GTA 5 Cars Despawning
Cars disappearing/despawning
The issue of disappearing cars is a frustrating one and isn't well documented. As far back as 2013, Rockstar warned about parking cars in garages because they could disappear. This happened in the Playstation version, before the launch of the PC in 2015, and Rockstar publicly acknowledged it as a bug. The problem still exists today in both GTAO, where your car can also be stolen, and in SP.
In today's GTA 5 PC version the issue is likely due to streaming memory: the cars not being used are deleted to free up memory and avoid crashes. The issues are often related to new MP DLCs Vehicles but can happen with addon mods as well.
Thankfully there are a few ways to solve this issue and keep spawned vehicles in place - technically called persistence.
You can try one or more of the following.
Use the Simple Trainer or Enhanced Native Trainers to spawn vehicles. They are updated regularly and will keep DLC vehicles from disappearing (despawning). Menyoo is an excellent trainer but unfortunately it won't keep your cars from despawning.
Use a "persistence" mod. Examples are the Add-On Vehicle Spawner and Persistence II mod. Search the Mods section of the site for "persistence". Keep in mind that mods need to be updated regularly to continue to work after Rockstar patches.
Spawn by script. This requires very basic programming skills and guarantees your cars will not disappear even if you spawn them at one extreme of the map and teleport yourself to the other extreme, your car will still be there. Your own scripts can easily be updated but it is rarely required.
Another very similar issue is related to LODs (Level of Detail).
- Edit the values under the lodDistances tag in a specific vehicle's vehicles.meta. This is hit or miss and will fix one car at a time unless you change all the values at once. It can also cause FPS issues if values are too high.
This is the distances LOD at which models will switch. There are up to 6 levels of LODs (HD, LOD0, LOD1, LOD2, LOD3, LOD4). Generally speaking LOD0 will be the vehicle's mesh with the most polygons and highest detail.
Example:
<lodDistances content="float_array">
500.000000
500.000000
500.000000
500.000000
500.000000
500.000000
</lodDistances>
