UpdatesOct 10, 20265 min readCS2Sell

CS2 "Tonight's Forecast: Rain-cient" update (August 2025): night Ancient and Deluge music kits

On August 14, 2025 Valve gave Ancient and Shoots visual upgrades and night versions, released the ten-kit Deluge Music Kit Box and put the M4A1-S | Solitude in the Armory.

On August 14, 2025, Valve released "Tonight's Forecast: Rain-cient" for Counter-Strike 2. Ancient and Shoots, which Valve called "CS2's tropical maps", got visual upgrades and new nighttime versions. The same day the Deluge Music Kit Box went on sale with ten kits, and the Armory swapped its limited item for the M4A1-S | Solitude.

What the update added

Area	Change
Maps	Ancient and Shoots: refreshed materials and new night versions
Map making	ancient_zoo, a map with Ancient's assets and blending examples
Music kits	Deluge Music Kit Box, ten kits, standard and StatTrak
Armory	M4A1-S Solitude as the new Limited Time item
Animation	New deploy and quick-inspect animations for knives and several guns
Settings	Resolution and aspect ratio changeable in fullscreen windowed mode

Ancient and Shoots at night

Valve's post said the two maps "have gotten visual upgrades, and now have nighttime versions." The release notes describe the upgrade in more detail: every Ancient material was refreshed to use the latest CS2 shaders, and new blending options, including wetness and moss, were added for those materials.

The night version of Ancient comes with a limit. Valve's post says it is "only available in Casual and Deathmatch". Ancient was in the Active Duty pool at the time, so Premier and Competitive matches on it stayed in daylight.

Shoots is an Arms Race map, added to CS2 together with that mode in February 2024 in the Kilowatt Case update. Valve's notes put no mode limit on its night version.

Map makers got something too. A new map file, ancient_zoo.vmap, contains all of Ancient's assets along with examples of the new blending. Four days later Valve added more Ancient and Shoots source content to it. Train got a similar file, train_zoo, on September 24.

The Covert and two Classified skins of the Ancient Collection, named after the map

The Deluge Music Kit Box

The Deluge Music Kit Box went on sale "in standard and StatTrak versions", in Valve's words. Its ten kits, one for each artist named in Valve's post, are all High Grade:

The StatTrak box holds StatTrak versions of the same ten kits, which count the MVP rounds you earn while the kit is equipped. Standard and StatTrak kits are separate items with separate prices. Our guide to music kits, graffiti and pins explains how kits work and what the MVP anthem does.

One artist is a returning name: Juelz already had a kit in the game, Shooters, which makes Floorspace the artist's second.

Six of the ten kits in the Deluge Music Kit Box

The previous box, Masterminds 2, had come out a year earlier, in August 2024 (Valve's only kit in between was a single Perfect World kit in November 2024), and is covered in our Snap Tap and Masterminds 2 article. The next music release, NIGHTMODE II in May 2026, dropped the box format and sold six kits individually; see our NIGHTMODE II article.

M4A1-S | Solitude in the Armory

Valve described this part of the update as "refreshing the Limited Time item in the Armory". The M4A1-S | Solitude took over from the XM1014 | Solitude, which had arrived in March 2025, and became the third limited edition skin after the Desert Eagle | Heat Treated from October 2024.

The two Solitudes share a finish name but not a grade. The XM1014 is Restricted, while the M4A1-S is Classified. The Counter-Strike Wiki lists its price as 25 credits, the same as the Heat Treated Deagle and more than the 15 the XM1014 had cost. Limited edition items stay in the Armory only for the period shown on their tile; our Armory explainer covers how credits and passes work.

The M4A1-S Solitude and the two limited Armory skins released before it

Animation and other changes

Most of the remaining notes were about how weapons come out and get inspected:

Knives: improved deploy and quick-inspect animations for all of them.
Guns: improved deploy and quick-inspect animations for the AK-47, Galil AR, AUG and PP-Bizon, and improved deploy animations for the AWP, M4A4 and M4A1-S.
Inspect delay: the "deploy inspect delay" was removed for most weapons.
Shotguns: a modified deploy for the Sawed-Off, with a fix for what the notes call "shell penetration on reload", and the XM1014 no longer blocks the crosshair while reloading.
SSG 08: improved animations for the legacy models.

Outside animation, Valve listed rendering performance improvements across most maps, let players change resolution and aspect ratio in fullscreen windowed mode, and stopped fps_max from being changed while connected to a server. A fix also closed a case where some weapons could fire sooner after being redeployed.

Fixes in the days after

Valve followed up with three patches in under two weeks:

August 18: on Ancient, the "house" roof decorations near CT spawn were reverted and the ability to shoot through the plywood in "cave" was restored. The patch also changed the daytime soundscape, fixed items getting stuck behind the rubble pile on the T side of B, and stopped knife slashes leaving a "dry" decal on wet surfaces.
August 26: matchmaking had been avoiding servers that were running night Ancient, and this was fixed. The patch also restored some grenade lineup visuals on Ancient and fixed deploy and inspect animations on several knives, including the Butterfly, Stiletto and Talon.
August 27: the Jonathan Young kit no longer loops incorrectly.

Ancient and Shoots got more player and grenade clipping fixes on September 3 and October 1.

Where it stands now

Night Ancient is still part of the game. When map guides spread to more modes in 2026, Valve made guides for de_ancient work on de_ancient_night and the other way round in February, and fixed Ancient guides not loading on the night version on May 7, 2026. Map guides themselves reached Competitive in the March 2026 reload update. Ancient stayed in Active Duty through the Premier Season Five rotation in July 2026.

No Valve note announced the end of the M4A1-S | Solitude's run, but the Counter-Strike Wiki lists it among former Armory items. The next limited edition skin, the AK-47 | Aphrodite, arrived on January 21, 2026 with Premier Season Four.

The previous update covered here is Premier Season Three and trade protection from July 2025; the next is the Genesis Collection and its terminal in September 2025.