A Strange Unique item is an item in TF2 that behaves like a Strange item, yet has yellow text like a unique item. The item shows up in your backpack with the standard strange counter icon in the upper right corner, and does indeed keep count.

Strange Unique items were created due to a bug introduced into TF2 with the Scream Fortress 2016 update. The nature of the bug was that any item that should have been created with Strange quality ended up being created as a Strange Unique.

The majority of items that were produced from this glitch originated from crate unboxings, but the glitch affected all items that should have been Strange, including MvM rewards. A handful of Strange Unique Australiums and Botkillers were created as a result.

It is not known exactly how long the glitch was in the game, but most estimates agree that it was patched pretty quickly. As a result, Strange Uniques are an interesting glitch that affected a wide range of items, but only a small number of each exist.

If you are interested in shopping around for a Strange Unique item for yourself, you should be aware that not all Strange Uniques exhibit the same behavior with regard to name tags.

More specifically, the following statement is true:

Any stock Strange Unique item that has had a name tag or description tag applied can never have the tag removed

So indeed, if you buy a renamed stock Strange Unique item planning to remove the name tag, think again. You can apply as many subsequent name tags as you like to change the name, but you can never remove it entirely. The same is true for description tags.

Take this renamed shotgun as an example:


If I try to restore it, I am given options to remove the festivizer and reset the strange counters, but there is no option to remove the custom name:


To reiterate, this issue only occurs for stock Strange Unique items. Any items that are not stock can have their custom names removed without a problem:

Over the past 2 years, in my search to expand my Strange Unique collection, I have been compiling my own personal store of information about them. At the time of writing this, I am not aware of any community resource that can be used to find this information.

Therefore, I have created the table below to share the relative rarity of different Strange Unique items. The table is ordered by decreasing rarity, with the most common on top and the ultra-rare 1-of-1's on the bottom.

The table provides the following numbers:

• Total? - the total number of the item that I know to exist or to have existed at some point. That last part means that even if I have an item ID whose history ends on backpack.tf (due to deletion, moved to a private backpack, etc) I am still including it in the total.
  
• Dirty? - the total number of the item that are dirty, as described in the section above.
  
• Circulating? - this number is my opinion on how many you can expect to find in circulation. I consider an item to not be circulating if it satisfies any of the following:
  
  • It is owned by an established collector who generally never sells anything they own
    
  • It is owned by someone who is VAC banned and cannot trade the item
    
  • It is owned by a marked SR scammer
    
  • It is owned by someone who has been offline for 300+ days
    
  • It is owned by someone who I have personally asked and have been told they will never sell
    
  • Its history ends on backpack.tf and I cannot conclude what happened to it

* MvM items aren't circulating and can't be dirty