Battle-Scarred, shortened to BS, is the bottom of the five CS2 wear tiers. A skin is Battle-Scarred when its float falls between 0.45 and 1.00. The range covers more than half the float scale, so it holds a wide spread of looks. A copy at 0.46 is close to Well-Worn, while a copy at 0.99 may be worn back to almost bare metal.
Battle-Scarred copies are usually the cheapest version of a skin. For players who want a design without the price, Battle-Scarred is the way in, and some finishes such as dark or metallic ones hide wear well enough that the tier still looks fine in a match.
Why are some Battle-Scarred skins worth a lot?
High-float collecting. Just as low floats near 0.00 attract buyers, floats near 1.00 attract a smaller group who collect the most worn copies in existence. A skin with a float of 0.999 can sell far above a normal Battle-Scarred copy. Some skins also have a maximum float below 1.00, so the highest possible float for that finish becomes a rarity of its own.
Battle-Scarred versions of expensive items like knives and gloves can still cost a lot because the base item is expensive. A Battle-Scarred Karambit is cheaper than a Factory New one, but it is still a Karambit.
Do Battle-Scarred inputs ruin a trade-up?
Not always. The output float is the average of normalized input floats mapped onto the output skin's range. If the output skin has a low float cap, even Battle-Scarred inputs can produce a Field-Tested or Well-Worn result. For skins that span the full 0 to 1 range, Battle-Scarred inputs return a Battle-Scarred output. Traders who hunt very high float outputs sometimes do the reverse and feed in the highest floats they can find.