The best GTA 5 mods

Looking for a list of the very best GTA 5 mods? No longer just a few cheats and trainers, the modding scene is now rife with crazy additions, useful tweaks, and big transformations. If you’re considering adding a few little non-developer-approved improvements, take your pick from our list of the best available.

A word of caution: many of these mods use ‘memory hooks’ to enable them to tinker with the fundamentals of the open-world game, and if you try to play GTA Online with them installed, you’ll be swiftly banned on suspicion of cheating. We recommend keeping a separate installation if you want to switch between GTA Online and a modded GTA V single-player experience frequently – back up your game files before making changes. Alternatively, if you’re looking to spice things up in multiplayer, head over to our GTA RP server guide, apply to join a roleplay server as an NPC, and live out your dreams of roaming the streets as a vigilante grandma.

Best GTA 5 mods

Here are the best GTA 5 mods you can download right now:

The Festive Surprise mod brings a bit of Christmas joy to Los Santos. Franklin, Michael, and Trevor each get a fancy red Santa hat, and Christmas trees are dotted around the map to get you in the Christmas spirit.

Feast your eyes upon the beautifully refreshed streets of Los Santos with new weather, skies, and many lush 4k textures courtesy of GTA V Redux. It’s not just a visual overhaul – Redux also includes tweaks to vehicle handling, a reconfigured police system, improved weapon feel and behaviour, and more sophisticated NPC behaviour.

‘It’s like a whole new game’ is a bit of a cliche, but LSPD First Response transforms GTA V into one of the best police games out there. To get started, you’ll head to the police station and create a character before heading out onto the mean streets and responding to robberies, dynamic crime events, and car chases. Now you can find out what it’s like to be on the other end of a police chase.

The team behind LSPDFR are also looking to branch out into RDR2 Mods – they’re behind the modding website mod-rdr.com.

World of Variety adds vehicles and assets from GTA Online into single-player GTA V to make the world look and feel more alive and varied – that includes the fancy cars from the GTA Online Diamond Casino DLC.

Satisfy your criminal cravings with ATM Robberies & Bank Heists, perfect for that handy injection of funds when the bank balance gets a little low. This mod lets you steal cash from any of the 47 ATMs or any of the 10 banks, but you’ll need to escape to a safe house to secure your haul.

The Complex Control mod overhauls the gameplay and puts you in the shoes of a procedurally generated Avatar who must battle against NPCs in an ever-shrinking map – sound familiar? Inspired by the best battle royale games and incorporating rogue-lite elements to keep things interesting, Complex Control is an incredibly fun and challenging addition to the game.

Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos may be huge, but there are still plenty of areas closed off to you. Frequently you’ll see huge tourist attractions that look like they’ll be explorable, only to walk up and discover their doors permanently locked. This Open All Interiors mod makes plenty of previously locked buildings explorable, just for a little added authenticity.

Since Valve put the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2, manipulating objects in zero-G has been a go-to feature for almost every modding community. This is GTA V’s Gravity Gun mod, and it does exactly what you expect it to. Watch out for hurling cars.

Police are often associated with fear and keeping order in various unruly towns and cities. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Simpsons Springfield Police pack replaces the fuzz’s various vintage cars and subs them with the vehicles you recognise from Springfield. No sign of Chief Wiggum though, sadly.

If you’re a PC game and not a survival sim, you’re doing it wrong. At least, that’s what the ‘New’ tab on Steam suggests. Make GTA V a survival game by adding some Basic Needs. Having fun is only as important as eating and sleeping, so keep filling your face and napping.

To add more realism to your urban sandbox, why not make vehicles burn fuel? Before engaging in a wild chase, ensure you’re fuelled because running dry with six cops ramming your tail end won’t finish well.

One of the PC’s most beloved games is Euro Truck Simulator, proving we somehow adore doing mundane tasks in games for zero pay. Trucking Missions brings the joy of Euro Truck to Los Santos and the surrounding area. Thanks to lax gun laws and the local meth-head population, is a far more dangerous/exciting world than the motorways of Europe.

Grand Theft Auto V isn’t exactly short of missions, but you’ll run out eventually. Thankfully modders are here to keep you well stocked, and The Red House adds more than twenty new missions, including assassinations and gang clean-outs, to the game, plus a new heist.

Everyone else is making zombie games, so why not GTA? This mod allows you to fill the streets of Los Santos with crowds of the walking dead for round-based survival. Fend off each successive wave of corpses for bigger and better rewards.

It’s 2020, and we still don’t have flying cars. It’s a problem in the real world but not in virtual Los Santos where, with a little bit of coding, you can stick jetpacks on cars. Ignore traffic queues and get there on time.

With its heavy story, huge world, and massive length, GTA V is almost an RPG. Don’t settle for almost, though; swap genres entirely with this GTA RPG mod. It adds a questing system to the game, a character creator, and even branching dialogue trees. Forget about making big bucks; make big XP instead.

There’s absolutely no reason to trundle around Los Santos in a car when you could strap on some exoskeleton armour and blast off into the skies. That’s exactly what you can do with this Iron Man armour. It also comes in handy for gang warfare since it has repulsor blasters in the palms and chest. If the war escalates, you could always upgrade to the chunky Hulkbuster variant.

GTA IV’s champion mod was Icenhancer, a graphical mod that made Liberty City look genuinely real. If you’re looking for a similar effect in GTA V, R*enhancer Photorealism is the way to go. It’s a lighting overhaul that adjusts atmospheric effects and works wonders on car reflections.

No one wants to drive normal cars, even if it’s the fastest car in GTA 5. You can do that in real life. Instead, we want to drive a DeLorean DMC-12 time machine, a Batmobile, or that thing from The Flintstones. Simply copy and paste a few files, and you can drive all these cars and more in GTA V.

Thanks to the fact that no one can drive properly, you spend quite a lot of time involved in car crashes in GTA V. They’re never quite spectacular, though; there’s none of those twisted door pillars and engines hanging from torn bodywork. Better Deformation makes an art form of car destruction and encourages you to take less good care of your vehicles.

Crime & Police adjust the detection system; an NPC has to report your crime first, and you can prevent them from dialling. Enemy accuracy scales with speed, so in a car chase, they won’t still hit with pinpoint precision. And silencers are now more effective, allowing you to stealth missions with much more effectiveness. Your wanted level is also more logical; getting a single star won’t have the entire LSPD hunting you down.

How do you drive the train in GTA 5? It won’t stop. It has no feelings. It is a physics-defying metal snake of sorts. Install this GTA 5 enhanced train driver script, however, and you’ll be permitted to hop inside the cabin and take control of the train. Speed up, slow down. Stop. Go. All of the main train driving options are available to you. Looks a little janky, mind.

The amount of effort Rockstar put into designing Los Santos’s seabed is inversely proportional to the effort modders put into naming mods. That said, the No Water + Tsunami + Atlantis Mod allows you to edit the game’s sea level to drain the oceans or flood the city, turning it into either Mad Max or Waterworld.

Hearkening back to the old days of Grand Theft Auto 3’s cheat codes, the Pedestrian Riot mod causes all civilians to be aggressive towards you and one another. It also arms them with random weapons, resulting in all kinds of unpredictable madness unfolding. Try climbing to a safe vantage point and watching as the city tears itself apart.

In older Grand Theft Auto games, back when Rockstar took themselves only slightly less seriously, the armed forces would arrive to take you down if your murderous rampage went on too long. Grand Theft Auto V ditched this top-tier wanted level, but this GTA 5 tanks five stars mod puts it back in place. Get five-star notoriety, and you’ll be pursued by the nation’s finest. The mod’s pragmatic title sounds weirdly poetic too.

GTA 5 Ragdoll on demand

Television – that antiquated thing where you passively observe other people doing things – has made so much money from people falling over. Bring the hilarity of candid camera to GTA with the Ragdoll on Demand mod, and you – yes YOU! – can decide the exact moment someone falls over! It even works in cutscenes, meaning you can add a touch of funny to even the most serious gangster-business talks.

Technically a cheat more than a mod, but Native trainer delves deep into the source code of GTA V to allow you to turn on and off various exciting settings. Fancy enjoying a little low gravity? Turn it on from an in-game menu and easily bunny-hop down the Vinewood hills with huge jumps and little danger to your health. You can swap out character models and become a cat for the day.

An extension for the Native Trainer, this unlocks the Fargo-like area of North Yankton. This is the area where the game’s prologue takes place and is inaccessible from Los Santos. So if you fancy heading back there, unlock the boarders with this mod.

When playing the game in first-person, GTA V’s field of view can feel a little restricted. There is a slider in the camera settings menu that allows you to alter it, but the highest setting is a measly 55 degrees. Modder DrDaxxy has remedied this oversight with some code that allows you to set your FOV to any value you fancy. You’ll need to edit the fov.txt file to do so, but that little fiddling will mean you can finally see Los Santos with the eyes it was always meant for.

Not strictly a custom GTA V mod, SweetFX is a graphics post-processing injector that adds various fancy visual effects to games. It can be used on pretty much anything, but tests on GTA V reveal that it runs pretty much perfectly. The enhanced look removes the washed-out feel the game can sometimes have, providing bolder and deeper colours.

If there’s one game world that needs to be experienced through virtual reality, it’s Los Santos. Using a program called VorpX, the FoV mod above, and the video tutorial below, you can get GTA V running in VR on an Oculus Rift DK 2. It’s a bit crude but still allows a functional armchair visit to digital LA.

If when you think of mods, your brain automatically points to the director of infinite health, ammo, and money, then not only are you a big cheater, but you’ll want to have a look at this trainer mod. Aside from the infinite provisions, you’ll also be able to leave behind the days of walking too slowly and reloading guns. And you’ll be able to teleport around the map, completely removing the need to drive cars, and thus play half of the game.

If making mods is more your thing, you’ll want to get your hands on OpenIV. It’s the toolset used to access and edit the game files of GTA IV and Max Payne 3, but clever PC gamers have managed to get the program to unpack GTA V. Crack the game open and get scrambling.

GTA Vice City Remastered

So while we all wait for more news about the GTA 6 release date, this GTA 5 mod does the next best thing: bring Vice City into the modern era with a complete remastering of Vice City from Lunchxbles. You can also add in Tommy Vercetti with a separate mod to take a step back into the neon dashed waterfront that captures 80s Florida so well.

How do I install Grand Theft Auto V mods?

Installing GTA V mods is really simple. You must copy the mod files you’ve downloaded into the main GTA V folder. If you’re using the Steam version of the game, this will probably be similar to the following:

C:Program Files (x86)SteamSteamAppscommonGrand Theft Auto V

If you’re not using the Steam version, you’ll need to find the main game folder with the GTAV.exe file in.

Some of the more complex mods require the installation of additional tools, such as Script Hook V. You’ll need to download Script Hook V, open the .zip folder and find the ‘bin’ folder, and copy and paste the three files into the main Grand Theft Auto V folder. Installation guides for any additional tools, and occasionally full installers, are available on the mod download pages.

These advanced mods aren’t all guaranteed to work harmoniously together – by all means, give combining them a shot, but you’ve got the best chance of a successful mod installation when working with the vanilla game as a base. In case you weren’t paying attention before – do not try to join GTA Online with a modded game unless you’re a glutton for digital punishment.

And there you go, the best GTA 5 Mods. Once again, do keep in mind that when applying mods, a lot of them fiddle with memory allocations, which may well be identified by Rockstar as cheating when it comes to going online. You’re best sticking to single-player when using anything non-official in one of the best PC games. If you fancy mixing things up without fiddling around in folders, see our list of GTA 5 cheats for a list of console commands which will let you bend Los Santos to your will.