Blips, markers, and checkpoints
A blip is the icon on the minimap. A marker is the glowing shape on the ground you walk up to. A checkpoint is the logic that fires when you arrive. Almost every job, shop, garage, and interaction in FiveM is built from these three pieces stacked together. In this lesson you place all three at a single coordinate and prove each one: the blip shows on the map, the marker draws on the ground, and a line prints the instant you stand inside it.
The three ways to mark the world
Before any code, get the three layers straight in your head. They look similar in game but they are three different systems and you will mix them up if you do not separate them now.
- A blip is a minimap and pause-map icon. You create it once and the game keeps drawing it for you. It lives in 2D map space, not the 3D world. You set it up and forget it.
- A marker is a shape rendered in the 3D world: a cylinder, a chevron, a ring. The game does not remember it. You have to call
DrawMarkerevery single frame or it vanishes. That per-frame cost is why you gate it by distance. - A checkpoint here means the detection logic: measuring how far the player is from the target and acting when that distance crosses a threshold. We do this by hand with
#(coords - target)rather than the built-inCreateCheckpointnative, because the hand-built version is the pattern every framework actually uses and it teaches you the math.
Keep reading the full lesson
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- Build it
- How it works
- Going configurable: many blips from one table
- Common mistakes
- What you can do now
- Try it yourself
The remainder of Blips, markers, and checkpoints is available to FiveM School members.