User modifications
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Skins are user-created modifications that change the appearances of weapons, Hats, player models, or any part of the game. Skins are unofficial and are not supported by Valve. Some weapons, such as the Homewrecker and the Dalokohs Bar, began as skins and were later contributed into the game.
Used as cheats
While most skins are used to improve or slightly alter the visual aspects of the game, some use them to try to get an unfair advantage. These include, but are not limited to:
- Materials
- Seeing players/items through walls
- Glow-in-the-dark
- Models
- Show only hitboxes of players
- Skewed to show locations
- "Giant head" to see player locations behind obstacles
- "Bubble" around pickups
- Particles
- Attached to models to make them more visible
- Show the location of cloaked Spies
- Attached to models to make them more visible
- Sounds
- Increase volume to alert from further
- Sentry Gun beeps
- Spies decloaking
- Increase volume to alert from further
Due to their nature, these kinds of cheats are not detected by VAC, which only deals with external programs or altered game code. However, there is some protection from these for servers by setting the 'sv_pure' console variable [default 0] to 1 and creating a whitelist, or to 2 which causes all content to be default.[1]
Installing skins
Installing skins can be difficult for first time users, in that case skins for TF2 can be installed via this directory steam/steamapps/<accountname>/Team Fortress 2/tf so on and so forth depending on where you need install it (Maybe a weapon sound mod, you would most likely need to go to tf/sound/weapons)
