Valve has quietly removed the unreleased LAR rifle from Counter-Strike 2, two days after dataminers found it. A small CS2 update on the evening of Friday 30 October (23:14 CET, 22:14 UK time) came with no patch notes and deleted 30 files, all tied to the weapon.
What was the LAR?
The LAR is a lever-action rifle, similar to a Winchester, that loads one round at a time. Its files first appeared after the 28 October update (the one that added the silent reload toggle and the Big Head mutator):
- a weapon model,
weapon_rif_lar
- textures stored in a folder literally called
do_not_ship
- a UI icon and a base inventory image
- around 20 first-person and world animations, including draw, inspect, ironsight shooting and both normal and silent reloads
Dataminers believe the LAR is a renamed version of the M14 entry spotted in the CS2 files on 23 September 2026. At that point it had preliminary stats but no model. By October the stats entry was gone and the model had arrived under the new name.
What Valve removed
According to the SteamDB file list for the 30 October build, the update removed the model, the material and four textures, the icons, the animation skeleton and every LAR animation clip. The same build changed some language files and rewrote the sound settings for all music kits.
Is the LAR cancelled?
Nobody knows yet. Valve has never announced the LAR and hasn't commented on the leak or the removal. The do_not_ship folder name already suggested it wasn't meant to reach players in its current state, so the most likely explanation is that unfinished files slipped into the 28 October build and were pulled back for internal testing.
The silent reload animations do show the rifle was built with CS2's new reload system in mind, so work on it was recent. Until Valve says something, treat the LAR as a leak, not as a weapon that is coming soon.
Would a lever-action rifle work in competitive CS2, or does it belong in a casual mode? Let us know below.
Source: https://pley.gg/cs2/lar-rifle-files-disappear-from-cs2-two-days-after-leaking/ and https://bo3.gg/articles/cs2-lar-what-is-confirmed-about-the-new-weapon-and-what-remains-a-leak
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