News & updates

Knifing someone is now worth doing, the kill announcer has a second voice, and the deathmatch map vote can no longer get stuck.

Knife someone and you take their money

A knife kill on another player now takes 10% of their cash and gives it to you, and everyone sees a chat line saying who robbed whom and for how much.

Knifing a bot still plays the humiliation sting -- knifing is the humiliation and the sound is the whole of it -- but it moves no money. Bots respawn forever and are free to knife, so paying out for one would simply be a money printer standing in the middle of the server.

You are never charged for a failed attempt, and a broke victim costs you nothing but the noise: if there is nothing to take, nothing is announced.

Pick the voice that calls your kills

!voice switches the kill announcer between the male and female voice packs, and your choice is saved -- it follows you to the next map and the next session.

Your own setting decides what is heard for your kills. Pick the female pack and everyone near you hears her call your double kills; your friend who kept the male pack still hears him call theirs. Nobody has to agree on it.

One honest gap: the female pack has no first blood line, so with her selected first blood passes quietly. Everything else -- doubles, triples and the whole multi-kill ladder -- is covered.

Multi-kill calls are tighter

The window for stacking kills into a double, triple or multi-kill is now about one second, down from three. Three seconds was generous enough that two unrelated fights could be read as one streak.

The map vote can no longer get stuck

On the 22nd the deathmatch server opened a next-map vote and never closed it. It sat frozen for thirteen hours -- everyone who joined got the vote screen instead of the game, and votes were still being counted hours after the timer should have ended.

The vote now arms its own exit before it does anything else, a second check closes any ballot that outlives its deadline regardless, and a vote past its deadline stops accepting votes. One player who cannot be shown the ballot no longer costs everyone else theirs.

!rtv works normally again.

Zombie Plague was offline this morning

Counter-Strike updated overnight, and Zombie Plague refused to start from 01:45 until 11:20 this morning. That refusal was deliberate rather than a crash: the server keeps its own weapon table, that table is built against a specific Counter-Strike version, and the server will not launch on a table built for a different one instead of risking wrong weapon behaviour.

The table has been rebuilt against the new version and republished, and the server is back. No settings, stats, ranks or saved cash were touched -- it never got as far as starting.

The deathmatch server was unaffected and stayed up throughout; it does not carry that weapon table.

New name

The deathmatch server is now Velheim [EU] | 🗡️ CSDM + War3 | !menu !guns !sentry !lm, so the commands worth knowing are in the name.

The deathmatch server has a new menu, and it is not a list of text any more.

Point at what you want

!menu now opens a panel in the world in front of you, and you use it by looking at it. Five tabs across the top — guns, buildables, the Warcraft shop, races and language — each with its own icon, lit while you are on it. Left click picks something, right click or R closes.

Hover a row and it turns green. Click a tab and the menu locks to it, so sweeping the cursor along the rest of the strip on your way somewhere else no longer swaps the page out from under you.

Nothing you were used to has moved: the same guns, the same buildings, the same shop, the same races. If a purchase is refused, the menu stays open and tells you why, rather than dumping you back into the world with one line of chat.

Laser mines are aimed, not guessed

Buying a laser mine used to mount it wherever you happened to be looking in that instant — you found out where it went by buying one.

Now buying one arms a hologram that follows your crosshair and sits against whatever surface is under it. It is teal where the mine would be accepted and red where it would not, so you can find the edge by sweeping across it. Left click places it. Right click or R cancels.

You are not charged until the mine is actually built. A click on a bad spot refuses, costs nothing, and leaves you still aiming.

The gun list is shorter

Removed from the menu: all SMGs, the SSG 08, CZ75, P2000, FAMAS and Galil AR. Machine guns now sit on the left with the rifles and snipers.

You can see what you cannot afford

Rows in the buildables shop you do not have the money for are now greyed out, the same way the Warcraft item shop has always done it, instead of looking available until you click them.

Walking through your own buildings works again

After last night's Counter-Strike update, every building and every spawn point marker turned solid. You could not walk through your own sentry, a dispenser dropped at your feet trapped you where you stood, and respawning could put you inside a marker.

This is fixed, and fixed in a way that a future Counter-Strike update cannot undo — the server no longer asks the game to re-check a building's collision after the fact, it sets it correctly before the building exists.

Tips in chat

Two short reminders now rotate in chat every 30 seconds: where the website is, and that !menu exists. Both are in your own language.

Smaller things

• !rtv and !votemap work properly. Both commands existed and did their job, but the server did not recognise them as real commands and answered "that command does not exist" while running them anyway.
• !votemap no longer appears in !info.
• Descriptions in the menu are smaller than the item names, so a name and its price no longer read as one run-on line with the description.

Everything above is translated into all eight languages.

Your money is yours now

Cash on the deathmatch server carries over between sessions. Disconnect with $18,000 saved up and it is still there when you come back — the next map, tomorrow, next week.

New players still start with $1,000, exactly as before.

Your balance is saved every 15 seconds while you play, and once more when you leave, so the most a crash can cost you is a few seconds of earnings. Dying and respawning changes nothing: your money is only loaded once, when you first spawn after joining.

A batch of deathmatch changes is live, plus one Zombie Plague fix.

Sentries reward the investment

A sentry's range now scales with its tier instead of being flat. A fresh level 1 watches exactly as far as it always did; every tier after that adds to it, and a fully funded level 5 sees three times as far.

• Level 1 — 1,800 units
• Level 2 — 2,700
• Level 3 — 3,600
• Level 4 — 4,500
• Level 5 — 5,400

Until now a tier bought damage and nothing else, so a maxed sentry covered no more ground than one you had just dropped.

Cheap to start, expensive to finish

Building a sentry now costs $1,000, down from $3,000. The tiers above it cost $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 and $5,000, and the random element at the top of the ladder is now $6,000, up from $5,000.

You can get a turret down early and grow it into something, instead of saving up for one and losing it.

Every upgrade makes a sound now

Paying for a tier plays the upgrade cue on every building, not just sentries. Dispenser, tesla and laser mine upgrades used to complete in silence, which read as though the money had not gone through.

Flipping a tier 2 laser mine's side beams between horizontal and vertical is free rather than an upgrade, so it gets a short beep instead — it was the one USE press on the server with no feedback at all.

32 spawn points on every map

Maps now carry up to 32 spawn points per team. Some of the rotation authored as few as six a side against a 32-player server — de_overpark just gained 26 per team, de_dust2 another 17.

They are real spawn points, so the game picks between them exactly as it picks the map's own.

Grenades run out

Grenades you receive from any source are now used up when you throw them. They were effectively unlimited.

The Destructor holds steady

The Destructor no longer has shooting recoil, and taking a headshot no longer kicks your crosshair upward. Those two things were most of what held the role back.

Zombie Plague: the Infection Bomb ends its round

Throwing an Infection Bomb at the last two humans turned one and killed the other, and then the round simply never ended. The bomb was resolving its kill before its own infections had been counted, so the game looked for a winner at a moment when nobody was on either side yet. It now finishes converting before anything else happens.

Fixes

• Explosive sentries look the part now: a scorched-orange shot with a real burst where it lands, instead of the blue lightning it was borrowing.
• Reserve ammo is infinite again on deathmatch. An earlier fix switched it off server-wide to close one exploit, which was a bad trade.
• Joining no longer throws you to the main menu while Workshop content downloads. The server was cutting slower connections off after 30 seconds; it now waits for as long as the download takes.
• Spawn point markers have half the capture and tooltip radius, so you claim the one you are standing on rather than one across the room.

Grenades run out properly now

Throwing a grenade could crash your game. The fix that made grenades finite was deleting the grenade out of your hands mid-throw, which is exactly the kind of thing a CS2 client refuses to survive. That code is gone.

Grenades are still finite — they just get there the way the game already intended. Grenades were only endless because the server had infinite ammo switched on globally, and that setting cannot tell a grenade from a rifle. It is now off, and the server refills gun ammo itself instead. Nothing about your guns changes: reserve ammo is still bottomless, magazines still empty and reload as before.

Two knock-on effects worth knowing:

• Race ability grenades — Mage, Ranger, Necromancer, Shapeshifter and Tinker — are now one throw per life, refreshed when you respawn. They were never meant to be endless; this is how they have always worked on Zombie Plague.
• The Wrath and Dazzle gloves now actually deliver on their 10-second grenade. Previously the first grenade was never used up, and the supply refuses to hand you a second while you are still holding one — so it only ever gave you one, forever.

Map rotation

de_pushcircle2 has been pulled from the deathmatch rotation. Nothing was wrong with the map — it is simply not wanted in the mix.

Buildings stay on the ground, and out of each other

A player found a way to break their own sentries: jump onto a dispenser, drop a sentry mid-air, and the sentry ends up inside the dispenser. From then on it could never be upgraded — the game aims at whichever building your crosshair reaches first, and the buried one could not be reached at all. Worse, pressing the key again just bought another sentry into the same pile, until both slots were gone.

Three things changed:

• Your feet must be on the ground to place a sentry, dispenser or tesla coil. Laser mines are unaffected — they mount wherever you are aiming, which was never the problem.
• Buildings need a little room around them. A new sentry, dispenser or tesla needs about a step and a half of clearance from any other one. It only applies at the same level, so a sentry on a walkway can still sit above a dispenser on the floor below.
• Aiming at one building and pressing another's key now tells you what you are pointing at, instead of quietly building a second one at your feet.

All three messages are translated — including Latvian, since that is how the bug was reported.

A batch of CSDM changes is live.

The Destructor

Every 10 minutes the team that is behind gets one Destructor for 2 minutes: unlimited ammo, double speed, low gravity, 20,000 HP, and double damage to enemy buildings. Your Warcraft items still multiply on top of all of it. The role goes to the player on that team with the fewest sentries standing, so it lands on someone out fighting rather than someone already dug in. It ends the moment you die, and the timer is a cap rather than a promise.

Which team counts as behind is now judged on score, buildings built and spawn points held together, rather than score alone — so a team that is quietly winning the map by owning it no longer gets handed the Destructor as well.

Capturable spawn points

Maps can now carry capturable spawn points, placed by moderators. Stand next to a marker and press USE once — the capture then runs itself over 5 seconds, and the marker turns red or blue when it flips. Bring friends and it goes faster; a living enemy standing on it stalls you, so clear the point first. Walk away or die and the capture is cancelled. Whoever starts a successful capture earns $100. Once your team holds at least one point, you respawn there instead of at the map's own spawns, and the enemy can always take it back the same way. Maps with none placed behave exactly as before.

Since then: markers you have not claimed yet are white, so it is obvious what is still up for grabs, and you can spot them from further away. Each point also has a 10-second cooldown before anyone can spawn on it again, and respawning now picks at random from every spawn you are entitled to — captured points and the map's own starts alike — instead of funnelling the whole team onto one marker.

Three new sentry elements

The paid element upgrade on a max-level sentry now rolls from six elements instead of three. Alongside Fire, Freeze and Electric:

• Poison — heavy damage over time, and while it lasts a poisoned player cannot be topped up by dispensers. Ammo and armour still work; only the healing is cut off.
• Explosive — the shot bursts where it lands and catches everyone standing near whoever was hit. Your own team is never caught in it.
• Vampiric — the shot drains life. The drain damages the target and feeds the health straight back into the sentry, and once the gun is full the surplus spills into your other buildings nearby.

VIPs can reroll. Pay the element price again on a sentry that already has one and it rerolls — never into the element it already had. Everyone else keeps what they rolled the first time.

Freeze finally bites

Freeze was the only element that dealt no damage whatsoever, which meant it could never actually finish anybody off. It now deals bonus frost damage on top of the hold.

The kill feed tells the truth

An elemental sentry used to stamp its element's icon on nearly every kill it got, even when a plain bullet did the work — Freeze was the worst offender. An element icon now appears only when that element genuinely landed the killing blow: the burn, the frost, the chain, the poison, the blast or the drain. Ordinary bullets show the minigun again.

No more accidental upgrades

Placing a building from the !menu shop could immediately buy it a tier you never asked for, because the single button press that placed it was being counted a second time. Laser mines showed it worst, being the one building whose first upgrade is available instantly. A freshly placed building now ignores upgrades for one second. Every later upgrade is instant, exactly as before.

Map rotation

The rotation now runs 40 maps — 19 official and 21 community, all admitted only after their real packages were measured for working bot navigation. de_assault has been removed by request.

Warcraft items hit harder on deathmatch

Deathmatch now runs its own Warcraft item tuning, independent of the Zombie server — the same item can be worth different numbers on each, and nothing here changes Zombie Plague.

• Sock of Feathers — halves your gravity, instead of shaving a quarter off it.
• Boots of Speed — +50% speed, up from +20%.
• Mask of Death — always heals you on a hit, instead of roughly half the time.
• Gloves of Wrath and Gloves of Dazzle — a grenade every 10 seconds, down from 60. Measured from when you throw it, so you cannot stockpile them.
• Ring of Regeneration — 5 HP per second, up from 1.
• Amulet of Vitality — +100 maximum health, up from +50.
• Deathbound Bulwark — halves incoming enemy damage, up from a quarter. That already covered sentries, dispensers, laser mines and tesla coils, and now it halves them too. It heals the damage back rather than preventing it, so it will not save you from a single lethal burst.

The Amulet and dispensers now work together

They used to actively fight each other: holding the Amulet put you above a dispenser's flat cap, so a level 1 or 2 dispenser would refuse to heal you at all. Worse, anything that recalculated your stats — a slow, a stun, an ability — would quietly confiscate whatever overheal you had earned.

Both are fixed, and the tiers now stack with the Amulet:

• Level 1 dispenser — heals to 100, or 200 with the Amulet
• Level 2 — 150, or 250 with the Amulet
• Level 3 — 200, or 300 with the Amulet

Armour refill deliberately stays on the old ceiling — the Amulet raises your health, not your armour.

Warcraft fixes you will actually notice

• Armour bonuses did nothing here. Paladin's Holy Shield and Dwarf Engineer's Stone Skin printed "armor gained" and granted zero armour on deathmatch, at every level. They work now, which matters because sentry bullets go through armour normally.
• Your own buildings were setting off your class abilities. Because a turret's damage is credited to its owner, every sentry tick was treated as though you had personally landed a shot — from across the map. Sacred Warrior's Burning Spear charged its health cost ten times a second and could kill you in about two seconds; the Money Siphon Scepter drained a victim's entire balance hands-off; shotgun and sniper damage bonuses were added to every turret bullet. Buildings no longer trigger any of it.
• Dwarf Engineer's build tool is no longer confiscated by the deathmatch loadout, and no longer refilled into unlimited turrets.
• Rogue's Smokebomb could leave you permanently unkillable and unable to move until the map changed. Fixed.
• Hammerstorm's Great Cleave could chain off its own splash damage.

Balance and quality of life

• Kill announcer no longer spams. The 10-second cooldown used to apply only to Rampage, which just let the streak cues take over; it now covers every announcement except first blood, double kill, and triple kill.
• Clearing your own buildings is three times faster, and you get back a third of everything spent on it as it comes down — split between whoever actually paid for the upgrades.
• Laser mines can no longer be placed where any of their beams would cross a spawn point, including the side beams a tier 2 mine would gain later.
• Tesla coil health is now 5,000, down from 10,000. That pool is both its durability and its total repair budget, so it heals less overall too.

A second Velheim Counter-Strike 2 server is now live: CSDM + Warcraft on 152.53.113.11:27016.

Deathmatch with a buildable battlefield

• Fight continuous team deathmatch rounds with fast respawns and persistent CSDM cash.
• Build and upgrade sentry guns, Tesla coils, dispensers, and laser mines.
• Train the familiar Warcraft races on a completely separate CSDM progression ladder.

Separate progress, shared VIP

• CSDM kills, deaths, cash, experience, and Warcraft race progress have their own rankings.
• Your Velheim VIP entitlement works across both CSDM and Zombie Plague automatically.

Use the new server buttons on Rankings, player profiles, and Tutorials to switch between each server's data and guides.