Creating Your Character

Everything that happens between connecting to The Estate and your first steps in the city — slots, the creator, and where you land.

Your Character Slots

When you connect, you land on the Arrival screen — a full-screen selector showing your character slots as cards. Each occupied slot shows a name, job badge, and when you last played. You get three slots by default (more if you’ve picked up a donator perk that raises the limit). Empty slots show a ”+ NEW” option.

Tabbing between slots re-poses a live preview of that character standing at their default spawn, with a slow orbiting camera — nothing is sent to the server until you actually commit to a slot.

Creating a New Character

Pick an empty slot and you’ll get an identity panel: first name, last name, date of birth, and gender.

A few rules apply:

Names have a minimum and maximum length, and go through a filter that blocks profanity, slurs, staff/faction impersonation, and troll or meme names — both your first and last name are checked.
Your date of birth has to put your character within a realistic adult age range.
Your full name has to be unique across the whole server — if someone else grabs it in the same instant, the server (not just the screen) will catch the clash and ask you to try again.
There’s a short cooldown between creation attempts, so don’t worry if a resubmit feels briefly blocked after a failed attempt.

Once it goes through, your character exists, you’re handed a small starter kit (see below), and you’re taken straight into the character creator to sort out your appearance — new characters skip the spawn-location picker entirely on this first run.

Choose carefully. Once you’re happy with a name and date of birth there’s no in-game “rename” — you’d need to delete and start that slot over.

Designing Your Look

The character creator opens full-screen in a private space of your own — nobody else can see you while you’re in it. You’ll set your model/gender, sculpt your face and skin tone, pick hair style and colour, eye colour, and dial in details like eyebrows, blemishes and ageing. A scripted camera lets you orbit and zoom in on whatever you’re editing, and every change previews live.

You’ll also choose your starting outfit here.

On your very first character, this step can’t be skipped or cancelled — you finish and save before you’re released into the world. After that, if you ever want to redo your whole look, that’s a separate paid service covered in Appearance, Clothing & Outfits, along with the clothing stores, barbers, tattoo parlours and the surgeon you’ll use to keep tweaking your look afterwards.

Your First Steps Into the City

New characters are given a small one-off starter kit — basic survival supplies and a phone and tablet to get you connected — so you’re not landing with absolutely nothing. Beyond that, your starting cash is whatever a fresh character begins with; don’t expect to be flush.

Depending on how the server has things configured at the time, you might also get a quick pick of your very first room — a short camera-based picker for a starting place to sleep — before you’re dropped into the world proper. If that step doesn’t appear for you, it just means it isn’t switched on right now.

For the fuller walkthrough of what to do in your first session — quests, your first wage, getting a Government ID — see Your First Day in the City.

Picking a Spawn Point

Every time after that first spawn, selecting an existing character takes you to a location picker instead of straight into the creator. You’ll be offered:

Home — if you own a property, this appears as an option pulled straight from your address, see Property & Housing.
Last Location — exactly where you logged out.
Preset public spots — grouped by region (Los Santos city, Sandy Shores/Grapeseed, Paleto Bay), each with a live camera preview and an idle preview of your character standing there.

A few preset spots — Paleto Lodges among them — are locked behind a higher survival skill, shown with a lock icon and what’s needed to open it up.

Confirm your choice and you’ll get a short cinematic push-in, a fade to black, and you’re in.

The Anti-Combat-Log Lock

If you logged out very recently, or you were downed when you logged out, your next login restricts you to Last Location only — everything else shows locked, either with a countdown (recent logout) or a permanent-looking banner until you spawn back where you left off (logged out downed). This is checked server-side, so there’s no way to trick your way past it by picking a different option client-side.

Your position, heading and playtime are tracked continuously, so this — along with Last Location generally — always reflects where you actually were, even through a crash or a server restart. If you disconnect while still on a selection screen (never actually spawned in), nothing gets overwritten.

Deleting a Character

An occupied slot has a delete option. It opens a type-to-confirm modal — you have to type the character’s full name exactly to proceed. Once confirmed, the deletion is permanent: the character, their bank accounts, appearance, job history, inventory, vehicles, and any owned property are all torn down together. If anything can’t be cleaned up immediately, the character stays visible rather than being left half-deleted, and the server keeps retrying in the background until everything’s fully gone.

There’s no undo. Make sure it’s the slot you mean before you type the name.