How to Add a Garage to FiveM

A garage looks simple from the player's side — drive in, the car disappears, come back later and it is there. Underneath it is three separate systems that have to agree: a database record of who owns which vehicle, a zone that stores it, and a zone that gives it back. Nearly every garage bug is those three disagreeing.

How ownership actually works

Owned vehicles live in a database table keyed on the player's identifier and the vehicle's plate. The row holds the plate, the owner, the vehicle's properties as a serialised blob, and a state flag — in the garage, out, or impounded.

The properties blob is the part worth understanding. It holds the modifications, colour, and damage of the vehicle at the moment it was stored. When the garage returns the car, it spawns a fresh vehicle and applies that blob. This is why a car sometimes comes back without its tuning: the blob was written before the modification was applied, or the script that applied it did not write back.

The plate is the join key, and plates must therefore be unique. A server that generates duplicate plates will eventually hand one player another player's car, and the bug will look random because it only fires when both cars are stored at once.

Storage and retrieval zones

A garage needs a place to put cars in and a place to take them out. Most scripts use the same zone for both, but they are separate operations and can fail independently — a garage that stores but does not return usually has a working zone and a broken query.

Place zones somewhere with room to spawn a vehicle without clipping into geometry. A retrieval point pressed against a wall will spawn the car inside it, and the physics response ranges from the car popping out to the player being launched. Test each garage location by retrieving the largest vehicle your server allows, not the smallest.

Impound and the missing-car problem

Every garage needs an answer for a vehicle that is out of the garage when the server restarts. Without one, the row says "out", the world says nothing exists, and the player has lost a car they paid for.

The two common answers are an impound lot the player pays to recover from, and a restart hook that flips every out-of-garage vehicle back to stored. The impound is better roleplay and the auto-return produces fewer support tickets. Whichever you choose, make sure it exists before launch — this is the single most common cause of "the garage ate my car" reports.

Placing garages without editing code

Older garage scripts hard-code coordinates in a config file, which means every new garage is a code edit, a restart, and a trip in game to check you got the numbers right. Newer scripts let you place zones from inside the game and write the config for you.

Our FiveM Garage Script & Ownable Garages takes that approach: garages are placed in game, and it adds player-owned garages on top — a player can own the building rather than just use a public one. It detects QBCore and ESX automatically and runs at 0.00ms idle, which matters for a resource that is running a zone check for every player at all times.

Testing a garage properly

• Store a modified vehicle, restart the server, retrieve it. The modifications must survive.
• Store a vehicle, drive it out, restart while it is out. It must be recoverable.
• Have two players store cars simultaneously. Neither should receive the other's.
• Retrieve the largest allowed vehicle at every garage. None should spawn inside geometry.

Four tests, ten minutes, and they cover the failures that otherwise arrive as tickets from players who lost progress.

Where to go next

Garages usually go in alongside a vehicle shop and a spawn system. If you are still building the base, the server setup guide covers the order to add things in, and adding jobs is normally the next step after vehicles.

Every ATY script ships with its own setup page in the documentation, and delivery is automatic through Cfx.re Keymaster the moment payment clears. Browse the full catalogue in the store, or open a ticket in our Discord if you get stuck — you talk to the developers who wrote the code.