Desert Eagle | Heat Treated

Desert Eagle | Heat Treated released October 2, 2024, as the launch item of Valve's "Limited Edition Item" set, introduced alongside the Armory itself in "The Armory" update. It's the first of 4 skins the set has rotated through so far.

It's a Counter-Strike 2-native release, launched a year after Valve's September 2023 relaunch, with no CS:GO history of its own. It shipped as a Classified-tier finish with a Souvenir edition and no StatTrak™ version.

As a finish, Heat Treated is applied to the Desert Eagle — Counter-Strike's iconic hand cannon, hitting hard per shot but punishing sprayed follow-ups with heavy recoil — and carries the pink rarity color every Classified-tier skin shares on the Steam Market and in-game. It's a Case Hardening finish: the same color-case-hardening process (wood charcoal applied at high heat) used on skins like AK-47 | Case Hardened, which means its exact blue-to-gold color mix varies by pattern seed rather than being fixed.

That Classified classification places it one tier below the rarest Covert finishes, but above the more common Restricted-and-below skins most loadouts are filled with.

Heat Treated ships in all five wear conditions, from Factory New through Battle-Scarred, across the full 0.00–1.00 float range.

As with every CS2 skin, lower float values look cleaner: Factory New copies (roughly below 0.07 float) show the case-hardening pattern at its sharpest, while Field-Tested and Well-Worn pieces make up the most commonly traded middle ground between mint and heavily worn.

Heat Treated doesn't come from a Case or Collection you open — it's redeemed directly from the Armory's XP Shop for 25 stars, earned by playing with an active Armory Pass. Every other Armory collection instead costs 4 stars for a random skin from that collection's own pool; Limited Edition Item is the one exception where spending stars buys the specific, guaranteed skin currently on rotation, not a chance at one.

As the set's first entry, Heat Treated was that guaranteed pull only while it was the featured item; once a newer skin rotated in, redeeming it directly through the shop stopped being possible, leaving trading and the Steam Community Market as the way to acquire one today. There's no drop chance to publish for it at any point in that timeline — it was never drawn from a pool in the first place.

There's a Souvenir edition of Heat Treated alongside the Normal version — but no StatTrak™ counterpart exists for it.

Its pattern index affects the case-hardening color spread the same way it does on other Case Hardening finishes, so individual copies can look meaningfully different from each other even at the same wear — there's no separate "phase" family, just pattern-driven color variance within the one finish.

As the Limited Edition Item set's first and most widely circulated release, Heat Treated is a familiar sight despite its Classified tier sitting below the set's rarer Covert entry — its Case Hardening finish gives pattern-chasing collectors a reason to look for specific seeds, the same draw AK-47 | Case Hardened and Karambit | Case Hardened have.

Without a StatTrak™ edition to chase, collector interest in the StatTrak direction doesn't apply here — the Souvenir edition is the one variant that trades at a premium over the Normal version.

Heat Treated's core definition hasn't changed since its October 2024 release — no rarity change, no reissue. Its one real transformation was structural rather than to the skin itself: once later Limited Edition Item skins rotated in behind it, direct XP Shop redemption closed for good, leaving the resale market as the only path to one from that point forward.

Heat Treated is the only Case Hardening finish in the Limited Edition Item set — the other 3 (XM1014 | Solitude, M4A1-S | Solitude, AK-47 | Aphrodite) use Hydrographic and Gunsmith finish styles instead, so it's also the one entry with pattern-driven color variance rather than a fixed look.

This is one of 45 Desert Eagle skins currently listed on the site, spanning multiple rarity tiers.