Why ROX CULT Counts More Crafts Than CSFloat

Every now and then someone messages us with a fair question. They open CSFloat, search the rox (Holo) sticker, and the number they see is a little lower than the one on our dashboard. So which one is right?

Short answer: both are right, they just count different things. CSFloat tells you what is out there right now. We tell you what has been crafted ever. Those are not the same number, and over time they drift apart on purpose. Here is the long version, because it is actually a neat little story about how these databases work under the hood.

How CSFloat gets its data in the first place

CSFloat, like every other float database, is built on top of Steam inspect links. An inspect link is the thing that lets a site read the exact details of a single weapon: its float, its pattern, and the stickers stuck on it. The catch is that an inspect link only works if the item is sitting somewhere public.

To find items, CSFloat crawls public inventories and active market listings, and it also gets a steady stream of data from people who have its browser extension installed. When you view an inventory or a listing with the extension on, that item gets read and remembered. Over the years this adds up to a huge catalogue. But every single entry in it has the same requirement: at some point, that weapon had to be visible in a place a crawler or an extension could reach.

That requirement is the whole reason the two counts can differ. CSFloat is, by design, a snapshot of what can be inspected today. It is a brilliant tool for that. It was just never meant to be a history book.

The five ways a craft drops off CSFloat

A rox craft can leave CSFloat's count without anything bad happening to it. Here are the ways it happens:

• Storage unit. The owner drops the weapon into a storage unit in their inventory. Items inside a storage unit cannot be inspected from the outside, so the crawler loses sight of it. The gun is perfectly fine, it is just in a drawer now.
• Private inventory. The owner flips their Steam inventory to private. Same effect. Nothing public to read, so it falls out of the search.
• Traded or sold away. The item moves to a new owner whose inventory is private, or it sits in a place the crawler has not visited again yet. Until it shows up somewhere public, it is invisible.
• Sticker scraped. This one is interesting. The weapon still exists, but the owner scraped the rox sticker off. Now it no longer matches a "has a rox holo" search, so it leaves that count, even though the weapon is right there in someone's inventory.
• Traded up or deleted. The weapon is used in a trade-up contract or otherwise destroyed. This is the only case where the item truly stops existing.

Notice that in four of those five cases the craft is still out in the world. It just stepped out of view. A search tool is right to stop showing it, because you cannot go buy something that is locked in a stranger's storage unit. But if your goal is to know how many rox crafts have ever been made, hiding is not the same as gone.

The part that never goes backwards

Here is the idea everything rests on. When you apply a sticker in CS2, that sticker is consumed. It is gone from the market forever. You cannot peel it off and sell it again. Even the scrape action does not give it back, it just slowly wears the sticker down until it is destroyed.

So the number of rox (Holo) stickers that have ever been applied can only go one direction: up. It physically cannot fall. Every craft that has ever existed used up real stickers from the supply, and that transaction is permanent whether or not the weapon is visible today.

That is the number we care about. ROX CULT is a history of the rox sticker, not a shopping list of what is for sale this afternoon.

What ROX CULT does differently

We read from the same CSFloat data that everyone else does. The difference is what we do with it. When we see a rox craft for the first time, we save it. And we never delete it. If that weapon later goes into a storage unit and disappears from the live search, our record of it stays exactly where it was, frozen with the stickers it had the last time we saw it.

So our database keeps growing while CSFloat's live count breathes in and out. Most days the gap is tiny, just one or two crafts that happen to be tucked away at the moment. But the gap is real, and it is the honest one if the question is "how many were ever made."

The dashboard now has a small box called Only in the ROX CULT Archive. It lists the crafts we are still holding that CSFloat is not showing right now, with a link to the photo of each one. Those are not errors or duplicates. They are real crafts that are simply out of sight today, and we kept the receipt.

So which number should you trust?

Depends what you are asking.

• If you want to know what you could buy or inspect today, use a live search like CSFloat. That is what it is built for and it does it well.
• If you want to know how many rox crafts have ever been made, or how the sticker has been used over the whole history of the Antwerp 2022 Major, that is us.

Neither one is wrong. They are answering two different questions. We just happen to think the history is the more interesting one, which is the whole reason this site exists.

If you want to see the full picture of where these crafts live and what they look like, the Crafts Gallery has every one we have ever recorded, and the About page explains every number on the dashboard in plain terms.