A silent Counter-Strike 2 update on Friday night removed the lever-action rifle that dataminers found on Wednesday, along with the folder marked “do_not_ship”.
Valve pushed an update to Counter-Strike 2 at without patch notes, and the files for the unreleased LAR rifle went with it. SteamDB’s file list for the build shows 30 files removed, all of them tied to the weapon.
The LAR first turned up in Wednesday’s update, the one that brought the silent reload toggle and the Big Head mutator. We covered it then: dataminers described it as a renamed version of the earlier leaked M14, a Winchester-style rifle that reloads one bullet at a time, with its materials stored in a folder called “do_not_ship”.
What was taken out
The removed files cover every part of the weapon that had shipped to players’ clients:
- The model: `weapon_rif_lar`, its material and the four textures in the `do_not_ship` folder
- Icons: the equipment icon and the base weapon image used in the inventory
- Animations: 20 clips for the world model and the first-person view, among them draw, idle, inspect, shooting from the hip and down the ironsights, and normal and silent reloads
- The skeleton for the rifle’s animations
The same build made small changes to the game’s language files and to the music kit sound files. Valve have not commented on the LAR, and nothing in the update says whether the rifle is cancelled or simply pulled back into internal testing.
Pulled before it was meant to be seen
The folder name already suggested that the LAR was never meant to reach players with Wednesday’s update, and Friday’s build takes it back out. The silent reload animations among the removed files show that the rifle was built with the new reload system in mind.
Friday’s build was the second CS2 update in three days. Unlike Wednesday’s, it came without a news post on Steam.
