How to Make a Custom Minimap in FiveM (2026 Guide)

I’ve swapped, edited, and rebuilt more FiveM minimaps than I want to admit — for satellite servers, for hood RP servers that needed turf lines, for a racing server that just wanted a cleaner radar. Along the way I learned that “custom minimap” means three very different amounts of work depending on what you actually want.

So here’s an honest look at the three ways to get a custom minimap or radar onto your server, ordered from least effort to most control. I’ll tell you what works, what’s tedious, and where each option falls apart, so you can pick the one that fits your time and budget instead of following one method blindly and regretting it four hours in.

Quick definitions first, because people mix them up: the minimap is the map artwork (the tiles you see in the corner). The radar is the whole HUD element — the frame, the blips, the health/armor arcs. Most of this guide is about changing the map image itself, though a full custom radar overhaul touches both.

Option 1: Install a Pre-Made Minimap (Fastest)

If you just want a different look and you don’t care that it’s someone else’s design, installing a pre-made minimap is a 10-minute job. This is the right call for the vast majority of servers.

A few solid places to start:

• oulsen_satmap (free) — a satellite/aerial style map. It’s on GitHub at github.com/Oulsen/oulsen_satmap. Popular because it’s clean, free, and gives you that Google-Maps-from-orbit look a lot of modern servers want.
• ArduousDev/MiniMap (free) — a static, streamed minimap replacement at github.com/ArduousDev/MiniMap. Simple drop-in if you want something different from the vanilla GTA look without paying.
• Paid Tebex presets — themed minimaps usually run $8–$15. You’ll see packs styled after real cities (“Chicago”-style minimaps are common for urban RP servers) or with custom color grading. These are fine; you’re paying for the art and the fact that someone already did the tedious part.

The standard install

Whether it’s free or paid, the flow is basically identical, and it’s the same flow as any resource — I go deeper on that in how to install FiveM scripts if you’re brand new:

1. Download the resource (GitHub ZIP, or from your Tebex/Keymaster account for paid).
2. Extract it so you have a single named folder, e.g. oulsen_satmap.
3. Drop it into your resources/ directory — I keep map replacements in a [maps] or [standalone] category folder to stay organized.
4. Add it to server.cfg with ensure oulsen_satmap (use the exact folder name).
5. Restart the server — a full restart, not just a resource refresh, since streamed assets load at startup.

Load in, look at your radar, and you’re done. If it didn’t change, jump to the troubleshooting section below — nine times out of ten it’s one of two things.

The honest downside: you get someone else’s fixed look. You can’t nudge a label, add your postal codes, or draw your gang territories. If a pre-made map is 90% of what you want, that last 10% will nag at you forever. That’s the whole reason the other two options exist.

Option 2: Edit the Minimap Yourself, the Manual Way

This is the traditional route, and it’s the one every “how to change minimap fivem” thread eventually points you toward. You’re going into the game’s actual files and rebuilding the map art.

The short version of the workflow:

1. Extract the minimap YTD (the texture dictionary holding the minimap tiles) from the game files using OpenIV or CodeWalker.
2. Edit the tiles in Photoshop or GIMP — recolor roads, paint in districts, redraw water, whatever your look calls for. The minimap is split into a grid of tiles, so you’re working across multiple images and keeping them aligned.
3. Reimport your edited textures back into a YTD using OpenIV, CodeWalker, or a helper like Folders2YTD.
4. Fix scaling and alignment — this is where people lose hours, because the DDS mipmaps and tile positioning have to be exactly right or your map is blurry, offset, or seams show.
5. Repackage it as a streamed resource (a stream/ folder inside a resource) so the server serves it to clients.
6. Restart to see every single change.

That last point is the killer. Iteration is blind. You edit a tile, repackage, restart, load in, walk to the spot, squint at it, decide the color’s off, and do the whole loop again. There’s no live preview — you’re guessing, then verifying, over and over. Budget hours, not minutes, and expect the first few passes to look wrong.

I’m not going to cram the full pixel-level process into this post, because it deserves its own walkthrough. We documented the complete manual workflow — CodeWalker export, tile editing, mipmaps, repackaging, the whole thing — in the minimap the hard way with CodeWalker. If you want maximum control and you enjoy the file-wrangling side of FiveM, that’s your guide.

Manual editing is genuinely the right choice when you need to change the base art itself — you’re repainting GTA’s world, not just adding overlays. But if what you actually want is zones, labels, postals, and boundaries drawn on the map, editing raw tiles is the slow way to get there. Which brings us to option three.

Option 3: Build It Live In-Game With an Editor (Most Control, Least Pain)

Full disclosure up front: this next tool is our own script. I’m telling you that so you can weigh what I say accordingly — but I built it precisely because option two burned me so many times, and I think it’s the honest answer for a lot of servers.

The LMX Minimap Creator is a $29.99 one-time in-game editor. Instead of exporting files and guessing, you type /minimap and start drawing on the real game world, in-game, with instant preview:

• Draw zones, labels, and postal codes directly onto the live map.
• Lay out hood and turf boundaries for gang/territory RP, seeing exactly where the lines sit relative to actual streets.
• Supports Oulsen Satmap tiles as your base, so you can combine the free satellite look with your own overlays.
• Export a drop-in resource when you’re happy — no blind restart loop just to check a color.
• Standalone, and it auto-detects ESX, QBCore, and Qbox, so it fits whatever framework you’re running without extra glue.

The point of drawing in-game is that the feedback problem from option two disappears. You place a turf line, you see it on the road, you adjust it — right there. For anything overlay-based (postals, districts, territories, labels), that’s a dramatically faster loop than edit-repackage-restart.

The fair comparison: fivem-tools.com

I’m not going to pretend we’re the only editor out there. fivem-tools.com has a browser-based minimap/postal editor and it’s a legitimately good tool. It’s freemium — you get 1 free export per day, and unlimited exports run $7.50/month. If you’d rather work in a browser canvas, don’t want to load a resource into your server to build the map, or you only need the occasional export, it’s a reasonable pick and the free daily export can genuinely be enough for a small project.

Where LMX’s edge shows up: you’re drawing on the real map inside the game, not a browser canvas approximation, so what you see is what players see. It’s a one-time price rather than a subscription, and you get unlimited exports with no daily cap. Whether that’s worth it depends on how much you’ll use it — if you’re iterating on territories across a season of RP, the in-game preview and no-cap exports pay off; if you need one map once, the free browser export might do the job.

One thing I want to be straight about: I won’t claim “no OpenIV needed” as some LMX-exclusive feature. Plenty of overlay and postal tools skip OpenIV. Our real advantages are the live in-game drawing, the one-time price, and unlimited exports — not a checkbox everyone else fails.

If you want a broader head-to-head of the map/radar options on the market, I put together the best FiveM minimap scripts compared, and if postal codes specifically are your goal, the FiveM postal map guide goes deeper on that one piece.

Troubleshooting: Minimap Not Showing After Restart

This is the section everyone actually needs. If you installed or exported a map and nothing changed, it’s almost always one of these:

Resource load order. If two resources both touch the minimap/radar, the last one to load wins. Make sure your custom minimap is ensure’d after anything it needs to override in server.cfg. Conflicts with HUD resources that also replace radar textures are common — temporarily disable your HUD to test in isolation.

Stream folder naming and structure. Streamed assets have to live in a folder literally named stream inside your resource, and the resource needs a valid fxmanifest.lua. A misnamed streams/ or Stream/ folder, or a manifest missing the resource, means the game silently ignores your textures. Double-check the folder is exactly stream and the YTD/DDS files are actually inside it.

Server cache. FiveM caches streamed assets aggressively. If you swapped a map and clients still see the old one, clear the server-side cache (the cache/ folder in your server data, and the cache/files in particular) and have clients clear their local cache too. Then do a full server restart, not a resource refresh/restart, because streamed assets only get picked up at startup.

You restarted the resource, not the server. Worth repeating on its own. restart oulsen_satmap will not reload streamed map tiles reliably. Stop and start the whole server.

Escrow/license (paid maps). If a paid map won’t load, confirm your server key is linked in Keymaster — escrowed assets fail quietly when the license isn’t valid.

FAQ

Do I need OpenIV to make a custom minimap? Only for the manual file-editing route (option 2), where you’re extracting and repacking the YTD. In-game editors and browser editors let you build overlays without ever touching OpenIV — but as I said above, that’s true of several tools, not just one.

Can I make a custom minimap for free? Yes. Install a free pre-made map like oulsen_satmap or ArduousDev/MiniMap, or use fivem-tools.com’s 1-free-export-per-day tier. Free gets you a long way if you don’t need heavy customization. Browse our free scripts for more no-cost resources while you’re at it.

Will a custom minimap hurt performance? A static streamed minimap has essentially zero runtime cost — it’s just textures. Watch out for radar/HUD scripts that redraw constantly; those can eat frames, but the map art itself won’t.

Does this work on ESX, QBCore, and Qbox? Map art is framework-agnostic — a streamed minimap works anywhere. For editor tooling, the LMX Minimap Creator is standalone and auto-detects ESX, QBCore, and Qbox so it drops in regardless of your base.

What’s the difference between the minimap and the radar? The minimap is the map image; the radar is the whole HUD element around it (frame, blips, arcs). Changing the map art is far easier than rebuilding the radar HUD.

Which One Should You Pick?

If you want a new look fast and don’t need custom zones, install a pre-made map — free options cover most servers. If you need to repaint the actual world art and don’t mind hours of blind iteration, edit the YTD manually and follow the CodeWalker walkthrough. And if you want postal codes, districts, or hood and turf boundaries drawn on the real map with instant preview and no restart loop, the LMX Minimap Creator is what I reach for — with fivem-tools.com’s browser editor as a fair, subscription-based alternative if you’d rather stay in the browser.

Pick the smallest amount of effort that gets you the map you actually want. That’s the whole game.