Team Fortress 2 Items, Metal & Trading Guide

Read This First

This is an items guide, not a leveling guide. It covers one thing — how items, metal and value are earned in Team Fortress 2 in November 2026 — and it covers it in depth. There is no Casual level route here, no Competitive rank ladder, no contract walkthrough. If you need the progression systems, that is our Team Fortress 2 Leveling Guide. Two more honest things up front: TF2 has no farmable gold currency — the economy runs on item drops, crafted metal, Mann Co. Supply Crate Keys and player trades, and this guide is built around that fact instead of pretending a gold farm exists. And trading is where TF2 players lose the most value, not to bad luck but to scams: the API scam, fake middlemen and fake price-check sites are documented, named and explained in this guide, because knowing them is worth more than any drop.

TF2’s economy is nineteen years old, and it works like a real one: there is a money supply (the weekly item drops), a mint (crafting), a reserve currency (keys), a stock market (the Steam Community Market) and a long history of fraud. The players with the most valuable backpacks are not the ones who play the most hours — they are the ones who collect their full weekly drops, smelt their duplicates instead of hoarding them, never open a crate expecting a profit, and never hand a stranger their API key. This guide walks every income lane in order of what it pays, starting with the drop system that funds everything else. If you only read three sections, read The Item Drop System, Metal Math, and The Scams — those are the three places most players leave the most value on the table, or lose it outright.

There Is No Gold to Farm

Say it plainly, because every other farming guide on this site has a currency and this one does not: Team Fortress 2 has no gold, no silver, no credits and no farmable currency of any kind. There is nothing to grind for in the way an MMO player understands grinding. What TF2 has instead is an item economy. Items drop from play, items are crafted from other items, items are traded for other items, and the whole system is denominated in two units the community invented for itself: Refined Metal for small change and Mann Co. Supply Crate Keys for large sums.

That is also why MMODude’s Team Fortress 2 game page lists Key & Item sellers only, and says so explicitly: the economy runs on item and key trading rather than a farmable gold currency, and there is no established account or boosting market for it. This guide follows the same logic. It does not invent a currency farm, it does not quote a gold-per-hour rate, and it does not pretend that playing more hours earns more money. It earns more items — up to the weekly cap — and the value of those items depends on what they are, not on how long you played.

The Item Drop System: Your Weekly Income

The item drop system is the main process of item distribution in Team Fortress 2, and it has worked the same way since the current version was introduced on April 20, 2010. You receive a random item at regular intervals while you play, until a weekly playtime cap is reached. The numbers, as published by the TF2 Wiki:

Three consequences follow. First, there is no point grinding past the cap: playing beyond it yields no additional items, and the hours are wasted for income purposes. Second, skipping a week is not punished: unused time carries over, so a player who does not play for one week receives roughly twice as many items the following week, up to the two-week maximum. Third, crates do not cost you drops: Mann Co. Supply Crates and other usable items run on their own timer, so a crate drop does not eat a weapon drop.

The drop cap is 10 hours or 11 hours depending on which passage of the TF2 Wiki you read. One passage states the cap as “estimated to be 10 hours each week”; another gives the 7–12 items-per-week estimate as “within the allotted base of 11 hours per week.” The cap is community-estimated in either case — Valve has never published it — so this guide quotes both figures and treats the cap as approximately 10–11 hours. Do not plan your week around the difference of one hour; plan it around the fact that the cap exists, it resets on Thursday, and unused time carries over.

One more mechanical detail: dropped items are stored in your backpack after your death, after a trade is completed, after a purchase at the Mann Co. Store, or after winning ten duels — and visiting the Mann Co. Store or disconnecting will usually restore them. If a drop seems to be missing, check the store or reconnect before assuming it is lost.

Free Accounts vs Premium: The Drop Gap

The single most valuable purchase a new TF2 player can make is also the cheapest: any purchase from the Mann Co. Store upgrades a free account to Premium, and Premium changes the drop system completely. Under the free-to-play system introduced in the Über Update, free players receive only limited item drops — with no rare or cosmetic items — until they upgrade. Premium players get the full item drop system.

The practical meaning is that a free account’s weekly drops are worth a fraction of a Premium account’s, because the rare and cosmetic items are where the value lives. A free player grinding ten hours a week is earning the capped quantity of the lowest-value drops. The cheapest Mann Co. Store purchase — a single key, a single ticket, anything — removes that limit permanently. There is no subscription, no recurring fee, and no reason to stay free once you know the difference. Buy one thing, once, and the drop system opens up.

Crafting: Turning Duplicates into Metal

Crafting is the mint of the TF2 economy: it converts the duplicate weapons the drop system hands you into metal, and metal into more metal, until you have the currency other players accept. The core recipe is smelting: two weapons of the same class smelt into one Scrap Metal. That is the first step of every metal stack in the game, and it is the reason duplicate drops are not trash — they are 0.11 ref each, waiting to be smelted.

Beyond smelting, crafting covers the full range of the game’s items: combining weapons into new weapons, crafting class tokens and slot tokens, and — for the patient — crafting hats from metal. The hat recipes are the famous money sink: three Refined Metal plus a class token crafts a random hat for that class, and the result is random, which means the expected value is almost always worse than buying the hat you want directly. Crafting is a tool for converting duplicates into currency, not a lottery to play with your savings. The lottery already exists, and it is called a crate.

Metal Math: Scrap, Reclaimed & Refined

TF2’s metal economy runs on a fixed exchange rate that every trader knows, and learning it is the price of admission to trading. Three Scrap Metal craft into one Reclaimed Metal. Three Reclaimed Metal craft into one Refined Metal. In trade shorthand, prices are quoted in Refined: 0.11 ref is one Scrap, 0.33 ref is one Reclaimed, 1 ref is one Refined. A weapon is worth roughly half a Scrap in trade — two weapons smelt into one Scrap, so one weapon is 0.05 ref — and the whole small-change economy of TF2 is built on those fractions.

Two warnings about metal. First, Refined Metal is not money: it is a crafting material the community uses as small change, and its dollar value is whatever a key is worth divided by the current key-to-metal exchange rate — a rate that moves. Never quote a “metal price” as a dollar price without the key conversion and a date. Second, do not craft Refined Metal from weapons you could sell: if a weapon is worth more than 0.05 ref to a buyer, selling it beats smelting it. The smelter is for true duplicates, not for everything in your backpack.

Crates, Cases & Keys

Mann Co. Supply Crates drop on their own timer — they do not count against your weekly drop cap — and they are the game’s lottery tickets. A crate on its own is worth almost nothing. A crate plus a Mann Co. Supply Crate Key is a spin: the key opens the crate, and the crate pays out a weapon, a cosmetic, or — rarely — an Unusual. Keys are the large denomination of the trading economy precisely because they are the thing everyone needs to open crates, and their price is the anchor for the whole market.

Key prices move, so this guide gives you the anchors with dates instead of a single number. The TF2 Wiki’s long-standing trading note puts keys at “around 2 dollars” in player trading. Skinport listings in late October and early November 2026 show a median of €1.56–€1.61 against a reference price of €1.82–€1.90. The Mann Co. Store sells keys directly, and third-party marketplaces list them — but the price you should use is the live one, checked on the day you trade, not the one in this guide. A key’s price last month is not its price today.

The economics of opening crates are brutal and worth stating plainly: opening a crate almost always returns less than the key cost. The expected value of a crate opening is negative by design — the rare Unusual pays for the thousands of ordinary openings that do not. If you want a specific cosmetic, buy it directly. If you want to gamble, open crates knowing it is gambling, with money you can afford to lose, and never with metal you need for something else.

Unusuals: The Lottery Tier

Unusual items are the top tier of TF2 cosmetics: a hat or weapon with a particle effect — a burning flame, a swirling galaxy, a storm cloud — visible to everyone in the game. They do not drop from the item drop system. They come from unboxing crates and cases with keys, and from specific event cases: cosmetic and taunt cases opened during the Halloween event, for example, can roll Halloween Unusual effects instead of their normal effects, while crates are excluded. Scream Fortress XVIII’s Haunted Hoard Case added 21 new Unusual effects to that pool.

No published drop rate exists for Unusuals in any source this guide could verify, so none is quoted here. What is certain is the structure: the Unusual is the rare outcome that makes the crate economy work, the effect and the hat together decide the price, and the price range runs from a few keys to hundreds — with the very rarest, like the Golden Frying Pan from Mann Up tours, effectively priceless. The discipline for Unusuals is the same as for crates: do not chase them with money you need, do not buy a crate expecting one, and if you unbox one, price-check it properly before you trade it away. The scam section of this guide exists largely because of Unusuals — they are the items scammers want most.

Mann Up: The Paid Loot Run

Mann vs. Machine is the one place in TF2 where you pay real money for a chance at loot, and it is the most honest gamble in the game because the terms are published. Boot Camp is free and gives no loot. Mann Up needs a Tour of Duty Ticket per mission, and the ticket is consumed only when you complete the mission — fail, and you keep the ticket. The Steam Community MvM guide quotes the ticket at €0.90; no current USD store price was verified for this guide, so none is quoted.

Finishing a Mann Up mission awards a unique item or a robot-themed cosmetic. Finishing a full tour awards more: Botkiller weapons always drop on tour completion (except on Two Cities), Killstreak Kits and Fabricators on Two Cities, and a chance at Australium weapons — gold-plated, extremely rare — on Advanced or Expert tours, with the Golden Frying Pan as the rarest tour drop of all. The tours: Operation Oil Spill (6 missions, Intermediate, Rust or rare Blood Botkiller), Operation Steel Trap (6 missions, Advanced, Silver or rare Gold Botkiller), Operation Mecha Engine (3 missions, Advanced, Engineer Botkillers), Operation Gear Grinder (3 missions, Expert, Carbonado or rare Diamond Botkiller).

The expected-value math is unfavorable by design — a tour costs one ticket per mission, and most tours return a Botkiller worth less than the tickets. Players run Mann Up for the Australium chance, not for the guaranteed return, and the guide is honest about that: if you want a Botkiller, buy one; if you want to gamble on an Australium, run the tour knowing the odds are long and the ticket cost is real.

The Steam Community Market

The Steam Community Market is Valve’s built-in exchange for buying and selling TF2 items for Steam Wallet funds, and it is the safest way to convert items into value — with one cost and one catch. The cost is the fee: 15% of every sale, split as 10% to the game publisher (Valve) and 5% to Steam. List an item for $1.00 and you receive $0.85 in Wallet credit. The catch is that Market funds cannot be cashed out: Wallet credit spends on Steam, and only on Steam. Market purchases are final, and Steam Support cannot reverse them.

The fee changes the math of every trade. A flip that looks profitable at a 10% margin is a loss after the 15% fee. A sale that clears the fee is a sale worth making. And the Market’s prices are the closest thing TF2 has to a public price list — which is why price-checkers start there, even when they end up trading elsewhere. The Market also has its own access rules: Steam Guard must be active, and Market access after a first purchase takes 7 days. Check the current Steam Support pages before you rely on any of these timings, because Valve changes them.

Trading & Trade Holds

Steam trading runs through trade offers between players, and the system that protects those trades is the trade hold. The current rule, per Steam Support’s Trade and Market Holds FAQ (Valve’s timestamp May 1, 2025, as read October 30, 2026): when the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator has protected your account for less than 7 days, outgoing items are held for up to 15 days. Once the authenticator has been on for 7 days, trades go through instantly. The hold exists so that if someone breaks into your account, you have time to notice, change your password and cancel the pending trades before the items are gone.

Two consequences are worth memorizing. First, cancelling a held trade triggers a 7-day trading cooldown — Steam assumes you stopped a hijacker, and the cooldown is the price of the rescue. Do not cancel a held trade casually. Second, Steam Support cannot lift holds, cooldowns or any other trading restriction, whatever caused it. There is no ticket, no appeal, no exception. Turn on the Mobile Authenticator, wait the 7 days, confirm every trade on your phone, and the holds stop.

Older rules still circulate in the TF2 Wiki’s Trading article and are worth knowing as legacy text: Steam Guard must be on for 15 days before trading at all; changing your password or email locks trading for 5 days; items bought from the Mann Co. Store become tradable after 7 days. The current Mobile Authenticator rule is the one that governs your trades today — but if you change your password or email, expect the 5-day lock, and if you buy from the store, expect the 7-day wait before that item can be traded.

The Scams That Cost Traders Their Inventories

TF2 trading has more documented scams than any other economy on this site, and the reason is simple: items are worth real money, trades are irreversible, and a new trader is a profitable target. Every scam below is sourced from the Steam Community’s scam guide and the trading-etiquette discussions, and every one of them is still active. Learn them before your first trade, not after your first loss.

The defences are short and absolute. Turn on the Mobile Authenticator and confirm every trade on your phone. Trade only through Steam’s official Trade Offer system. Never log in to a trading site through a link someone sent you — type the address yourself or do not go. Never hand over a Steam API key, and check your API key page regularly: if a key exists that you did not create, delete it. Never send an empty trade offer — experienced traders add a cheap item on the other side, because most API bots will not have that item and cannot substitute the offer. And if a trade is cancelled and re-sent, stop: that is the API scam happening in front of you.

One more protection that costs nothing: a held trade you did not make is the sign Steam Support itself describes of a broken-into account. If you see one, change your password and cancel it — that is the one cancellation worth the 7-day cooldown, because the alternative is losing the items.

Price-Checking Without Getting Scammed

Every item in TF2 has a price, and every price moves. The safe way to check one is to use sources you reached yourself: the Steam Community Market for the public sale price, the TF2 Wiki for what the item is, and the trading communities’ price lists for the current trade value in keys and metal. The unsafe way is to use a site someone sent you a link to — which is how the fake price-check scam works. The rule is the same as for trading sites generally: type the address yourself, or do not go.

When you check a price, check three things. The Market price — what it sells for, minus the 15% fee, which is what you actually receive. The trade price — what it trades for in keys and metal, which is usually lower than the Market price because there is no fee. The spread — the gap between the buy price and the sell price, which is where flippers lose money. An item with a wide spread is an item you cannot flip profitably, however good the headline price looks. And remember that key prices move: a price quoted in keys last month is a price quoted in a different currency today, so convert with the current key price, not the one in this guide.

Building Backpack Value

Backpack value in TF2 is built the slow way, and the slow way is the only way that works. Collect your full weekly drops every week — up to the ~10–11 hour cap, resetting Thursdays, with unused time carrying over to a maximum of two weeks. Smelt your duplicate weapons into Scrap, and your Scrap into Reclaimed, and your Reclaimed into Refined. Sell the trade goods and keep the metal. Buy the items you want directly instead of opening crates for them. Run Mann Up only when you can afford the tickets as entertainment, not as investment. And hold your keys: keys are the reserve currency, and a backpack measured in keys is a backpack that keeps its value when metal prices move.

The mistakes that destroy backpack value are all in the traps section below, but the single biggest one is impatience: opening crates for a specific item, crafting hats hoping for a good random roll, and selling a good drop in a hurry to the first buyer. TF2’s economy rewards the patient trader and taxes the impatient one at 15% a time. Be the patient one.

Patience also means knowing when not to trade. An item you use every day is worth more in your loadout than in your backpack, and a Strange weapon with a kill count you built yourself is worth more to you than the metal it would fetch. The backpack is not a bank account to be maximized at all costs — it is the record of how you play, and the best backpacks belong to players who kept the items that mattered to them and traded the surplus. Trade the duplicates, keep the favorites, hold the keys, and let the weekly drops do the slow work they were designed to do.

Trading Up: From Scrap to Keys

The classic TF2 trade-up path is the slowest honest way to build value in the game, and it is the path every long-term trader has walked. It starts with the weekly drops: duplicate weapons smelted into Scrap, Scrap crafted into Reclaimed, Reclaimed into Refined. It continues with Refined traded for the items other players want — a hat here, a Strange weapon there — and those items traded onward, each trade a small step up in value. And it ends, for the patient, in keys: the reserve currency, the large denomination, the unit in which the whole market is priced.

The path works because each step is small and each step is safe. A Scrap is worth 0.11 ref. A Refined is worth 1 ref. A key is worth whatever the market says it is worth today, and the number of Refined a key costs is the exchange rate every trader watches. The trade-up is not fast — it takes weeks of drops and dozens of small trades to go from Scrap to a key — but it is real, and it is the only path in TF2 that turns play time into market value without spending real money. The players who get rich fast in TF2 are the ones who get scammed; the players who get rich slowly are the ones who traded up.

Two rules govern the trade-up. First, never trade down in a hurry: selling a good item for quick metal is the trade-up run backwards, and it is how backpacks shrink. Second, keep a reserve: hold your keys and your best items, trade the surplus, and never put your whole backpack into a single deal. The trade-up is a marathon, and the traders who finish it are the ones who never had to start over.

Strange Items & Killstreaks

Beyond ordinary weapons and cosmetics, TF2 has two item systems that carry their own value: Strange items and Killstreak kits. A Strange weapon counts your kills — the number is on the item, it rises as you play, and other players can see it. Botkiller weapons, the guaranteed reward for completing a Mann Up tour (except Two Cities), are Strange by nature, which is part of why they hold value: a Botkiller is not just a weapon, it is a weapon with a kill counter and a robot head on it. Strange items exist for most weapons, and the count is the point: a Strange weapon with ten thousand kills is worth more than the same weapon with ten, because the number is the record of the player who carried it.

Killstreak kits are the other system. A Killstreak Kit applied to a weapon makes it track your current killstreak in-game; Specialized and Professional kits add cosmetic effects — a colored sheen, an eye effect — that appear as the streak grows. Killstreak Kits and Fabricators are Two Cities tour rewards: Killstreak Kits always drop on Two Cities tour completion, Specialized Killstreak Kit Fabricators always drop, and Professional Killstreak Kit Fabricators sometimes drop. The Fabricators are themselves an economy: they require specific items to complete, and the completed kit is worth more than the sum of its parts if the weapon is one players want. The discipline is the same as everywhere else in this guide: buy the kit for the weapon you actually use, do not gamble on Fabricators for weapons nobody wants, and remember that a killstreak is a record of a good game, not a source of income.

War Paints & Decorated Weapons

Decorated weapons are TF2’s skins: a weapon with a paint pattern, a grade and a wear level, introduced with the Gun Mettle Update. The grades mirror the Casual ladder — Civilian, Freelance, Mercenary, Commando, Assassin, Elite — and the wear levels run Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn and Battle Scarred. Grade and wear together decide the price: a Factory New Elite weapon is worth far more than a Battle Scarred Civilian one, even if the pattern is the same.

War Paints are the later evolution of the same idea: a paint item you apply to a weapon of your choice, instead of a pre-painted weapon you have to accept. War Paints made decorated weapons a market rather than a lottery, because the buyer chooses the weapon and the paint separately. The contract connection is direct: Gun Mettle contracts awarded decorated weapons from the Teufort, Craftsmann, Concealed Killer and Quarantined collections, and the cases opened with Gun Mettle Keys carried the rest. For the farming player, the rule is the same as for crates: buy the decorated weapon or the War Paint you want, at the grade and wear you can afford, rather than gambling on a case to produce it. The case is the lottery. The Market is the shop.

Event Cases & Collections

Beyond the standard Mann Co. Supply Crates, TF2 runs event cases tied to its seasonal updates, and they work differently enough to matter. The Halloween cases are the example: cosmetic and taunt cases opened during the event can roll Halloween Unusual effects instead of their normal effects, while crates are excluded. Scream Fortress XVIII’s Haunted Hoard Case added 23 community cosmetics, 5 new taunts and 21 new Unusual effects to that pool, and the event ran from October 1 through November 7, 2026.

The economics of event cases follow the same rule as ordinary crates — the expected value of an opening is negative, and buying the item you want directly is cheaper — with one difference: the window. Event cases and their Unusual effects are available only during the event, which means the supply of event Unusuals stops growing the moment the event ends. Season-exclusive cosmetics often gain value after the season, because no new supply appears while demand continues. That does not make opening event cases profitable — the expected value is still negative — but it does make holding an event Unusual a different proposition from holding an ordinary one. If you unbox a Halloween Unusual during the event, the patient play is to hold it past the event’s end and let the closed supply do its work, rather than selling into the flood of identical openings happening during the event itself.

Collections matter too. Gun Mettle’s contract rewards came from named collections — Teufort, Craftsmann, Concealed Killer, Quarantined — and later campaigns and cases added their own. A decorated weapon’s collection is part of its identity, and some collections are more sought-after than others, which is one more reason to price-check before you trade. The collection, the grade, the wear and the pattern together decide the price; a seller who knows only one of the four is a seller who will be underpaid.

The Daily & Weekly Loop

The TF2 income loop is weekly, not daily, because the drop system is weekly. Play your ~10–11 hours of drop-eligible time before the Thursday reset, accept each drop as it comes, and do not grind past the cap — the hours past it earn nothing. Smelt duplicates at the end of the week, list the trade goods, and check your active contracts (covered in the leveling guide) so your play time earns contract progress at the same time as drops. If a seasonal event is live — Scream Fortress in October, Smissmas in December — work the seasonal contracts first, because the window closes and the rewards do not come back until next year.

Monthly, check the key price and the metal rate, because both move, and re-price anything you have listed. Check your Steam API key page for keys you did not create. And check the patch notes: TF2 still receives updates, and an update that adds a case, a contract set or a balance change can move the price of the items it touches within hours.

Trading Traps

• Opening crates expecting a profit. The expected value of a crate opening is negative by design. Buy the item you want directly.
• Crafting hats for a random roll. Three Refined plus a class token buys a random hat. The hat you want costs less bought directly.
• Quoting metal as dollars. Refined Metal is a crafting material, not money. Its dollar value is the key price divided by the current exchange rate, on the day you trade.
• Trading without the Mobile Authenticator. Without it, your trades sit on hold for up to 15 days, and a hijacker has the same window.
• Cancelling a held trade casually. It triggers a 7-day trading cooldown Steam Support cannot lift. Only cancel a trade you did not make.
• Price-checking on a linked site. A site someone sent you is the fake price-check scam. Type addresses yourself.
• Handing over an API key. A phished API key lets scammers cancel your real trades and substitute their own. Check your API key page regularly.
• Trusting a middleman you did not verify. Any middleman in a trade you did not independently check is the scammer’s alt.
• Believing in item verification. Valve does not verify items. No admin will ever inspect your item. The request is the scam.
• Grinding past the drop cap. Playing beyond ~10–11 hours a week earns no additional drops. The hours are wasted for income.

A Word on Buying Keys & Items

TF2 keys and items are bought and sold on third-party marketplaces every day, and buying them is not against Valve’s rules the way buying gold is in other games — but the scam risk is the risk this whole guide is about. MMODude’s Team Fortress 2 game page lists ten reviewed Key & Item sellers, led by Skinport at 4.7/5, for readers who want to compare them. The safe default is the official Steam path: trade offers with the Mobile Authenticator, and the Steam Community Market with its 15% fee and no cash-out. Whichever path you take, start small, pay through the seller’s own checkout, and never log in through a link someone sent you.

Patch State (as of November 9, 2026)

Newest live patch: October 29, 2026 — a small update fixing Scream Fortress XVIII issues, including a pumpkin-disguise capping bug and a persisting Reveal outline. Scream Fortress XVIII launched October 1, 2026 — five new community maps, the Haunted Hoard Case (23 cosmetics, 5 taunts, 21 new Unusual effects), reset Halloween Contracts, a Soul Gargoyle for every player — and the event ran through November 7, 2026. A May 2026 update added name-change limits and vote-kick grace periods aimed at the bot problem, and a November 2, 2026 report describes bots returning with a slot-clogging tactic in Casual matchmaking. Key prices at research time: Skinport median €1.56–€1.61 against a reference price of €1.82–€1.90 (late October / early November 2026). Check live prices before trading.

Related pages:

Leveling Time Planner Team Fortress 2 Team Fortress 2 Leveling Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

Every fact in this guide carries its source. Drop, crafting, trading and MvM mechanics come from the official TF2 Wiki (Item drop system, Trading, Mann vs. Machine, Tour of Duty Ticket, Boot Camp); hold and Market rules come from Steam Support via the SenseOS trading guide and the Steam Market fee explainer; scams come from the Steam Community scam guide; key prices come from Skinport listings dated October–November 2026; the patch state comes from Steam News and MMODude’s own Team Fortress 2 game page. Where sources disagree — the drop cap, the key price — this guide carries the conflict instead of settling it. Last checked November 9, 2026.

• TF2 Wiki: Item drop system (30–70 minute intervals, ~10h/week cap, Thursday GMT reset, carryover to 2 weeks, crates on separate timer, free-account limits)
• TF2 Wiki: Trading (metal denominations 0.11/0.33/1 ref, keys around $2, 15-day hold, 7-day store wait)
• SenseOS: TF2 Trading Explained (Steam Support hold rules as of Oct 30, 2026: 15-day hold, 7-day cooldown on cancel, Support cannot lift restrictions; Market funds cannot be cashed out)
• Steam Community: How to detect all TF2 item-related scams (API scam, fake middlemen, fake price-check sites, impersonation, “Valve doesn’t verify items”)
• Steam Community: The TF2 trading etiquette (15-day hold, mobile authenticator, scammer tactics, ref/keys currencies)
• TF2 Wiki: Tour of Duty Ticket (ticket consumed only on success; Botkiller always on tour completion except Two Cities; Australium Advanced/Expert only)
• TF2 Wiki: Mann vs. Machine (Boot Camp vs Mann Up, five difficulties, Golden Frying Pan)
• TF2 Wiki: Boot Camp (free, functionally identical, no loot; five difficulties)
• Skinport: Mann Co. Supply Crate Key (median €1.56, reference €1.90, November 2026)
• Cyber-sport.io: Steam Community Market Explained (15% total fee — 10% game, 5% Steam; $1.00 sale returns $0.85)
• Steam News: Team Fortress 2 Update Released (Oct 29, 2026)
• ixbt.games: Bots have returned to Team Fortress 2 (Nov 2, 2026 — slot-clogging tactic, community servers safe)
• MMODude: Team Fortress 2 game page (Scream Fortress XVIII Oct 1–Nov 7, 2026; Key & Item sellers only — no currency market)