Counter-Strike 2’s movement has been in a long, public negotiation between tradition and technology. Subtick made inputs and simulation feel more exact, but it also exposed how much classic movement, especially bunnyhopping, relied on timing quirks that were never designed to be “auditable” at sub-frame granularity.
In late January 2026, Valve shipped a jump/landing overhaul that directly targets where bunnyhops actually live: the landing moment. With landing time now resolved at subtick precision and success defined around a formal timing window, the game is less about “guessing the tick” and more about hitting a measurable band around touchdown.
1) From “tick feel” to subtick landing time
On Jan 21, 22, 2026, Valve stated that landing time is now calculated with subtick precision, and that this overhaul directly changes bunnyhop timing windows. That single sentence signals a fundamental shift: instead of landing being effectively rounded to a server tick boundary, the engine can evaluate the landing event more precisely within the tick.
For bunnyhopping, this matters because the classic “window” for chaining jumps is tightly coupled to when the game believes you touched ground. If that contact point is computed more precisely, the acceptable input timing (and the feedback players feel) can change even if your muscle memory hasn’t.
It also reframes how players interpret inconsistency. What used to be written off as “tick randomness” or “server variance” can now be the engine enforcing a precise landing timestamp. The upside is determinism; the downside is that legacy timing habits may no longer align with the new, more exact definition of touchdown.
2) A new rule: bhop success is a window centered on landing
The most explicit design statement in the 2026 notes is: any jump press within sv_bhop_time_window centered on the landing time will be treated as a successful bunnyhop. Rather than leaving bhop chainability as an emergent side-effect of physics and input sampling, Valve effectively formalized the condition for success.
This is important because it moves bunnyhopping from “you must press jump at just the right time” to “you must press jump within a configurable band around landing.” The center point is the landing time (now subtick-precise), and the width is controlled by a server variable. That makes bhop behavior more legible for competitive settings and more tunable for community servers.
It also changes what “good timing” means. Instead of aligning with the next tick, optimal timing becomes aligning with the exact landing instant as measured by the subtick system. In practice, players may find that their best results come from treating the landing moment, not the rhythm of ticks, as the anchor.
3) Stamina is out; landing-time penalties are in
Another Jan 21, 22, 2026 change rewires movement feel: jumping and landing no longer affect stamina, and the landing speed penalty is now a simple function of landing time. Historically, many players described bhop “flow” in terms of an invisible stamina-like behavior: repeated jumps felt like they carried a cost, and recovery had a cadence.
By removing the prior stamina-based feel, Valve replaced a somewhat opaque model with a more event-driven one. The penalty becomes anchored to the landing event and its timing, which pairs naturally with the new landing-time-centered bhop success rule.
The practical implication is that the game is telling you: chaining jumps is primarily about landing discipline. You’re not managing a stamina bar (even an implicit one); you’re managing how your landings are evaluated and how cleanly you hit the timing window that qualifies as a successful hop.
4) The Jan 22, 23 hotfix: vertical velocity matters again
Very quickly, Valve followed with a Jan 22, 23, 2026 hotfix: landing vertical velocity now affects landing speed penalties similar to sv_legacy_jump stamina. This tweak reintroduces a familiar intuition, harder falls should punish you more, even though the system is no longer framed as stamina.
This matters for bunnyhopping routes that involve drops, ramps, or elevation changes. Under a pure “landing time” function, players worried that very different impacts might feel too similar if timing was the dominant variable. Tying penalty to vertical velocity restores a physical cause-and-effect: high-impact landings cost more speed.
SteamDB mirrors and patch-note archival confirmations dated Jan 22, 2026 corroborate that this landing-velocity penalty change was documented and preserved independently of the live notes. For movement communities, that archival trail is useful because it clarifies what changed, when it changed, and why a particular day’s bhop feel may have shifted.
5) The broader subtick timeline: 2025’s jump-spam changes and bugfixes
To understand why the 2026 overhaul landed the way it did, it helps to remember the earlier subtick-related changes. On Aug 1, 2, 2025, Valve noted that the bhopping jump spam clock now starts at the instant the input is registered, rather than the end of the subtick. That’s another example of the engine tightening definitions around precise timing.
In the same period, Valve also fixed a bug that would cause bhopping penalty to continue to accumulate even when jump had not been pressed. That bugfix matters because it addresses a common complaint during “broken” phases: players feeling punished even when they weren’t actively attempting to chain jumps.
Together, these 2025 notes show a pattern: Valve is not treating bhopping as a taboo mechanic to delete, but as a mechanic that needs well-defined inputs, clocks, and penalties under subtick. The 2026 landing overhaul is consistent with that direction, making the system explicit rather than accidental.
6) Community reactions, Valve intent, and temporary mitigations
When bunnyhopping felt unstable during earlier subtick adjustments, Valve addressed the anxiety directly. On Jul 30, 2025, a developer stated: “there’s no intent to break bhopping (at this time, or in the foreseeable future)”. That quote is often referenced because it frames later changes as attempts at consistency, not eradication.
At the same time, the community experimented with temporary workarounds when movement felt off. A widely reported console-side mitigation around Jul 30, 2025 was using sv_subtick_movement_view_angles 0 (and sometimes pairing it with fps_max 300) to approximate pre-change jumping behavior during a broken-bhop period. These were stopgaps, but they highlight how sensitive bhop feel is to timing and view-angle sampling.
The 2026 landing overhaul reduces the need for “folk remedies” by defining bhop success via sv_bhop_time_window and tying penalties to landing metrics. In other words, instead of players trying to coerce the engine into old behavior, servers can choose clear settings, or opt out entirely.
7) Server control: opt-out via sv_legacy_jump
Valve also made a key political move for the ecosystem: legacy jump behavior can be restored on private servers with sv_legacy_jump. That’s an official opt-out path for communities that want the pre-overhaul feel, particularly surf/bhop/kz servers or training environments with established expectations.
This matters because movement communities are not monolithic. Some want “official competitive” consistency; others want the quirks that make classic bhop maps and techniques feel right. Providing sv_legacy_jump acknowledges that a single global movement model might not serve every mode equally well.
It also provides a clean baseline for comparison. If players are debating whether the new subtick landing model is better or worse, server owners can run controlled tests: same map, same players, same configs, with only sv_legacy_jump toggled. That’s far more productive than guessing whether a patch “secretly changed movement.”
8) Why this fits Valve’s subtick trajectory beyond movement
The landing overhaul doesn’t exist in isolation. Valve’s Sep 17, 2025 notes mention various improvements to subtick shooting consistency, which signals ongoing iteration across core gameplay systems. When shooting and movement are both governed by subtick logic, small changes in one area can affect perceived responsiveness in the other.
For players, that means movement feel is increasingly a first-class engineering problem, not a lucky byproduct of tick alignment. The 2026 approach, subtick-precise landing time plus a defined bhop window, looks like the same philosophy applied to movement that Valve has been applying to gunplay: make the timing rules explicit, consistent, and debuggable.
As CS2 continues evolving, bunnyhopping will likely remain a litmus test for “feel.” The more Valve formalizes timing windows and penalty functions, the easier it becomes to discuss bhopping in terms of parameters and models, rather than myths about perfect ticks.
CS2’s subtick landing overhaul reshapes bunnyhopping by relocating the skill test to a precisely measured event: the landing instant. With bhop success defined as a sv_bhop_time_window centered on subtick landing time, the system becomes more consistent, more configurable, and easier to reason about than the old tick-rounded behavior.
At the same time, Valve’s quick hotfix tying penalties to landing vertical velocity shows a willingness to preserve intuitive physics and the “impact matters” feel that players associate with classic movement. Between the official opt-out (sv_legacy_jump) and a clear statement of intent not to break bhopping, the message is that bunnyhopping isn’t being deleted, it’s being re-specified for a subtick era.