Custom FiveM minimaps — how they work and how to install one

The minimap you see in the corner and the full map on the pause screen are drawn from a grid of texture tiles that the game streams like any other asset. San Andreas is split into a matrix of images, each stored in a texture dictionary, plus a separate lower-resolution set used when the map is zoomed out.

• Tiles are named systematically — a row/column scheme the game resolves by name.
• Replacing the map means shipping texture dictionaries with those same names in your resource's stream folder.
• Because names are global, two minimap resources will conflict. Run exactly one.
• The LOD map is a separate, smaller set. Replacing only the detail tiles gives you a custom map that turns vanilla when the player zooms out.

1. 1Drop the resource folder into your resources directory.
2. 2Add `ensure pityus_minimap` (or whatever the folder is called) to server.cfg.
3. 3Disable or remove any other minimap resource. Two will fight and load order decides the winner.
4. 4Restart the server fully — not just the resource — so the texture dictionaries are re-registered.
5. 5Clear your client cache if you previously ran a different map. Cached tiles are the number one reason "it did not change".

# FiveM
%localappdata%\FiveM\FiveM.app\data\cache

# delete the cache folder, not the whole FiveM.app

Postal-code maps are the standard in roleplay because they give players a shared vocabulary for locations — "meet me at 812" is faster than any street name. What people misunderstand is that the numbers on the map are baked into the texture. They are not data the game knows about.

• The map texture shows the numbers. That alone gives players something to read off the screen.
• A `/postal` command, a nearest-postal HUD element or a GPS waypoint by number needs a separate script with a coordinate list.
• The script's postal list must match the map you installed. Mixing a map from one pack with the coordinates from another puts players in the wrong place, confidently.
• Some servers prefer a clean map without postals for immersion. Both are valid — decide before you build the HUD around it.

Changing the map image and changing the minimap frame are two different jobs. The square or circular minimap you see on modern roleplay servers comes from a HUD resource that swaps the mask and repositions the overlay — it has nothing to do with which tiles are streamed.

• Square, circular and rectangular minimaps are all mask swaps plus scaleform positioning.
• If you install a custom minimap and your HUD looks off, the HUD is what changed, not the map.
• Keep the map style and the HUD style in the same visual language — a neon map inside a chrome frame looks accidental.

Building a minimap from scratch means rendering the full San Andreas map at very high resolution, slicing it into the tile grid, converting each tile into a texture dictionary with the correct name, and producing a matching LOD set. It is genuinely a rendering pipeline, not an image edit.

1. 1Start from a high-resolution base map with a clean alpha channel separating land from water.
2. 2Apply your palette and any effects at full resolution — never upscale afterwards.
3. 3Slice into the tile grid at the exact dimensions the game expects.
4. 4Convert each tile to a YTD with the correct texture name and sensible compression.
5. 5Render the LOD set from the same source so the two never disagree.
6. 6Test at every zoom level in-game, including the pause map and the GPS route overlay.