The FiveM map glossary

minimap.ytd

The texture dictionary holding the minimap tiles the radar draws.

GTA 5 does not store the map as one picture. It stores a grid of tiles inside texture dictionaries — minimap_0_0 through minimap_2_2 and their sea counterparts — and the radar samples whichever tiles the camera is over. Replacing the map means writing new textures into those same slots under the same names, in the same compression format, with a complete mip chain. Get the name or the format wrong and the game silently falls back to the stock art.

Installing a custom minimap →

minimap_sea.ytd

The water layer drawn under the land tiles.

The sea tiles are a separate set. They carry the ocean, the bays and the large inland water so the land tiles can be drawn with transparency over them. A replacement map that only swaps the land tiles ends up with stock-coloured water, which is the usual reason a "custom" map still looks half vanilla.

.ydd

A drawable dictionary — the geometry the minimap tiles are painted onto.

The radar is not a flat image; it is a set of meshes that the tiles are mapped onto, shipped as .ydd drawable dictionaries. A complete minimap resource carries around 65 of them. They define where each tile sits in world space, which is why the map lines up with the player position at every zoom level.

.ytd

Texture dictionary: a container holding many compressed textures under one name.

Every texture GTA 5 streams lives inside a .ytd. Each entry has a name, dimensions, a compression format such as DXT1, DXT5 or BC7, a usage flag and a mip chain. Materials reference textures by name, and the game resolves that name against the dictionaries streamed alongside the model. For a minimap this is where the map art itself lives.

DXT1 / DXT5 / BC7

Block compression formats GPUs read directly.

A GTA 5 texture is almost never a PNG. DXT1 is 4 bits per pixel with no usable alpha, DXT5 is 8 bits per pixel with smooth alpha, and BC7 is a higher quality 8-bit format. Minimap tiles use DXT5 because the land layer needs its alpha channel to sit over the sea layer. Re-encoding a tile as the wrong format is the fastest way to a black or blocky map.

Mip chain

The ladder of smaller copies of a texture the GPU uses at distance.

Each texture stores itself at full size, half size, quarter size and so on down to a single pixel. The radar picks a mip based on zoom. A tile shipped without mips looks correct at full zoom and shimmers or goes black when the player zooms out, which is a classic symptom of a hand-edited .ytd.

RSC7

The resource header on every .ydr, .ydd and .ytd file.

RSC7 is the magic value at the start of a RAGE resource. It records the version and how much system and graphics memory the file expands into. Tools have to read those sizes from the containing archive entry rather than the file body, which is why a file copied out of an archive by hand is often rejected by the game.

stream folder

The folder in a resource whose files are pushed to every client.

Anything inside a resource’s stream folder is streamed to connecting players and, if the file name matches a vanilla asset, overrides it. That single rule is the whole mechanism behind a custom minimap: put a file called minimap_0_0.ytd in stream/ and the game uses yours instead of Rockstar’s.

fxmanifest.lua

The file that tells FiveM what a resource contains.

Every resource needs one. It declares the manifest version, the game target, which scripts run on the client and the server, and which files are streamed. A minimap resource needs very little of it: a version, a game line and the stream files. A missing or malformed fxmanifest is the reason a resource shows as "could not start" in the console.

Minimap

The map image itself — the ground, the roads, the water.

Strictly, the minimap is the texture. It is what a replacement pack changes. It knows nothing about players, jobs or blips; it is the picture underneath all of them.

Radar

The whole HUD element: the frame, the mask, the blips, the health and armour arcs.

The radar is the assembly. It contains the minimap plus everything drawn over and around it. When someone says "radar replacement" they usually mean a minimap swap, but the two are different layers and a script that changes the radar shape is not changing the map art at all.

Every blip sprite id →

Blip

One icon on the radar or pause map.

A blip has a sprite id for the picture, a colour index for the tint, a scale, a label and a short-range flag. Blips are created client side and live entirely outside the map texture, which is why they survive a minimap replacement untouched.

The full blip list →

Radar mask

The shape the minimap is cut to — the rounded rectangle or circle.

The mask is its own texture. Swapping it is how servers get a circular or fully square minimap. It is separate from the map tiles, so a mask change and a map change can be shipped independently.

Pause map

The full-screen map on the Esc menu.

The pause map is drawn from the same tiles as the radar, at a different zoom and without the mask. A replacement minimap therefore changes both at once, which is usually what you want and occasionally a surprise.

Radar zoom

How much of the world fits inside the minimap.

The zoom level is data, not art. A resource can refresh it on an interval so the map keeps the range you chose even after the game resets it on a vehicle change. It costs almost nothing — a handful of calls every few seconds.

Short range blip

A blip that only draws when the player is near it.

SetBlipAsShortRange keeps an icon off the edge of the pause map and hides it at distance. Shops, garages and ATMs should be short range; mission markers and job destinations should not. Forgetting it is why some servers show a wall of icons the moment the map opens.

Postal code

A community grid of numbers drawn onto the map so players can call out a location.

Postals are not a game feature. They are numbers baked into the map texture, usually paired with a script that tells a player the nearest one. Roleplay servers lean on them because "postal 812" is faster over the radio than a street name. A minimap either ships with postals burned in or it does not.

Minimaps with postal codes →

Zone name

The district the game itself reports for a coordinate.

GTA 5 divides San Andreas into population zones, each with a short code such as ROCKF and a readable name such as Rockford Hills. GetNameOfZone turns a position into that code, which is how a HUD prints the neighbourhood under the minimap.

Every GTA 5 zone name →

Street name

The road label the HUD shows under the radar.

Street names come from the game data, not from the map picture. A minimap can also have the names drawn into the art — that is a design decision, and it is why some replacement maps read cleanly at full zoom while others turn into a wall of text.

Cayo Perico

The island added by the Cayo Perico Heist, drawn from its own map file.

The island is not part of the Los Santos minimap tiles. Replacing the main map leaves Cayo on stock Rockstar art, so a matching island has to be rendered and shipped as a second resource. Servers that use the island and skip this end up with an obvious seam in their branding.

MLO

A custom interior streamed into the world.

MLO stands for map logic object — the format used for interiors such as a custom police station or nightclub. MLOs change the world, not the minimap texture, so adding one does not alter the map art. If you want the new building to appear on the map, that is a separate edit to the tiles.

Installing an MLO →

Gang zone

A coloured area painted onto the map to mark territory.

Territory can be drawn two ways: as a radius blip created at runtime, or baked into the map texture itself. A baked zone is always there, costs nothing at runtime and matches your palette exactly. A runtime blip can change owner mid-session. Most servers want both.

Satellite map

A minimap built from aerial imagery instead of drawn shapes.

A satellite map replaces the stylised vector look with something closer to a photo. It reads as realistic and as busier; small roads and labels are harder to pick out at radar zoom. Which one is right depends on whether your players navigate by landmark or by street.

Atlas map

A flat, high-contrast map style built for legibility over realism.

Atlas styles strip the terrain shading down and lean on solid colour and clear road hierarchy. They are the easiest to read on a small radar and the easiest to brand, because a single accent colour carries the whole design.

Height arrows

The small up and down markers beside a blip.

Sprite ids 0, 1 and 2 are radar furniture rather than icons: they mark whether a target is above, level with or below the player. They are worth knowing about because they are the first three entries in every blip list and they confuse people who expect id 0 to be a picture.

CodeWalker

The community tool for exploring and editing GTA 5 world and resource files.

CodeWalker opens .ytd, .ydd and .ydr files, shows the world in 3D and can write resources back out. It is the standard way to inspect what a map resource actually contains. It is also a Windows desktop application, which is why automated pipelines drive its core library instead of the UI.

OpenIV

The older archive editor for GTA 5 game files.

OpenIV predates FiveM and reads the game archives directly. It is still the quickest way to pull an original texture out of the base game for reference. For building a FiveM resource it is largely replaced by CodeWalker and by pipelines that never touch the game install at all.

Texture conversion

Turning a PNG into a block-compressed texture the game can stream.

A finished map render is a PNG. The game needs DXT5 with mips inside a .ytd. That conversion is where quality is won or lost: a bad encoder produces banding in flat colour areas, which on a minimap is very visible because so much of the image is flat colour.

Client cache

The local copy FiveM keeps of everything a server streamed.

FiveM caches streamed files on disk. Install a new minimap and the old tiles may keep loading until that cache is cleared. Clearing it is the first thing to try when a map "did not change" — long before assuming the resource is broken.

The install guide, including cache clearing →

Resource conflict

Two resources streaming a file with the same name.

If another resource also ships minimap_0_0.ytd, one of them wins and it is not always yours. Load order decides it. The fix is to stop the other resource, not to rename yours — the name is what makes the override work.

server.cfg

The FiveM server configuration file that starts resources.

A resource does nothing until it is started. One ensure line in server.cfg does that. Ordering matters when two resources touch the same files, and the last one to start is the one whose files are used.

ESX

A long-running FiveM roleplay framework.

ESX provides jobs, money, inventories and the plumbing around them. It has no opinion at all about the minimap — a map resource is framework independent, because it replaces textures rather than calling framework code.

QBCore

The other major FiveM roleplay framework.

QBCore covers the same ground as ESX with a different structure and a large script ecosystem. Like ESX, it is irrelevant to a minimap swap: the map is streamed art, and art does not care which framework is loaded.

Standalone

A resource that needs no framework at all.

A standalone resource runs on any server. Minimaps are the clearest example — no dependency, no config, no events. That is also why they are the safest first customisation a new server owner can make.

txAdmin

The web panel bundled with the FiveM server artifacts.

txAdmin manages the server process, players, bans and deployments from a browser. It is where most owners restart a resource after dropping a new minimap in, which is faster than a full server restart.

Artifacts

A build of the FiveM server binary.

Artifacts are versioned server builds. Newer artifacts occasionally change how files are streamed or which game build is targeted, so a very old artifact is worth ruling out when a resource that works elsewhere does nothing on your server.

OneSync

The FiveM system that raises the player limit above 32.

OneSync changes how entities are synchronised across clients. It affects players, vehicles and entities — not streamed textures — so it has no bearing on a minimap, but it comes up constantly in server setup threads.

Escrow

The Cfx.re system for protecting paid resource code.

Escrowed resources ship with their Lua encrypted and can only run on the account that owns them. Map resources are usually shipped unescrowed because there is no meaningful logic to protect — the value is in the art, and the art is streamed either way.