. If the food runs out, your pet leaves for good – in Valve’s words, “Your pet has accepted a position elsewhere. The offer included meals.” If it never runs out of food, it lives for 140 days after hatching and then retires of old age. The game files also include a photo booth with hats, filters, and effects, as well as the HatchBook, a photo album that keeps memories from each stage of your pet’s life.
The New Starjunk 95 Music Kit
The new Music Kit from Starjunk 95 features the song “Industrial Sunset Memories”. It can be purchased in-game for $4.99, the StatTrak version costs $7.99. After the 7-day trade hold, both versions will also be available on the Steam market and on other third-party markets.
The New Rush Game Mode
Rush is a new fast-paced 3v3 queued game mode. Players push through a gauntlet of battle arenas to reach and capture the enemy castle and win the match. The battle arenas are randomly selected for each match, so no two matches are the same.
To win a round, you need to control the tower once you eliminate the enemy team or when time expires, all while making the most of a limited budget. There’s also a Rush friends leaderboard to keep track of your wins.
Premier Map Selection
Instead of banning down to a single map, teams in Premier now pick maps. Team 1 picks one map, Team 2 picks two maps, and Team 1 picks a final map. One of those four maps is then randomly selected and the match begins. According to Valve, this gives players more opportunities to play the maps they’ve been investing time into learning.
Gameplay Changes
Players can now reload silently by pressing and holding the reload key – at the cost of a considerably slower reload. Un-scoping a sniper weapon also no longer produces a sound.
On the visual side, blood and bullet impacts are now much more visible, with globally increased visual clarity and
improved fidelity of bullet impact decals. Additionally, the ammo_grenade_limit_total setting now also enforces the
total number of grenades a player can buy in a round, and chickens now take damage from the Zeus x27.
Crosshair Changes
Crosshairs have received a significant upgrade and are now resolution independent. A new Crosshair/Scopes tab in the settings menu includes the updated crosshair settings and new crosshair styles. The default crosshair has also been changed to “Dynamic Quad”, which better represents weapon accuracy.
Map Changes
A handful of official maps received fixes: Ancient fixed holes in the world in Long A Main Hall and adjusted door geometry and grenade clipping inside Jaguar, Cache got gap fixes and clipping adjustments around the blue doors in Mid, Mirage reinforced the scaffolding by the balcony on A site, and Train blocked a pixel gap in the crates on bombsite A.
Beyond that, Clan Tags are back – select one of your Steam Community Groups in your player profile and its tag will appear next to your name. Stickers can now be applied to the C4, music volume can be adjusted per game mode, and halftime scoreboard stats now fully reflect the results of the previous round. Valve also updated the game’s engine to the latest version of Source 2, fixed a case where players could avoid a kick ban, and added new entities and scripting features for Workshop map creators. Enjoy the new music kit and the Rush game mode, and keep an eye on your Weekly Care Package for a Chicken Egg!