CS2 Recoil Patterns, Measured and Dated

How to read the pattern

The left panel is what the wall shows if you hold the trigger and never touch the mouse: bullet 1 at the aim point, then the climb, then the sideways drift. The right panel is the same shape mirrored — where your crosshair has to be at each bullet so that the bullet still lands on the aim point. Pull down through the climb, then follow the drift. Yaw is positive to the right, pitch positive upwards; the scale bar in each panel is one degree.

Degrees, not pixels

A recoil picture in pixels is a picture of somebody else's resolution. The AK-47 climbs 11.2° by bullet 26; at 1920×1080 that is about 141 px on screen, at 1280×960 stretched about 125 px — same angle, different picture. In mouse terms it is one number for everybody: at sensitivity 2 and CS2's m_pitch of 0.022, the full AK climb is 255 mouse counts of pull-down — about 8 mm of mousepad at 800 DPI, half that at 1600. That is 1600 eDPI; the animation above each pattern is drawn at 800 eDPI, so its millimetres are twice these. Change the sensitivity and the counts scale with it; the degrees do not move. The pattern was measured with spread off, so it is the ideal compensation path, not a promise that every bullet lands in a match. The eDPI calculator gives your centimetres per turn from the same constant.

How we measure

On our own CS2 client, on a fleet account, with -insecure and sv_cheats on a local map: stand at a fixed setpos on de_dust2 facing a flat wall about ten metres away, set weapon_accuracy_nospread 1 so every impact is recoil and nothing else, and fire one bullet per round restart — bullets one to k−1 go into a side wall, a bound setang turns the view onto the clean wall just before bullet k, and sv_showimpactsleaves a marker of constant shape. The marker centroid is read from a 2560×1440 screenshot (0.06° per pixel), converted to degrees through the same field-of-view maths the trainer draws with. Bullet 1 is the aim point. The whole run is a script; nobody holds the mouse. Re-running the method on the same version reproduces a bullet to within the marker's size, which is why the change log above can tell a patch from noise.

Train the path

The Spray Path programin our aim trainer plays these exact numbers: hold the button at the weapon's own cadence, move the mouse through the compensation path, and get the error per bullet — first ten, the rest, whole magazine — scored from your input log. For the rest of the setup the crosshair generator and the practice config cover a wall session of your own.

Questions people ask