by Conor “Anima” Kinahan follow him on Twitter @Anima_082

The crosshair. It’s more than a player’s point of aim, it’s how we interact with the world in CS:GO. Almost all key gameplay elements other than movement are functions of the crosshair. Aim, flicks, corner snapping, prefiring, headshots, wallbangs, and most importantly, defusals. The importance of a crosshair that suits the player using it cannot be stated enough. If you don’t like the crosshair, if it doesn’t work for you, then you’re simply not playing at your best. It’s a fundamental thing for many players just finding their footing to create and experiment with their own crosshairs, but it’s equally important for those at the highest levels of play to tweak and refine their own over time.

A master painter is nothing without his palette and canvas, so let’s establish a few basics about how you can go about making crosshairs if you’re just starting out. My first crosshair was created through a website called tools.dathost.net. Also recently there was a fantastic tool released through the steam workshop called crashz' Crosshair Generator v2. Some images are provided below to show you what the latter of these tools look like in action. This article won’t discuss how to use these particular tools individually, but rather cover the broader concepts that both tools take advantage of.

First thing, make sure the developer console is enabled to manually play with these values. If it’s not, you can’t continue. You can bring up the console with the tilde key ~/`  which is just left of the number one on a standard US and UK qwerty keyboard. The proper syntax for writing in the console should look like this. cl_(command) (value). Spaces are necessary, so make sure you’re typing these correctly or you won’t see any change.

The style of your crosshair determines whether or not it moves when you shoot, run, walk, or stand still. There are six types of crosshair styles in CS:GO that are available to choose from. In the console, this is written as cl_crosshairstylen where n is a number between 0 and 5.

“New” crosshairs:

Style 0 is the absolute default crosshair in CS:GO. It is a dynamic crosshair, which means it will open or expand when running, walking, anything to do with movement, as well as when you shoot your weapon. This crosshair will by default turn RED when you’ve targeted an enemy, but stay whatever color you set it to otherwise. It will also put an X in the crosshair when targeting a friendly, a cue to not fire at them.

Style 1 is identical to style 0 in every way except the crosshair is static, meaning it will not expand when you move or shoot.

Styles 2-5 are the classic crosshairs, as made famous by CS:Source and CS 1.6. These are simple in shape but vary in properties.

Style 2 dynamic and adds a “split” piece to the crosshair to illustrate inaccuracy when moving or shooting.

Style 3 is extremely dynamic, along the same vein as style 0. It will expand when you move or shoot, as well as collapse a bit when you crouch.

Style 4 is static, period. It will not move, and that’s its job. Most high level (professional) players use this style.

Style 5 is is dynamic only when shooting. This is particularly useful for those who’ve mastered movement but need to work on spray control.

So with style out of the way, let’s dig into the nitty gritty of what makes crosshairs so special. These variables can be played around with in both the online tool and the steam workshop map, so experiment a lot until you find something you like.

cl_crosshairusealpha and cl_crosshairalpha. The first command enables or disables the alpha (use 1 to enable and 0 to disable), and the second adjusts the alpha, a value from 0 to 200 or so. This “alpha” is simply the opacity, or transparency of a crosshair. If you want a crosshair with some see through attributes, this is the value to play with.

cl_crosshairthickness. This determines the thickness of the crosshair bars. The higher the value, the thicker the crosshair. From 0 for no crosshair to 100 for something silly, you can adjust this value in increments of 0.5 to fine tune your thickness.

cl_crosshairsize. This determines the “length” of the crosshairs, or rather how large the crosshair is on your screen. Set this variable to an integer value for best results.

cl_crosshairgap. This is the gap between the lines of your crosshair, and can be set from -100 to 100.

cl_crosshair_drawoutline and cl_crosshairoutlinethickness. The first command will enable the outline, (0 to disable 1 to enable) and the second command will tell the game how thick the outline should be. Outlines are always black. This can help your crosshair “pop” against brighter surfaces as well as give it definition in the darker corners of the game.

cl_crosshairdot, To enable this, type 1, to disable, type 0. This command puts a dot on the absolute dead perfect center of the screen, which can help some people with aiming.

cl_crosshaircolor For a value of 0 to 5, these are the default crosshair colors valve has provided with the game, 0-5 being red, green, yellow, blue, and cyan respectively. Bright green is the most visible color to the human eye, which is why people often choose that.

cl_crosshaircolor_C where C is either R, G, or B, representing the colors Red, Green and Blue. This is where you would manually input values in the RGB color space, from 0 to 255. (256 possible colors for 24 bit color) Higher values in each color mean more of that color. The resulting color is a mix of all three R G and B values.

Both of the tools that I’ve linked and shown above utilize some nice coding to program all of these values for you. The online tool will spit out a long string of text for you to copy and paste into your console, and the steam workshop tool will actually change it in game as you play with the values. The workshop map also has many pre-made crosshairs from different pro teams and popular streamers available to choose from and modify to your liking. The only way to see for yourself is to download it and try it.

The last thing I want to mention is that there is no “wrong” crosshair. Unlike certain techniques and skills in CS:GO, the crosshair is a thing unique to every individual player. You are the master of your crosshair, and your eyes and brain will figure out something you like and that works for you. There are some great starting points to jump off of, but that’s exactly what they are, starting points. You should never be finished with building your crosshair. Eventually you will tweak it bit by bit and refine it to a point where you’re happy, but then tweak it a few days or weeks down the road. It’s always an experimental process, which is why I find it so fun to try new things. So go out and be a crosshair artist, and experiment away! Good luck, and have fun.