The Horizon Case came out in August 2018 and did something no case had done for two and a half years: it added new knife models. The Navaja, Stiletto, Talon and Ursus knives arrived alongside 17 community-made weapon finishes led by the AK-47 | Neon Rider. Here is what the case holds, where its knives turned up next and what it means that it no longer drops.
Released with the Panorama update
Valve shipped the case with its CS:GO update of August 2, 2018. Most of the attention that day went to the interface: Panorama, the redesigned menus Valve had previewed in June, became the default on every supported operating system. HLTV quoted Valve describing it as "the most substantial change to the look and feel of CS:GO since the game was released".
Valve's own post gave the case a single line, promising 17 new community weapon finishes "along with four all-new knives". Like every case of the period, it needs its own key, the Horizon Case Key, to open.
The four knives were the first new models since the Bowie Knife in February 2016. Our guide to every CS2 knife compares their shapes and animations; in short, the Talon shares much of the Karambit's animation set, and the Ursus is known for a draw that throws the blade and catches it.
Contents by rarity
The weapon finishes follow the standard community case layout of seven Mil-Spec, five Restricted, three Classified and two Covert skins. The Counter-Strike Wiki's list and the item data in the game files agree on all of them.
| Rarity | Count | Skins |
|---|---|---|
| Covert (red) | 2 | AK-47 Neon Rider, Desert Eagle Code Red |
| Classified (pink) | 3 | M4A1-S Nightmare, Sawed-Off Devourer, FAMAS Eye of Athena |
| Restricted (purple) | 5 | AWP PAW, CZ75-Auto Eco, G3SG1 High Seas, MP7 Powercore, Nova Toy Soldier |
| Mil-Spec (blue) | 7 | AUG Amber Slipstream, Dual Berettas Shred, Glock-18 Warhawk, MP9 Capillary, P90 Traction, R8 Revolver Survivalist, Tec-9 Snek-9 |
| Rare special item (gold) | 52 | Navaja, Stiletto, Talon and Ursus knives, 13 versions each |
Every gun skin and every knife in the case also exists as StatTrak, the version with a built-in kill counter. StatTrak guns show the count on a small orange display, while StatTrak knives have it etched into the blade.
The knife pool
Each of the four models comes in 13 versions: the plain blade with no finish, often called vanilla, plus 12 classic finishes that the Counter-Strike Wiki groups as the Original set. They fall into three rough families:
- Pattern finishes: Case Hardened, Fade, Crimson Web and Slaughter. On these the paint seed decides how the pattern sits on the blade, so two knives with the same name can look quite different. Our paint seed guide explains why.
- Camouflage: Boreal Forest, Forest DDPAT, Night Stripe, Safari Mesh, Scorched and Urban Masked.
- Treated steel: Blue Steel and Stained.
That makes 52 possible knives, all sharing the gold slot. None of the four models came with Doppler or Marble Fade at launch. Those arrived later: the Danger Zone Case of December 2018 reused exactly this set of 52, and the Prisma and Prisma 2 cases of 2019 and 2020 put the same four knives in Chroma finishes instead.
Standout skins
AK-47 | Neon Rider. The case's best-known skin is its Covert AK. Valve itself used it as one of its examples of Workshop art on the page for its 2021 Dreams & Nightmares contest, where it credits the design to the artist Puffin. Its float runs from 0.00 to 0.80, so even its most worn copies stop short of the worst end of Battle-Scarred.
Desert Eagle | Code Red. The second Covert uses the full 0.00 to 1.00 float range, so it exists in every wear from a near-perfect Factory New to a heavily worn Battle-Scarred.
The Classified trio. The M4A1-S | Nightmare gave the case a high-tier M4 for the CT side, alongside the FAMAS | Eye of Athena and the Sawed-Off | Devourer.
Float caps on the cheaper skins. A float cap is the limit Valve sets on how worn a particular skin can be. Several Horizon skins have one. The AWP | PAW stops at 0.50, so even its Battle-Scarred copies sit at the clean end of that tier, which begins at 0.45. The Dual Berettas | Shred is capped at 0.50 too, and the AUG | Amber Slipstream at 0.55. Our float guide covers how the wear tiers are cut.
Where the Horizon Case stands in 2026
For years, cases that left the active rotation moved into a rare drop pool, which still handed out a few copies through weekly drops. That ended quietly in December 2025. Hotspawn reported that drop-tracking tools had seen no rare-pool cases at all since a silent change that month, and Valve said nothing about it. By January 2026, according to Techaeris, the weekly pool held only five containers, and the Horizon Case was not one of them.
As of October 2026, community drop trackers still list it as discontinued. In practice that means no new Horizon Cases enter the game, and the existing stock only shrinks as people open them. Because the change was never announced, Valve could reverse it the same way. Our guide to weekly drops and drop pools explains how the system works today.
If you are after one of the knives rather than the case, the finish, wear and float range, paint seed and StatTrak filters on Buy let you compare all four models side by side.
Sources
- A New Horizon — Counter-Strike blog (Valve)
- Panorama UI moved out of beta in new update; Horizon Case released — HLTV.org
- Horizon Case — Counter-Strike Wiki
- Dreams & Nightmares contest page — Counter-Strike (Valve)
- CSGO-API item data from the game files — GitHub
- Is CS2 removing cases? Rumors explained — Hotspawn
- Valve is quietly killing CS2 cases — Techaeris
