For most CS2 skins, the price you see is the price you pay. For a handful of skin families — Case Hardened, Marble Fade, Crimson Web, Doppler, Fade — the paint seed determines whether the same float is worth $50 or $50,000. Pattern databases are the tools that tell you which seeds matter and what they look like. This is the short list of which tool to use for which kind of pattern hunt.
Why pattern matters
Every CS2 skin is generated with a paint-seed integer between 0 and 1000. The seed determines how the skin’s texture lands on the model — where the camo lines fall, which side gets the most colour, how visible the “rare” features are. For most skins this is cosmetic. For a few, it’s the entire price.
A blue gem is a Case Hardened pattern with a large, contiguous blue area on the playside. A FFI Marble Fade is a Marble Fade with full red and full blue coverage and no yellow. A Tier-1 Crimson Web has five or more spider-webs visible on the front faces. A Doppler Black Pearl is one specific phase out of seven, and Steam doesn’t label which phase your knife is — third-party tools infer it from the paint seed.
The whole pattern-database market exists because the people listing items on Steam often don’t know what they’re holding. The tools below are how you find an under-priced rare pattern before someone else does.
The four tools that matter
CSBlueGem — for Case Hardened, full stop
CSBlueGem is the canonical reference for Case Hardened blue gems. The site catalogues every notable seed for every Case Hardened weapon — AK-47 #661 is the most famous, but there are graded tier lists for the Karambit (#387), M9 Bayonet, Five-SeveN (#278, #690), MAC-10, and the rest of the family. Each seed page shows reference images, the community-canonical tier (1 through 5+), and where applicable a live filter pulling current listings.
CSBlueGem’s strength is depth. If you want to know whether a specific paint seed on an AK Case Hardened is a T1 blue gem, a T2 mostly-blue, or a T4 partial, this is the site that has the answer with reference images. The gap is coverage of other pattern families — Crimson Web, Marble Fade, Doppler — which CSBlueGem doesn’t cover. For those you want the next tool.
Best for: any Case Hardened decision — buying, selling, or appraising one you opened.
Dispattern — for everything else
Dispattern’s wedge is breadth. The same site that ranks Marble Fade FFI grades will also tell you which Doppler phase your Karambit is, which Crimson Web tier your M4 is, and what Fade percentage you’re holding. The depth on each individual family is shallower than CSBlueGem on Case Hardened, but the catalogue is wide enough that for most non-Case-Hardened pattern hunting Dispattern is the only tool you’ll need.
The interface is utilitarian — pattern lookups, seed-to-grade mappings, and a separate page per family. Live-listings integration exists for some patterns but isn’t the headline feature; you’ll use Dispattern to identify, then a marketplace search to find listings.
Best for: Doppler phase identification, Marble Fade FFI grading, Crimson Web tier checks, Fade percentage, and the long tail of pattern-graded skins outside the Case Hardened world.
CSGOSkins.gg — pattern pages alongside cross-market prices
CSGOSkins.gg is primarily a price aggregator across 29+ marketplaces, but its pattern pages are a respectable secondary feature. Coverage is partial — popular families like Case Hardened and Marble Fade are well-represented; obscure patterns less so — but the integration with live listings is better than Dispattern’s. If you find a graded seed and want to immediately see who’s selling that exact pattern on every marketplace, CSGOSkins.gg gets you there in one click.
Best for: shopping for a graded pattern across multiple marketplaces in one view, after you’ve identified the seed elsewhere.
CSFloat — float-and-seed search on the marketplace itself
CSFloat doesn’t market itself as a pattern database, but its marketplace search is the deepest float-and-seed-aware search engine in the wild. You can filter listings by exact float, exact paint seed, or both — and because CSFloat is also a marketplace, the listings you find are immediately buyable. Pair it with a database (CSBlueGem for Case Hardened, Dispattern for the rest): identify the seed you want, then go to CSFloat and search for that seed.
Best for: turning a graded seed from CSBlueGem or Dispattern into an actual purchase decision on listings you can buy right now.
Which to use when
- Case Hardened blue gem hunt — CSBlueGem to identify the tier, CSFloat to find the seed in live listings.
- Doppler phase identification — Dispattern (or paste the inspect link into CSFloat, which surfaces the phase in the listing detail).
- Marble Fade FFI grading — Dispattern for the grade, then CSFloat or Buff163 to find the listing.
- Crimson Web tier check — Dispattern.
- Fade percentage — Dispattern shows the percentage; CSGOSkins.gg has pages for the popular Fade weapons.
- Cross-marketplace shopping after you know the seed — CSGOSkins.gg.
For the head-to-heads
The tightest decision in this category is CSBlueGem vs Dispattern — covered in the dedicated head-to-head with criteria-by-criteria detail. The verdict short-form: CSBlueGem for Case Hardened, Dispattern for everything else. Most pattern hunters end up using both.
Workflow: from spotting to purchase
- See an inspect link. A friend, a Reddit post, a Steam listing — any inspect link encodes the float, paint seed, stickers, and asset.
- Read the seed. Paste into CSFloat or any other float-checker. The paint seed is a 0–1000 integer.
- Grade the seed. CSBlueGem (Case Hardened) or Dispattern (anything else). You now know if you’re looking at a generic, a T3, a Tier-1 blue gem, an FFI, whatever the family ranks.
- Price the seed. Look at recent sales for the same seed (CSBlueGem and Dispattern often link sales history for graded seeds), then check current listings on CSFloat and Buff163. Rare patterns trade at a steep premium over the generic float-equivalent.
- Decide and buy. If the listing is the seed you want, at a price below the recent comp, take it. Pattern scarcity means good listings disappear quickly.
Frequently asked
What is a CS2 blue gem?
A blue gem is a Case Hardened skin (AK-47, Karambit, M9 Bayonet, Five-SeveN, MAC-10, etc.) where the random “patina” pattern lands with an unusually large, contiguous blue area on the playside. Tier-1 blue gems can sell for 100x to 1000x the price of a generic Case Hardened of the same float.
What’s the difference between CSBlueGem and Dispattern?
CSBlueGem is the deepest single-source database for Case Hardened blue gems specifically. Dispattern covers a wider range of pattern families (Doppler phases, Marble Fade FFI, Crimson Web tiers, Fade percentage) but with shallower per-family depth. Most pattern hunters use both.
How do I check the paint seed of a CS2 skin?
Open the inspect link in CS2, then paste it into a float-checker tool like CSFloat’s inspect-checker or any equivalent. The float-checker reads the inspect link and returns the float, paint seed, sticker scrape, and a 3D preview. Once you have the paint seed number, look it up in CSBlueGem (for Case Hardened) or Dispattern (for other patterns).
Are pattern databases ever wrong?
The databases reflect community-canonical tier lists, which are themselves opinions. For Case Hardened, the rankings are stable and widely-used as references — disagreement happens at the margins (is this a high T2 or a low T1?). For newer pattern families, tier lists are still being established and reasonable people disagree. Treat the database as a starting point, not the last word.
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