Cache Replaces Overpass in CS2's Active Duty Pool — and FACEIT Is Set to Follow

Cache officially replaces Overpass in CS2's Active Duty map pool as of July 6, the day Valve's Premier Season 4 closes and Season 5 opens. The new seven-map rotation is Dust2, Mirage, Inferno, Nuke, Ancient, Anubis, and Cache. Overpass leaves after barely a year back in the pool — at IEM Cologne it was picked just 13 times across Stage 3 and playoffs, tied with Nuke for the fewest appearances at the Major.

Cache's return closes a seven-year gap: it was the first community-made map Valve ever added to Active Duty, back in 2014's Operation Breakout, before getting cut in 2019 for Vertigo. Original creator Shawn "FMPONE" Snelling reworked the map from scratch in 2025, Valve bought the rights that May, and the rebuilt version shipped in April's CS2 update ahead of today's Premier debut. Its first tier-one test comes fast — BLAST Bounty picks it up on July 21, giving pro teams barely two weeks to build sets and utility lineups on a map that's been out of serious competition since before several current top players broke into the scene.

FACEIT already ran this exact experiment. Cache came back to FACEIT's own ladder on April 22 as an optional pick after a community vote drew nearly 149,000 votes, and demand was strong enough that the platform's servers buckled under 360,000 requests per minute on launch day. FACEIT's pool has tracked every official Active Duty swap for years now — Train for Vertigo, Overpass's earlier return, Anubis for Train — so today's change lines up with FACEIT folding Overpass out of its own ladder as it moves into its next season, even though FACEIT hasn't published its own patch notes for that yet.

I think the real tell here is how quickly Overpass got cycled back out after Valve brought it back in the first place — a map Valve itself never seemed confident belonged in the pool, cut twice in seven years. I'd also flag the practice window as the thing worth watching before BLAST Bounty: two weeks is tight for a map with a full geometry rework, and the teams that spent time on Cache during its FACEIT run in April already have a head start over anyone waiting for LAN bootcamps to catch up.