CS2
Counter-Strike 2's pet chicken costs two weekly drops and leaves after 145 days
· 2 min read
Valve never documented CS2's pet chickens. The egg burns both Weekly Care Package picks, the feed burns more, and the hen leaves after 140 days.
Valve shipped a Counter-Strike 2 update on October 5 with exactly three lines in it. One of them: "Pet photobook pages now have localized text art." Three days before that, the October 2 notes said agents now wear their equipped gloves "during the photobooth photography sessions and in buy menu."
Photobook. Photobooth. Valve has never defined either term, because Valve has never acknowledged the pet system at all. It came in with Rush Hour on September 22 and got zero mention in that day's notes, which found room for "Chickens now take damage from the Zeus x27" but nothing about the chicken you can now raise. PC Gamer called it a shadow drop. Two weeks on, the only official trace of the feature is localisation work on a photobook nobody was told about.
That is the chick stage. Every one of them looks like this, and the screenshot comes from PC Gamer's coverage of the shadow drop.
The reporting on all this has been cheerful and mostly about how to get one. What almost nobody is pricing out is the bill. Your chicken is not free. It is paid for in weekly drops, and it is the most expensive non-purchasable item in the game right now.
The egg takes both picks, not one
The Weekly Care Package is Prime only. You earn it on your first profile rank-up of the week, 5,000 XP from official matchmaking, and grinding three rank-ups does nothing extra. The package shows you four rewards and lets you keep two.
The chicken egg is one of those four, and selecting it consumes both of your picks. That is the whole mechanic in one sentence, and it is the one detail Valve has never put in front of a player. You do not add a chicken to your week. You trade your week for it.
What that costs depends on what the package rolls. I pulled Steam Community Market medians on October 8: Fever Case sits at $0.85 with 33,428 units sold in 24 hours, Gallery Case at $0.88, Kilowatt Case at $0.15. So a two-pick week is worth somewhere between about thirty cents and $1.70 of liquid, sellable inventory, depending on the offer. Current numbers for whatever your package shows you are on the CS2 market tracker.
![Fever Case](https://community.steamstatic.com/economy/image/i0CoZ81Ui0m-9KwlBY1L_18myuGuq1wfhWSaZgMttyVfPaERSR0Wqmu7LAocGJKz2lu_XsnXwtmkJjSU91dh8bj35VTqVBP4io_frncVtqv7MPE8JaHHCj_Dl-wk4-NtFirikURy4jiGwo2udHqVaAEjDZp3EflK7EeSMnMs4w