Every parking meter on the map is a target. Modul Meter Robbery turns street furniture nobody looks twice at into a complete petty-crime loop: an original lockpicking minigame where your accuracy decides both the payout and whether police hear about it, meter states that persist, area heat shared by every player, witnesses, anti-farm systems and optional progression — built to drop into any Qbox, QBCore, ESX or standalone server.
Qbox QBCore ESX Standalone ox_inventory qb-inventory qs-inventory ox_target qb-target No target needed
Zero location config — it just works
No coordinates to fill in, ever. The script targets the vanilla parking-meter props anywhere they exist — every street corner, every custom MLO that reuses them. Area tiers and no-robbery zones are the only setup, and both ship configured. Optional strict mode: an in-game scan command prints coordinates for a registry if you want airtight validation.
Tumbler Trace — a minigame built for this script
Not a recycled skill circle. A pick sweeps a machined lock channel while you seat the pins one at a time:
- Each tumbler hides a sweet spot somewhere along the channel — press at the right moment and the pin drops into the shear line
- Every pin you seat makes the next sweep faster and its sweet spot narrower
- Pins bind mid-sweep — the pick shudders to a crawl and your timing goes out the window
- Slip too many times and the lock wins
- Four difficulty presets, and difficulty shifts live with police count, your robbery streak, the area tier and how hot the block already is
- Accessibility mode: slower pins, wider sweet spots, an extra slip — and it never changes rewards
- Prefer something else? Fall back to an ox_lib skill check, plug in your own minigame export, or run pure chance
Accuracy is the whole risk model
How well you pick the lock decides what you get and how much noise you make. Playing well is quieter and richer — that is what turns a petty crime into a skill expression:
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Perfect — 125% payout, a bonus item roll, and 20 points off the dispatch chance
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Clean — full payout, 10 points off dispatch
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Sloppy — it opens, but you keep 60% and add 12 points to dispatch
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Failed — the tumbler slips, and the meter may jam solid for half an hour
Meters remember
- Five server-owned states: available, being robbed, cooldown, jammed and disabled — broadcast to every client, so a robbed meter greys out for everyone instantly
- Two players can never work the same lock — the meter is claimed the moment picking starts
- Failure can jam the mechanism, spark, and put that meter out of service far longer than a normal cooldown
- Cooldowns survive prop streaming, because meter identity is derived from the world, not from an entity handle that changes every time you walk away
- Optional persistence: meter cooldowns and area heat can survive a server restart
Four districts, four economies
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Low-income — easier locks, quieter streets, thinner takings
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Downtown — 15% richer and noticeably louder
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Beach & tourist — steady money, the occasional gold chain
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High-risk premium — 60% more cash and rare finds down to a diamond ring, on harder locks that answer fast
- Each tier carries its own loot table, difficulty shift, dispatch modifier and heat rate — add your own in a few config lines
- Time-of-day multipliers: meters sit full overnight and pay more for it
Anti-farm that actually works
- Shared area heat: working one block heats it for every player, raising dispatch odds and cutting payouts, then cooling on its own — with an optional lockdown that shuts a block down entirely
- Robbery streaks raise difficulty and dispatch chance while shrinking the payout
- Payout decay on recent successes, plus a hard hourly cash cap
- Per-meter, per-player and server-wide cooldowns, and hourly/daily limits
- Every one of them enforced server-side, in real-world seconds
Dispatch done properly
Six triggers — starting a pick, failing, succeeding, snapping your lockpick, being witnessed, or hitting three meters on one block — each with its own chance, then modified by heat, streak, district, time of day, bystander count and your own accuracy. Only one alert ever fires per attempt, so police never get spammed. Alerts carry a configurable code (default 10-66), street name, suspect description, and either exact or deliberately blurred coordinates so responders get a block to search instead of a pin on the suspect's head. Bridges for ps-dispatch, cd_dispatch, qs-dispatch, rcore_dispatch, core_dispatch and lb-tablet, a zero-dependency builtin that alerts online officers directly, and an open custom bridge file for anything else.
Optional progression
Off by default — flip one flag for 15 levels and five small perks: steadier hands, tougher tools, better fences, quieter jobs, faster picking. Deliberately modest, so it shaves the edges off the loop without trivialising it. A clean stats panel shows meters robbed, cash earned, picks broken, alerts triggered and active perks.
Requirements
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ox_lib and oxmysql
- Everything else is optional and auto-detected — framework, inventory, target and dispatch
- Runs with no database at all if you want it to: one config section turns every table off
- No map edits, no streamed assets, no audio files
Includes README, INSTALL and CONFIG documentation, an admin toolkit with in-game scan, debug markers, and test commands for the minigame, dispatch and reward tables.
