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“

— The Scout Where's your precious Hippo-crates now? ”

Mann Co. Supply Crates are tool items obtainable through the item drop system. They are shown as open-style wooden shipping crates, wrapped in chains held with a large padlock. Mann Co. Supply Crates can be opened with the use of a Mann Co. Supply Crate Key. Anything unboxed using an untradable key will become tradable on the date the key is supposed to become tradable.

When a crate is opened, a model appearing similar to a Mann Co. Supply Munition will drop from the top of the screen, the sides of the box falling and fading from view to reveal an item. The player will receive one among a set of items which are listed in the crate's description and are dependent on its series. This item is announced to the server in a similar format to regular dropped items. After which, both the crate and the key are removed from the player's inventory and replaced with the uncrated item.

While Mann Co. Supply Crates are obtained through the item drop system, they do not add to the total cap of items a player can obtain each week. Furthermore, crate drops are completely independent from weapon or hat drop rates.[1] Scorched Crates and the Summer 2013 Coolers were exceptions as they were not dropped. Scorched Crates could have been the only item inside a Pile of Ash, and the Coolers could only be obtained through Summer Claim Checks.

Though the notion and concept of a crate suggests that the contents should be predetermined, Robin Walker has confirmed the mechanics are such that item drop is determined at the point of opening the crate; moreover, items are not mapped to crates and thus there is no distinction to be made between two crates of identical series.

Players located in Belgium and the Netherlands are not able to open Mann Co. Supply Crates. Attempting to open a crate in these countries will display a window preventing them from doing so.

Contents

Note: Rare item statistics assume drop rates are equal regardless of series. It is also assumed that the series of the crates are dropping in a uniform distribution.

Active series

Retired series

Seriesless crates

Crate-like items

Several items work similar to crates, with the exception that they don't require a key. They will when used show a slightly modified version of the uncrating dialog and award the player with one or more items.

Bonus drops

Added in the Jungle Inferno Update, all cases from the Gun Mettle Update forward have a chance to drop one or more bonus items in addition to the cases' normal drop.[2]

Bonus drops can be any of the following:

Crates vs. Cases

Crates and cases may appear to be fundamentally the same, but there are some very significant differences in how they operate that should be considered when deciding what to use keys on. Most crates look exactly the same with a few exceptions, while cases come in a wide variety of colors and shapes and are easy to individually identify. If there is any ambiguity, looking at the name of the item will immediately reveal whether it's a crate or a case.

Using Keys

All normal crates can be unboxed with regular Mann Co. Supply Crate Keys, purchasable directly from the Mann Co. Store in game. Meanwhile, cases each have a unique, exclusive key that can only be used on its matching case. There are exceptions, however. The Robo Community Crate and the End of the Line Community Crate require unique and exclusive keys to be opened, just like cases. Also, the Winter 2016 cosmetic case does not require a key at all; it can be freely unboxed at the owner's discretion. Thus, these cases are priced similarly to keys.

Graded Items

Note: These and subsequent percentages are based off of community testing, and may not be accurate.

After the Gun Mettle Update, cases introduced a new system of item grades, causing some items to be rarer than others. This contrasts with crates, which generally maintain the same or similar odds between all of its items. The grades from lowest to highest are: Civilian, Freelance, Mercenary, Commando, Assassin, and Elite. Each grade has its own color, and when moving up in grade, the color shifts from light blue on the bottom to red on the top. The higher the item's grade, the more rare it is. Cases that require keys only give Mercenary grade items or higher; civilian and freelance are only present on keyless war paint cases that can be freely obtained by completing contracts. The odds of getting each grade of item in a case are: 80% Mercenary, 16% Commando, 3.2% Assassin, and 0.8% Elite. The percentage for each grade is divided up between all of the items that share the same grade; for example, if there are 2 Assassin grade items, each one has a 3.2% / 2 chance of being given, or 1.6%. There is a separate 10% chance for the unboxed item to be Strange, and a separate 1% chance for the crate to contain an Unusual item.

Unboxing Unusuals

This is by far the most significant difference between crates and cases. When a crate decides to give you an Unusual, it abandons the normal list of items it can drop, and selects a random hat from the enormous list of non-graded craft hats available in the game, regardless of whether the crate normally offers hats at all. Unboxing an Unusual hat that's present in the crate's list is possible by sheer coincidence. Curiously, there were a few misc items that could be unboxed with Unusual effects, allowing people to equip more than one Unusual at a time. However, Valve eventually removed this feature, removing all Miscs from the list of items that are able to be unboxed with Unusual quality. Whether this was done intentionally is still unknown.

Cases, on the other hand, stick to the items within its list. When a case gives you an Unusual, it only goes through the hats within its own list. Most items in the list are unable to have Unusual quality since they're not hats, which means that there are generally only about 6-9 possible Unusual hats that can be unboxed from each case. For example, the Violet Vermin Case's list of items that can be Unusual consists of: Murderer's Motif, Vampire Vanquisher, Mann-o-War, Hepheistos's Handcraft, Highway Star, Tank Top, Defragmenting Hard Hat 17%, and Lucky Cat Hat.

The grade system functions exactly like before, only with fewer items for each grade. For example, the Blue Moon Case has 7 Commando grade items, but only 2 of them are hats (Starboard Crusader and Burning Question). Thus, in the event of an Unusual, the 16% chance of getting a Commando grade is divided between only those 2 items.

For cases that contain painted weapons or war paints, every single item in the case can be unboxed with Unusual quality. There are always only three possible effects: Hot, Cool, or Isotope.

Unusualifiers have caused slight confusion about how they fit into the Unusual drop rate. Since it is a bonus drop item, its odds are completely separate from the odds of getting an Unusual hat or weapon. Thus, it is possible to unbox more than one Unusual in a single case. Unusualifiers have a far higher chance of being unboxed than Unusual hats or weapons, and like all other bonus drop items, they are exclusive to cases.

There is no way to say for sure whether crates are superior to cases in terms of possible profit, or vice versa. Cases are more predictable and offer lots of extra bonuses, but tend to be more expensive. Meanwhile, since crates have such a wide variety of possible Unusuals, there is no way of knowing whether you'll get a terrible Unusual or a god tier one. And it makes no difference which crate you open, except when it comes to the different list of effects each series of crates offers, as well as the effects that are exclusive to certain crates.

War Paints

War Paint cases use the same drop rates as weapon and cosmetic cases - 80% Mercenary, 16% Commando, 3.2% Assassin, and 0.8% Elite, with a separate 10% chance of being Strange and 1% chance of having an Unusual effect. War Paints also have different grades of wear; the odds of these are: 10% Factory New, 20% Minimal Wear, 40% Field-Tested, 20% Well-Worn, and 10% Battle Scarred.

Limited Time Offers

During Scream Fortress X, all Unusuals that were unboxed from cases were guaranteed to have one of the brand new Unusual effects that were introduced in the event. However, the offer did not apply to crates, which confused people who unboxed crates during the event and ended up with standard Unusual effects. It is safe to say that future limited time offers of this kind will probably be exclusive to cases as well.

Demonstration

Unused content

An unused 'Special Crate' backpack icon exists in the game files.

Two skins for Weapons Cases are present. One lacks any distinguishing features while the other one has the TF2 Matchmaking logo. Additionally, the unused backpack item images show that the former skin would simply have a patch applied to it DIY-style for a Craftsmann Weapon Case and the latter skin is named weapons_case_04_gentlemen , suggesting it would've been used for a Gentlemanne's Weapon Case. The backpack image for the ordinary Weapon Case was later replaced with that of a Winter 2018 War Paint Case which also went unused, likely because no war paints were released in the Smissmas 2018 update.



Bugs

Attempting to open a crate while disconnecting from a server will result in the timer being set to 1,000 seconds (16 minutes and 40 seconds).

Trivia

Although Valve modeled the padlocked chain for the icon, the padlocked box can't be found in the game files; its textures, however, can be found. The crate itself uses a model that appears to be the same as models/props_hydro/barrel_crate_half.mdl . Almost inversely, the model for the Supply Munitions variation can be found in the game files, but two of the three textures aren't included.

. Prior to the Two Cities Update, crates with expiration dates (such as Festive Winter Crates and the Refreshing Summer Cooler Crate) were not actually removed from player backpacks until Team Fortress 2 was started up.

was started up. Community Crate cards and spaces are used in Monopoly: Team Fortress 2 instead of Community Chest.

Gallery

The unused 'Special Crate' backpack icon

In-game crate expiry alert

In-game announcement stating that the Summer Appetizer Crate has begun dropping

Mann Co. Supply Crate texture found in the game files

Mann Co. Supply Crate key chain texture found in the game files

The unused 'ordinary' weapons case icon

The unused Craftsmann weapon case icon

The unused Gentlemanne's weapon case icon

The unused Winter 2018 war paint case icon

References

See also



