How to Use Quasar MLO Creator: Complete FiveM In-Game Mapping Guide
A complete, step-by-step guide to Quasar MLO Creator: open the studio, learn the controls, build an interior from scratch, furnish it, place ymaps, cut Rockstar's sealed doors and push it all live with no server restart. Every tool, every key and every mistake to avoid, in a single guide.
How to Use Quasar MLO Creator: The Complete Guide to Building FiveM MLOs Inside the Game#
Quasar MLO Creator puts an entire mapping studio inside FiveM, which means the learning curve is not the file formats, the exporters or the restarts — it is just knowing which panel does what. This guide walks through the whole thing in the order you will actually use it: opening the studio, the controls that apply everywhere, the project system, and then every tool from a blank interior to a door cut out of a Rockstar building.
Read it once from top to bottom and you will be able to build, dress and publish a live interior on your server in a single session. Keep it open on a second screen the first time you map, and you will not have to guess at anything.
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This guide is long on purpose — it is written to answer everything, including the things you will only wonder about on your third map. If you would rather see it than read it, start with the official trailer. It is not a thirty-second montage: it walks through creating an MLO in detail, tool by tool, at real speed and with no cuts, so it doubles as a video version of this tutorial.
Watch the trailer to understand the workflow, then come back here for the specifics — the keybinds, the permission setup, the Ctrl trick on the Collision Cutter and the list of mistakes worth skipping. The two together cover everything.
Three things decide whether the studio opens at all, and all three are worth checking before you blame the script.
OneSync has to be on. The resource will not start without it, full stop. Live map loading depends on it.
ox_lib, oxmysql and your framework have to start first. In your server.cfg, ensure [mlocreator] goes below them. If it starts first, the framework detection fails and nothing works. On a correct start, the console prints a line confirming which framework was detected — esx, qb or standalone. If you do not see that line, stop and fix the load order before going any further.
The add_ace permission lines have to be there. This is the single most common installation mistake, and its symptom is specific: everything looks fine until you press Build, and then every build fails with "could not start resource". The script starts and stops the maps you create while the server is running, and it cannot do that without those ace grants.
You also need the folder structure intact. Do not rename qs-mlocreator — the UI and the permissions both use that exact name. Do not delete [maps], which is where your builds live, and do not delete qs_mlotextures, which is the texture pack every interior you build depends on. Without it, every surface you texture shows up missing for your players.
Who can open the studio: it is admin-only and follows your framework. ESX checks for the admin or superadmin group, QB and QBX check for god or admin permissions, and standalone servers use the command ace. If your staff structure needs something different, the rule lives in playerIsAdmin inside qs-mlocreator/custom/<framework>/server.lua and is meant to be edited.
Type /mlocreator in chat. The studio opens and shows one card per tool, plus every project you have saved.
Before you build anything, press the gear icon at the top. This is where you set your language, change the command to whatever fits your server, and bind a key so you are not typing a command every time. All of it is stored in the database, so it survives restarts and updates.
One catch worth knowing up front: a few of those fields — the command itself and the keybinds — need a restart qs-mlocreator before they take effect. The panel tells you which ones, so you are not left wondering why your new key does nothing. Change them, restart the resource once, and you are set for good.
If you want to try the occlusion tool, it is hidden by default because it is still being finished. Turn it on in Settings > Tools. Treat it as a preview rather than a production feature.
Every tool that works in the world docks its panel on the left of the screen, and the single most important key is ALT: it switches between moving your character and using the mouse inside the panel. If your cursor will not move or your character will not walk, that is ALT, every time.
Each panel displays the keys that apply to it, so you never have to memorise a full list. These are the ones that recur across the whole studio:
Key
What it does
Left click
Place / pick
Right click
Undo the last point
Arrow keys
Nudge
Page Up / Page Down
Raise / lower
Enter
Done
Backspace
Cancel
F5
Free camera
ALT
Switch between character and panel
Right click is the one people forget. It undoes the last point rather than cancelling the whole operation, which means you can place a long sequence of points and walk back through mistakes one at a time instead of starting over. Backspace is the one that cancels outright.
This is the concept that makes everything else make sense, so it is worth getting straight before you touch a tool.
Everything you make is a project, stored in the database. Not in a file you have to remember, not in a folder you have to back up. Close the game, come back tomorrow, reopen the project and keep going exactly where you stopped. Projects are not lost when you update the script.
Every project has two buttons, and they do different things:
Export writes the files. That is all it does. Nothing appears in the world.
Build puts the map into the world, live, for every player, with no restart.
The number one source of confusion with this script is pressing Export, flying to the location and finding nothing there. That is correct behaviour. Export is the intermediate step; Build is the one that publishes.
Press Build and the screen fades. You are moved to a safe spot far away from the build site — this is normal and intended. A prompt tells you to press E. Press it, the screen comes back, and you are standing exactly where you were, with the map in place.
Every player online goes through the same short fade and returns to their own position. Nobody reconnects, nobody is kicked.
Two rules during a build, and they are not optional: do not restart the server and do not disconnect. If your server has automated restarts or teleport scripts, the resource exposes a server-side export so your own code can check first:
lua
local busy = exports['qs-mlocreator']:IsBuildRunning()
And the second thing people miss: if you do not press E, the world does not update. The build is not broken; it is waiting on you.
Step 4 — MLO Creator: building an interior from scratch#
This is the tool that creates an interior where there was nothing. Six steps, in this order.
1. Create a new project and name it. The name is how you will find it in the project list and the Maps panel later, so be specific — "vinewood-tattoo-back-office" will make more sense in three months than "test2".
2. Place the entrance door. Walk up to a building, aim at the wall and left-click. The door lands where you were looking. From there the arrow keys slide it along the wall and Page Up / Page Down move it vertically, so you can line it up precisely with what is already there. Take your time on this step — the entrance is the one thing that ties your interior to the real world, and it is the piece players judge first.
One rule about placement: put the entrance on a real outside wall. Building an interior whose entrance sits inside another MLO is one of the classic mistakes and it will not behave the way you expect.
3. Paint the floor. This is the part that replaces modelling entirely. You draw the floor shape in the 3D editor and the walls come up on their own around it. Want an L-shaped office behind the shop floor? Paint the L. Right click undoes the last point if you overshoot a corner.
4. Add doors, windows and stairs from the panel. Same flow as everything else: pick it, look where it goes, left-click, nudge with the arrows, confirm with Enter. Stairs are how you get a second level — add them, then paint the floor above.
5. Pick textures. They come from the integrated pack, which is why they load correctly for every player without you streaming anything extra.
6. Finish interior, then Build. "Finish interior" closes out the geometry and the room definitions. Build publishes it live.
Use F5 freely throughout. Dropping into the free camera to look at your shape from outside or above catches proportion mistakes that are invisible from eye level.
The MLO Editor dresses an interior — one you just built, or any MLO already on your server, including paid maps from other creators.
Stand inside the interior and open the tool. Position matters here; the editor works on the interior you are physically in.
Pick a prop from the catalogue and it drops where you are looking. From there the gizmo handles the rest: move it, rotate it, place it. Doors and lights are added exactly the same way, which is how you give a shop a working back door it never had, or light a basement that shipped completely dark.
When you are happy: Export, then Build.
The part that matters most here is what the tool does not do. The original MLO is never changed. Everything you add goes into your own project layered on top of it. That has two consequences worth internalising: the original creator's updates will not fight your work, and removing your project puts the interior back exactly the way it was. You can dress a map you paid for, on a live server, knowing the undo button is real.
The Ymap tool handles the world outside interiors, and it is the one where F5 earns its keep — fly, place, land, check at eye level, fly back up.
Props come from the same catalogue. Fences, barriers, scenery, event setups, industrial clutter.
Parked vehicles show a ghost car where the vehicle will stand, at the angle it will stand, before you commit. No spawning a car to test the rotation and deleting it again.
Weather zones are drawn as a box. Draw it, then fly into it — the preview applies immediately, so you can tune the atmosphere of a district by looking at it rather than guessing numbers in a config.
Same ending as every other tool: Export, then Build.
Step 7 — Collision Cutter: opening a sealed building#
This is how you put your interior behind a real door that Rockstar welded shut. Four steps.
1. Stand in front of the building.
2. Look at the door. It lights up yellow when the tool has it.
3. Left-click to take it. Click it again to put it back — the selection is a toggle, not a commitment.
4. Build. The door and its collision are gone. Walk through.
Sometimes the game has baked an entire wall into one single piece, and the highlight covers the whole thing instead of the door. Cutting at that point gives you a hole the size of the wall, which is the mistake that makes people think the tool is crude.
It is not — press Ctrl and the tool fits a door-sized box instead. Build, and only that box is cut. The wall stays. Whenever the highlight looks bigger than what you wanted, Ctrl is the answer.
The Maps panel lists every map you have built on the server and gives each one two actions.
Rebuild publishes it again after you have changed the project. This is your iteration loop: edit, rebuild, look, repeat.
Remove takes the map out of the world. The original building comes back. Nothing is lost — the project stays saved and can be built again whenever you want.
One thing to expect: Remove is also a build. The screen fades, you get moved, and you press E. If you remove a map and it is still standing there, you skipped the E.
Your builds land in the [maps] folder, and they look like ordinary map files, which tempts people into opening them in a text editor to change one coordinate. Do not.
Those files are rewritten on every build. Any hand edit disappears the next time you press Build, or the next time someone else rebuilds that project. The project in the database is the source of truth — change it in game, rebuild, done.
The same applies to updating the script: replace qs-mlocreator and qs_mlotextures with the new version, keep your [maps] folder, and your settings and projects are untouched because they live in the database. If you edited anything in config/, custom/ or locales/, copy those files back afterwards.
And if you map as a team: only one person can edit a project at a time. The second person gets a warning rather than silently overwriting someone's work — but it does mean coordinating who has which project open.
Optional: opening the studio from your own scripts#
Most servers never need these, but if you want the studio opened from your own admin menu rather than a command, the client exports are there:
lua
-- Open the studio, optionally on a specific tool
exports['qs-mlocreator']:OpenStudio()
exports['qs-mlocreator']:OpenStudio('mlo_editor')
-- Close it
exports['qs-mlocreator']:CloseStudio()
-- true while the studio is openlocalopen = exports['qs-mlocreator']:IsStudioOpen()
Valid tool ids are mlo_creator, mlo_editor, ymap, occlusion, collision_cut and maps. Permissions still apply — OpenStudio does nothing for a player who is not an admin, so you cannot accidentally expose the studio through a badly gated menu.
Anything starting with mlocreator: is an internal event and can change between versions. Do not hook them.
If this is your first time in the studio, do it in this order. It takes well under an hour and it teaches you every part of the workflow on something small enough to throw away.
Open /mlocreator, set your language and keybind in Settings, restart the resource once.
Find an unused building with a sealed door. Use the Collision Cutter on that door — it is the fastest way to see a build work end to end.
Press Build, press E, walk through the gap you just made.
Open MLO Creator, place the entrance on that same doorway and paint a single square room behind it.
Texture it, finish the interior, Build, press E, walk in.
Open the MLO Editor inside your new room and drop three props and a light. Export, Build.
Open the Maps panel and Remove the project. Press E. Watch the building return to exactly how Rockstar shipped it.
That last step is the one worth doing deliberately. Once you have seen the world restore itself cleanly, you will map far more confidently, because you will know that nothing you do on a live server is permanent.
Do I need CodeWalker for any part of this? No. Every step above happens inside FiveM.
Do players have to reconnect when I build? No. They go through a short fade and return to their exact position with the map loaded.
What is the difference between Export and Build? Export writes the files and changes nothing in the world. Build publishes the map live for every player.
Why did nothing happen after my build? You almost certainly did not press E. The world updates on that keypress.
Will this modify MLOs I bought from other creators? Never. Your changes are a separate layer, and removing the project restores the original exactly.
Can I undo a map I already built? Yes — Remove it from the Maps panel. The project stays saved and can be rebuilt any time.
Where are my projects stored? In your database. They survive restarts and script updates.
Why is the occlusion tool missing? It is disabled by default while it is still in development. Enable it in Settings > Tools.
The written documentation covers the details this guide summarises, and the full video walkthrough shows every tool in this article in the same order, at real speed.
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