What Is CS In League Of Legends

Introduction

What Is CS In League Of Legends, surely we have all heard this abbreviation from seasonal players and the regulars.

Table of Contents

But What Does CS Mean In League Of Legends?

Well in this article we will cover the following topics and all things around CS that you need to know in order to succeed in your League Of Legends journey. More specifically we will cover the following topics:

What Is CS and Why Is CS Useful
What Is A Good CS Score
How Is CS Calculated And How Much Is CS Worth

So please carry on reading to get a deeper dive on the topic and have all your questions answered.

What Does CS Mean In LoL

CS is basically an abbreviation for creep score. You’d ask what is a creep in league of legends. Well a creep is basically a unit that once you kill it by last hitting it you will receive an amount of gold income that you can use later.

But lets explain a bit what we mean by last hitting, since this term is very important to understand how CS is gained in league of legends. Basically last hitting means that when the unit gets really low in health and is about to die you as a champion are the one that hits the final blow. More specifically lets say there’s a bunch of minions targeting each other and you are also hitting them as a champion. In the screen below you are Malzahar and hitting the minions, if you happen to do the final blow hit on a minion while every other minion is also hitting them on a minion you will be the one that will receive the gold. If the minion dies from a last hit from another minion you do not receive any gold.

So your timing is very important to get this right if you want to be earning a lot of gold. Last hitting takes practise and over time you will get better at it. It’s important to understand that certain champions have an easier time last hitting because they have a higher base attack damage. Typically the champions that have the higher base damage are ADCs, AD assassins and generally anyone that has attack damage in his base stats.

In contrary champions that are tanks and mages have less of a hitting blow power in the first levels and rely more on spells to deal the final blow to a minion. Since your spells and mana cost can be high at the beginning this is not ideal thus making mages and tanks harder to last hit and harder to collect more minions and increase your creep score. If you are a beginner you will want to pick a champion that has an easy time last hitting to get your creep score higher up for the reasons we will discuss in the next section.

Is CS Important In LoL

As we discussed earlier collecting minions and generally units like jungle creeps is important for the following reasons:

More gold income translates to the following advantages for you:
- Be able to buy more items
- Buy health/mana potions and other items that let you survive
Better ability to increase levels thus increasing your base stats in a battle
Get a higher ranking score at the end of the game which will favor you in getting better allies in subsequent games and go higher in elo. I wrote about all the factors in this article if you would like to read more about it: Ultimate Guide to Getting an S+ LOL
Push lanes better which applies pressure in the enemy champion
Use minions as your companion to take down objectives such as towers (the bigger the minion wave the better your pushing power)

The list above gives you a good understanding of why it’s important to CS properly in LoL but let’s talk about some objectives on what you should be shooting for as a league of legends player.

How To Improve CS In LoL

The methods that you need to learn and practise on last hitting are the following:

Under tower
While you are trading with an enemy champion
While positioning safe in lane
While you are being ganked/camped by the enemy jungler
While you are freezing or overextending (wrote an article for this which you can find here: How To Always Win Lane By Freezing In LOL)
While having or defending baron buff
In late game when you can spam spells
In early game where you have to focus with your basic ability

All the methods listed above are different forms of last hitting and you should become good at them to some extent.

What Is A Good CS In LoL

In order to better understand what a good CS score is in LoL we need to split it up in different levels of players. A new player cannot have the same experience as an advanced player in League of Legends so you can’t be expecting to have the same creep score.

But before we dive into this lets set a metric of common understanding here so we can talk in relative terms. Basically CS is typically measured in units killed per minute of the game passed. That is how many creeps (some count for more than one we will discuss later) you have collected in the span of a minute). It’s also important to note that this changes if you are not in lane and you are a jungler so in this case we will be referring to the following three positions of the game:

Mid Lane
ADC
Top Lane

We exclude support off course because it’s a role that does not farm, in fact supports get penalized if they farm in lane from certain items so it’s counter productive to be CSing in lane. Similarly because the jungle clears change a lot over time it’s easier to avoid this lane too for our metrics. We will stick with the ones mentioned earlier.

Beginner

As a beginner as we discussed earlier you should be playing an easy CS champion that has high base AD stats. Stay away from more advanced ones like mages etc as it may make you depressed having a low creep score and falling behind. Having said that a good CS score for a beginner is in the range of 3-5 CS/minute. A Beginner will typically know 2-3 of the method we listed in the earlier section that you should learn to CS.

Intermediate

As an intermediate you now have some experience in the game you’ve been playing for a while and can safely say you know how to CS. In this level you are expected to be able to do anything between 6-8CS/minute. While this isn’t impossible it’s a bit harder as you will need to master at least 4-5 methods of the ones listed earlier to get to that level.

Advanced

At this stage you are considered a pro and mistakes on CS are not forgiven. You should be in the range of 8-10CS/minute at a minimum. In reality you should aim not to lose any minions as the gold loss could be important and make an item difference later in game. If there’s a lot of fighting around them map (there shouldn’t be in this level unless you are playing in Korea) your main focus at the early levels should be perfect CS. I generally average 9cs/minute and I’m way beyond perfect in the game. Needless to say you need to master all the methods listed earlier in this article to be able to get to that level.

What Is Max CS Per Minute In LoL

Technically there’s a cap at around 12-13 creeps per minute but practically it’s impossible to maintain such a thing as you’d want to go back to base and do other things. More specifically a realistic near perfect CS is close to 10-11 CS/minute and you generally see this in the pro level of gameplay of League of Legends. While the 12-13 may be a theoretical max you should not aim to reach it as there’s more things going on the game besides creep scores and this may have a negative impact in your overall win if you over focus on farming.

How Much Gold Is CS Worth

The CS is basically dependent on what you are killing. The categories that affect this are the following:

Melee: 21 gold (1cs)
Caster: 14 gold (1cs)
Cannon: 60-90 gold (3cs)
Super: not very relevant for most of the game

I also analyze this in my article here: How to climb from Iron to Gold in league of legends

The idea that you need to keep in mind is that at various levels of the game the minions that are harder to kill are usually worth more gold thus give you more experience and also count as more CS.

How Is CS Calculated In LoL

The CS is calculated based on weights on each unit you kill. For example if you kill a jungle unit such as gromp you get more cs for it than you would get for a caster minion. Since those numbers change all the time I will not go into covering the details for it but there’s a general rule of thumb to follow.

The bigger the unit and the higher the health and resistances it has the higher of a creep score you will get for killing it. Obviously this is based on timing at the end of the day since you are taking more time to kill it than you would with lets say something simple like a caster minion. Furthermore there are some ghouls in the game such as Yorick’s, Malzahar or steady units like Heim’s rockets, Illoi’s tentacles which also count as creeps but since they are easier to kill most of the time they give you less of a creep score and gold income than other units.

Conclusion

If you found What Is CS In League Of Legends useful and you think it may have helped you please drop me a cheer below I would appreciate it.

If you have any questions, comments please post them below I check periodically and try to answer them in the priority they come in.
Also if you have any corrections please do let me know and I’ll update the article with new updates or mistakes I did.

Where is your favorite champion to CS with?

Mine is by far Malzahar. While he’s very difficult to CS with for the first three levels until he gets his abilities after that if you properly manage your mana pool (watch out for his bonus mana addition for every minion killed by his e) you should have an easy time CSing. Since he has the ghouls in his kit he’s one of the few champions of the game that you can literally press e and w and let them kill the minion wave even as early as level 10 if you have a decent item. Remember Malzahar takes a lot of practise and is not recommended for a beginner for CSing. I would suggest champions such as Zed, Yasuo, Yone, Jax (W reset), Yorick etc. if you are now starting out and want to keep a high creep score.

If you want to learn more about CS related stuff I have written a few articles below:

If you would like to find more information on the CS in LoL you can check the articles below:

https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Farming