How to use the FiveM minimap editor

#What the studio actually is

It is a minimap maker rather than a filter. Every layer you place is composited into the real 6144 × 9216 map at full resolution by the same renderer that produced the 36 catalogue maps, and the output is a texture set the game loads — not an overlay drawn on top of the HUD by a script. That distinction matters: a script-drawn logo can be disabled, blocked or broken by another resource, and it costs a draw call every frame. A logo baked into the map is simply part of the map.

The editor runs against the live tiles, so what you position is what gets rendered. You are not aligning against a placeholder image and hoping.

• Runs in the browser — nothing to install, no image editor needed.
• Works on the real map, at real coordinates, not on a scaled mockup.
• Exports a drop-in FiveM resource with fxmanifest.lua, client.lua and the stream folder.
• Framework independent: QBCore, QBox, ESX, vRP and standalone all take it unchanged.

#Step 1 — pick the base map style

The first screen is the base map: with postal codes, without postal codes, or Google style. This is the one decision that cannot be undone later by a slider, because the numbers and street names are printed into the artwork itself.

#Step 2 — pick the palette

Twelve palettes, from near-black through the six colour themes to the two topographic ones. Hovering a card swaps the city crop for the whole island so you can judge the water and the coastline, not just the streets.

Pick for contrast against your blips rather than for your brand colour. A red map with red blips is the classic mistake — the brand colour belongs on your logo, and the map belongs underneath it.

#Step 3 — the editor, tool by tool

The left rail is the toolbar. Each entry shows its name and its keyboard shortcut, and hovering one flies out a description. The first eight are the tools; the last three open panels.

#Text layers: what you can actually do

A text layer is not a caption box. Seven fonts are available — Pricedown (the GTA face), Anton, Bebas Neue, Oswald, Teko, Archivo and Big Shoulders — and each layer carries a full set of typographic and effect controls, all included in the $1.

• Curve the baseline into an arc, in either direction.
• Tilt and skew, stretch on X and Y independently.
• Gradient fill with your own two colours and an angle.
• Outline, drop shadow and an outer glow, each with its own colour and strength.
• A plate behind the text — colour, padding and corner radius — for when the map underneath is busy.
• Uppercase, letter spacing and line height, so a server name can be set like a zone label rather than a caption.

#Logo layers and the burn-in

Upload a PNG, JPG or WebP up to 20 MB; a design can hold up to 24 images. Every upload is checked by its actual bytes rather than its declared type and re-encoded server-side, so a renamed file is not a way in.

Once placed, an image layer has the usual transforms — free stretch, skew, flip on either axis, corner rounding, a drop shadow — plus brightness, contrast, saturation and a greyscale switch, so a logo made for a white website can be brought down to something that sits on a dark map.

#Drawing: zones, routes and repairs

The four drawing tools are what turn a bought map into a server map, and they cost nothing. Brush and line are for routes, borders and callouts. Zone traces an area and fills it, which is how gang territories, safe zones and red zones get onto a map without a script.

Erase is the odd one out and the most useful of the four: paint over something and the compositor rebuilds the map from what surrounds it. Three modes — smooth, texture and mirror — decide whether the patch is blurred in, given back the grain of its surroundings, or mirrored from the other side. That is how a landmark that no longer exists on your server disappears, seam and all.

#The Look panel and the postal grid

Look restyles the base map itself rather than your layers: hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, blur, sepia, greyscale, invert, a tint colour, a vignette and film grain — eleven controls, plus eight presets to start from. The presets are Noir, Night ops, Wasteland, Vintage, Winter, Toxic, Inferno and Cyber.

The postal panel drops the entire postal grid onto whichever base you chose, including the two that do not have it printed. You set the colour, the opacity and whether the numbers get a halo; the positions come from the map itself, so they are exactly where a player expects them. It costs nothing.

#Layers, and the Minimap divider

The layer list is on the right. Drag to reorder, send forward or back, duplicate, hide, lock or delete. Selecting a layer fills the properties panel below it with everything that layer can do.

One row in that list is pinned and cannot be moved: Minimap. It marks the map itself. Anything above it is drawn on the map; anything dragged below it is drawn behind the map, with the map composited over the top at whatever opacity and blend mode you set in the Base map panel. That is how a full-bleed background image or a coloured wash under the whole island is done.

#The export frame and the Cayo Perico canvas

A dashed frame marks the export area: 6144 × 9216, the exact pixels that end up in the resource. Anything crossing it is flagged with a warning strip naming the layers that will be clipped, so nothing is silently cut off at build time.

If you tick the Cayo Perico add-on, a second canvas appears next to it, with a Los Santos / Cayo Perico switch in the top bar. The island has its own export frame at 1991 × 1995 and its own layer list, and everything the editor can do on the mainland it can do there — your logo, your labels, your zones, on the island, baked into the island file at full resolution after payment.

#The free preview, and what the price is made of

The bar along the bottom always shows what the design currently costs, itemised: the map, the number of text layers, the number of images, how many drawn layers are included free, any element package that has kicked in automatically, and the Cayo add-on if it is on.

Free preview renders the whole map for real — the full composite, at full resolution, downsampled to a watermarked image. It is not a mockup of the editor view: if something is going to be wrong in the finished resource, it is wrong in the preview too. Use it before you pay.

#From design to a running server

Add to cart saves the design to your account and puts it in the basket. After payment the compositor builds the real resource on our machine — that takes a couple of minutes for a full-resolution map — and the archive appears in your dashboard. Saved designs stay there, so a map can be reopened and re-edited later rather than rebuilt from nothing.

1. 01 Add to cart

   The design is saved against your account with everything on it.

2. 02 Pay

   Card through Stripe. A branded build starts automatically afterwards.

3. 03 Download

   The finished zip appears in your dashboard. It contains the resource folder, plus the island resource if you bought the add-on.

4. 04 Install

   Unzip into resources/, add one ensure line to server.cfg, clear the FiveM client cache and reconnect.

#Common questions people hit in the editor

• Nothing happens when I click a tool — Text and Logo place a layer immediately and hand you back to Select; the drawing tools stay active until you pick another one.
• My logo looks huge — sizes are in map pixels, and the map is 6144 across. A mark that reads well is usually between 400 and 900 pixels wide.
• My text vanished — check the layer list for a hidden or locked layer, and check the export-frame warning; a layer dragged below the Minimap row is behind the map.
• The preview looks different from the editor — the editor previews the base map through CSS, which cannot reproduce grain or a vignette exactly. The render is the truth.
• I cannot drag the map — press H for Pan, or switch back to Select and drag an empty part of the canvas.