GTA 6 Server Launch Day Checklist

Launch days should be boring. If you're reading this guide one month before GTA 6 comes out, your goal is to take the chaos of launch and make it into a checklist you can execute calmly while your community looks on.

Note: multiplayer aspects may change depending on what Rockstar announces from now until November. This checklist is based on the assumption of a self-hosted server route (like FiveM for GTA 5). Should the official multiplayer story take a different route, modify this list accordingly.

Seven days before launch

• Finalise hardware. If you haven't settled on a hardware tier by now, pick the higher one.
• Freeze your ruleset. Stop editing it. Post it on your Discord for everyone to see.
• Perform a full backup test. Don't just take a backup, restore it into a staging environment and confirm the server boots.
• Tell people ahead of time when your soft launch will be. There is nothing more chaotic than everyone speculating about when you are going live.
• Notify your host's support team that you are a launch-day customer. Request a dedicated contact for the first 72 hours.

Forty-eight hours before launch

• Do a full chaos drill. Kill your database. Block a port. Simulate a staff member being unavailable. Measure recovery time.
• Verify in writing that all staff know their role on launch day.
• Warm up your Cloudflare cache. Ensure your status page is live and linked in Discord.
• Validate your monitoring. If an alert fires on launch day, you should get a phone notification, not an email no one pays attention to.

Two hours before launch

• Announce in Discord that you are going into pre-flight. Post the status page URL again.
• Restart the server cleanly. Take baseline numbers: CPU, RAM, tick rate.
• Re-check the whitelist. Test logging in with a staff account, not a founder account.
• Make sure the Discord bot is online. Test its commands.
• Check that backups are running on schedule.

The first hour

• Allow staff and RP testers onto the server first. 10 people.
• Watch the tick rate, RAM increase, and database connections.
• One staff member to monitor player reports. Not taking action on them yet. Just logging for now.
• After 30 minutes of stable tick rate, open to whitelist tier one.

Hours one to six

• Continue adding people in tiers. Don't open the floodgates.
• Triage player reports in 10-minute bursts. Batch similar problems together.
• Don't ship code you haven't tested.
• Snack. Drink water. Nobody makes good decisions when tired. A small launch team beats an exhausted one.

The first 24 hours

• Take notes on everything you decide, and why. You'll forget by Tuesday.
• Perform a thorough incident review at hour 24 with your entire staff. What failed, what was remediated, what is outstanding.
• Share a brief synopsis with your player base. Being transparent builds trust from day one.
• Plan your first script deploy for 48 hours out, not right away.

Things that usually break on launch day

• DNS propagation, especially if you've made any A record changes in the past 48 hours.
• Database connection pools exhausting.
• A noisy script that worked perfectly with 5 people and explodes when you have 50.
• Your Discord bot rate limiting because you failed to set up an application properly.
• A staff member being unaware of where the emergency shutdown procedure is documented.

Related reading

For a broad view of the prep plan, read our seven-month prep guide. For the underlying stack we recommend, see how to start a GTA 6 RP server. For scaling after launch, check out our 32 to 128 slot scaling guide.