Everything you need to know about tweaking your crosshair settings in CS:GO.
Our CS:GO Crosshair guide contains a complete walkthrough to help you easily tweak every aspect of your crosshair to suit your playstyle.
If there’s one thing you’ll learn quickly when playing CS:GO competitively, it’s the need to personalise every aspect of how it looks and feels in order to better suit your playstyle.
Changing your crosshair is one of the first things you’ll end up focusing on, especially as it forms such a critical part of this unforgiving FPS. While the default crosshair isn’t exactly awful, you can do better – much better.
In our experience, a tailor made reticule can make a world of difference to your game, as it’ll make you more confident in your shots, and begin the process of ingraining that all-important muscle memory into the way you swing the mouse across the pad.
CS:GO provides a basic method for customising your crosshair via the in-game settings, but it’s incredibly limited all things considered.
For a truly handcrafted reticule, you’ll need to turn to some brilliant third party tools and create an in-game config file. This sounds intimidating, but if you follow all the info we’ve put down below, you’ll be up and running with a brand new, highly optimised crosshair in no time at all.
What’s an auto-exec file and why do I need it?
An “auto-exec” or “config” file allows you to customise all manner of things in CS:GO. You can change the crosshair itself, tweak the minimap to perfection and even customise how much your character bobs when moving.
It’s essentially a basic file filled with a bunch of console commands which runs automatically every time you play, and it makes the game load up all your personal touches.
Setting it up can be intimidating if you’ve never been one to tamper with in-game files, but get one cooked up and it really does make a massive difference to your CS:GO experience. Plus, you can always go back to the file and tweak a few things if you ever feel like changing up aspects of the in-game HUD and more!
More popular CS:GO guides:
- 1. Guide – CS:GO – Guide 2018
- 2. Best Weapons – CS:GO – Best weapons 2018
- 3. Recoil Control – CS:GO – Recoil control guide
- 4. Crosshairs – CS:GO – How to change crosshair
- 5. AWP – CS:GO – AWP guide 2018
How to setup a config file
Getting an auto-exec is the first step to tricking out your crosshair. To help you do so, make sure you have a read of our CS:GO How to create a config file guide in another tab before continuing on with this walkthrough. Once you’ve got one created, then you’re good to move on to the steps below.
How to change your CS:GO Crosshair
We’d recommend only one tool for this particular job and it’s called “Dathost’s CS:GO Crosshair Generator Tool”. It makes the process incredibly simple, and allows you to develop and test out your crosshair to see how it looks and interacts with different surfaces.
You’ll find all kinds of crosshair customisation sliders to the right of the screen, so tweak these to your liking and see the results appear in front of you on the example slides.
Once you’ve settled on the crosshair of your dreams, take note of the “Config” box to the bottom right of the screen. From here, you’ll want to highlight everything in the box, copy it and paste it directly into your config file.
Now that it’s in your config file, you’ll be good to go!
Of course, if you head into game and find it’s still not quite right, you can always make a few tweaks directly in the config file by playing around with the variable and clicking “Save” before exiting, or by heading to Dathost’s tool and copying another fresh config over the old one.
