Controls & Interface

Everything on your screen and how to drive it — HUD, radial menu, 3rd Eye targeting, talking in character, and the ESC pause menu.

Once you’re in the city, a handful of interface systems carry almost everything you do — reading your own status, opening a menu, interacting with the world, and talking to other players. None of it needs unlocking. It’s all there from the moment you spawn.

The HUD at a glance

Your heads-up display is made up of several independent pieces, each of which can be moved, resized in style, or switched off entirely (see Customising your HUD below):

• Identity strip — your name, voice indicator, and general info, top-right.
• Status bars — health, armour, hunger, thirst, stress, and intoxication. See Hunger, Thirst & Stress and Health, Injuries & First Aid for what actually drains and heals these.
• Vehicle cluster — speed, gear, fuel, and warning lamps, which only appears while you’re driving.
• Weapon panel — your currently held weapon and ammo, hidden unless you’re actually armed.
• Notifications — toast messages from whatever you’re doing.
• Progress bars — for timed actions across the suite (lockpicking, crafting, treating an injury, and so on).
• Skill tracker and injury icons — appear contextually when a relevant skill is active or you’re carrying an injury.
• Task HUD — a small objective stack that tracks active quests and job tasks; if it ever gets too tall to read comfortably, it can be bound to a scroll key in your FiveM keybind settings (look for “Task Focus”).

None of this needs starting up — it simply runs in the background from the moment your character loads in.

If a HUD element is missing or in the wrong place, it’s almost always a customisation setting, not a bug — check /hudedit before assuming something’s broken.

The radial menu

Hold Z to open the radial menu — an orbital wheel with up to eight top-level slices: Vehicle, GPS, Clothing, Character, Activity, Property, Settings, and (for on-duty police only) Police.

Each slice opens its own ring of options depending on context:

Slices with nothing to offer simply vanish from the wheel — you’ll never see an empty ring.

3rd Eye targeting

Hold Left Alt while looking at a nearby player, vehicle, door, or object to bring up a fan of context-sensitive action chips — up to six at a time, with a “+N More” option if there’s more available. What shows up depends entirely on what you’re looking at: a car might offer boot, bonnet, lockpick, or repair; a person might offer search or detain; a door might offer lock or unlock.

A few things worth knowing:

• You need to be close and looking directly at the thing — this isn’t a long-range tool.
• Some options are picky about exactly where you’re looking (a wheel option genuinely wants you looking at the wheel).
• Job-gated chips — police search/detain and similar — only appear for players clocked on to the relevant job.

3rd Eye is the interaction layer for most of the world: doors, vehicles, machines, and other people all route through it rather than through separate menus.

Talking in character and nameplates

Ordinary free chat is switched off on The Estate — the in-game chat box is for command output only. To actually speak in character, use:

• /me <text> — posts a floating action bubble over your head and a short line visible to anyone nearby. It’s the standard way to describe an action or speak in roleplay. Don’t spam it — there’s a short cooldown and a length cap, so keep it to one clear beat at a time.

To see who’s around you, press F3 to toggle character-ID nameplates above nearby players — handy for reporting an incident, checking someone in for a whitelist scene, or just keeping track of who’s who in a busy scene. It needs line of sight and only shows players within a reasonable distance.

Customising your HUD

Run /hudedit, or open Settings > HUD Customisation from the radial menu, to bring up a drag-and-drop layout editor. From there you can:

• Reposition any movable HUD element to one of nine anchor points on screen.
• Adjust per-element opacity.
• Pick alternate visual styles for status bars, injury icons, notifications, progress bars, and targeting/prompt chips.
• Toggle any element off entirely if you’d rather not see it.
• Reset everything back to default.

Your layout is saved per character, so it’ll be waiting for you next time you log in on that character.

The pause menu (ESC)

Press ESC to open the pause overlay — a branded full-screen menu with an orbiting camera on your character (click-drag to look them over) instead of the plain game pause screen. It opens a moment after you press the key while it pulls your live details from the server; expect a brief … placeholder before your name, character ID, National Insurance Number, date of birth, job and grade, gang/organisation, and cash/bank balance settle in. It also shows current server population and how long you’ve been connected this session.

Along the bottom are a row of cards:

If you’re downed or dead, a restricted version of the card (no Map, no Keybinds) shows — or in some cases the plain native menu opens instead. The overlay also won’t open mid-cutscene or while another system has your input locked (say, mid-minigame); it politely falls back to the native menu in those cases rather than fighting you for control.

Keybinds quick reference

For the full picture — including hotbar slots, vehicle and weapon controls, and the odd action (crew panel, gang tablet, racing tablet, quest tracker) that ships with no default key at all — open the Keybinds card from the ESC pause menu. It’s the single reference for every default in the suite, and a good first stop any time a control feels like it isn’t doing anything. For device-specific screens like the phone and tablet, see Phones, Tablets & Radios.