I don't play Counter-Strike 2, but I follow this CS2 player who is dedicated to finding weird bugs and stuck bomb spots on Valve maps.

I have no interest in playing Counter-Strike 2, and yet I find myself glued to the screen whenever a user by the name of @duduckCS has something new to share. Unlike most Counter-Strike players I’ve met, who focus primarily on their rank or the rarity of their Steam inventory, Duduck spends his nights scouring Valve’s maps for holes in the world.

He’s very good at it, too: Duduck’s feed consists almost entirely of PSA-style videos showing him surprising enemies by standing on abnormal ledges, overlooks, or small geometric edges that Valve never intended for players to climb. Many of these phantom platforms can only be reached by jumping on a teammate’s head and “boosting” himself a few extra feet.

My favorite Duduck posts, though, are his compilations of bomb stuck spots. A bomb stuck spot is exactly what it sounds like: a point or angle on a map where the bomb can be dropped and cannot be retrieved. CS map boundaries are often fortified with invisible collisions to prevent this from happening, but Duduck has a knack for spotting holes in the atmosphere where the box-shaped C4 charge can be squeezed into tight corners, under wooden pallets, behind inaccessible alleys, into the strut of a modest gallery, or even stuck on an invisible platform in the sky.

Operation BOMB STUCK part 2 @AlmasJonas @iiTwinx @catfood_maps pic.twitter.com/Dwz47ZaR66July 18, 2024

I love the comedy inherent in a moment when the bomb gets stuck. You had the bomb, now you don’t have it, there’s no way to get it and your team is in trouble.

Most of these points are so obscure that you’re unlikely to see this happen organically in a match, but in the hundreds of thousands of CS2 matches played every day, I’d bet it happens more often than you think. All it takes is for a bomb carrier to fool around by throwing the C4 into the air and catching it only to accidentally kick it under a car or out of bounds. The round isn’t unwinnable at that point, but your team is suddenly under new pressure to kill the entire CT side or lose.

Operation STUCK PUMP @catfood_maps @FMPONE @QuotingDev @iiTwinx Please fix it pic.twitter.com/FvOfkvcMXZJune 26, 2024

That potential disruption to competitive integrity is likely why Valve is taking these minor map glitches seriously. Duduck told me over DMs that Valve has quietly patched several of the clipping bugs and stuck bomb spots it’s found, most recently a handful of holes in Vertigo, Nuke, Ancient, and Anubis sealed in a late-June patch. Duduck has made a habit of tagging Valve developers in his videos to raise awareness, but he told me that Valve has started reaching out to him.

“Recently, the official CS2 Twitter account also sent me a direct message asking for help reproducing a certain bug,” he told me. “However, it hasn’t been fixed yet, but I hope it will be soon.”

Counter-Strike 2 map seen through the Source 2 viewer

An example of a “cutout” (highlighted by the blue arrow) on a Counter-Strike 2 map that is fair Large enough for a player model to stand on. (Image credit: DuduckCS)

I was curious to know how Duduck, who told me he had played over 10,000 hours of Counter-Strike since 2017, conducts his geographic research. The answer was more complex than I assumed. Duduck imports maps from Counter-Strike 2 into Source 2 Viewer, a community-created tool used to analyze Source 2 assets in detail. There, Duduck can literally see where level designers have placed invisible walls and look for potential gaps or overhangs (called “cutouts”).

“You can find clipping bugs from there and test them in a private match,” Duduck said. “However, some spots or bugs can’t be found by just looking at the clippings, and it basically requires a lot of experience to know how the CS2 player model interacts with the world/clippings and how it can be exploited.”