FiveM garage: owned_vehicles and player_vehicles, missing cars fixed

Typical symptoms:

You bought a car, and the garage says "No vehicles". Or the car was parked at the street, the server restarted, and it is gone.

Almost every garage script reads the same thing: one table with a row per owned vehicle. When a car is missing, the row is wrong, not the script. This article explains the two standard tables, what the stored and state columns mean, and the SQL that fixes the usual cases.

#The two tables

ESX uses owned_vehicles. QBCore and QBox use player_vehicles. The names are the same across servers, the exact columns depend on your version and your garage script, so look at yours first:

DESCRIBE owned_vehicles;
DESCRIBE player_vehicles;

#ESX: owned_vehicles

The main columns in ESX Legacy:

Garage scripts add their own columns, for example for the garage name or a pound state.

#QBCore and QBox: player_vehicles

QBox uses the same table with the same ideas. Other columns, like finance data, vary.

#Properties as JSON

The vehicle column on ESX and the mods column on QBCore hold the appearance and tuning of the car as JSON: colours, mods, wheels, plate, extras, neon, and so on. A garage reads it when you take the car out, and writes it again when you store it.

-- when storing, on the client
local props = lib.getVehicleProperties(vehicle)
TriggerServerEvent('my_garage:store', plate, json.encode(props))

The JSON must be valid. If a script wrote a broken string, the car cannot be restored and spawns stock or not at all. The article on vehicle properties shows how to build and apply them.

#Vehicles missing from the garage

Run these in order.

#1. The row exists but belongs to someone else

The garage list filters by owner. If the owner value is not the one the server uses for your character, the row is invisible:

SELECT owner, plate, stored FROM owned_vehicles WHERE plate = 'MIC 001';

SELECT citizenid, license, plate, state FROM player_vehicles WHERE plate = 'MIC 001';

Compare the owner with your real character:

• ESX: the identifier in users.identifier for that character. With a multicharacter script it can carry a prefix such as char1:, and a vehicle bought before you installed multicharacter has the old value without it.
• QBCore and QBox: the citizenid in the players table.

After a framework change, an import from another server or a manual insert, this is the most common cause. Fix it by pointing the row to the right value:

UPDATE owned_vehicles SET owner = 'char1:abcdef...' WHERE plate = 'MIC 001';
UPDATE player_vehicles SET citizenid = 'ABC12345' WHERE plate = 'MIC 001';

Replace the values with the real ones from your tables.

#2. The state is stuck "out"

A car that you took out and that never came back, for example after a crash or a restart, stays marked as out. The garage only lists stored cars.

ESX, set the stored flag back:

UPDATE owned_vehicles SET `stored` = 1 WHERE `stored` = 0;

QBCore and QBox, set the state to garaged:

UPDATE player_vehicles SET state = 1 WHERE state = 0;

Warning: on a live server this also stores cars that players are driving right now. Run it at startup, or limit it with a WHERE on one plate or one owner.

Many servers run a cleanup like this automatically when the resource starts, since after a restart no vehicle can still be out. If yours does not, you can do it yourself:

-- server side, runs when the garage resource starts
AddEventHandler('onResourceStart', function(resource)
    if resource ~= GetCurrentResourceName() then return end
    MySQL.update('UPDATE player_vehicles SET state = 1 WHERE state = 0')
end)

Note the backticks around stored in the ESX query: stored is a reserved word in MySQL and fails without them. Some scripts then send these cars to an impound state instead of the garage, so check what your garage expects.

#3. The garage id does not match

On QBCore the garage column says which garage the car lives in. A garage named in your config that is not in the row, or a renamed garage, shows nothing. List the values in use:

SELECT garage, COUNT(*) FROM player_vehicles GROUP BY garage;

Set the cars to a garage that exists in your config.

#4. The car type does not match

Garage scripts separate cars, boats and aircraft by the type column or the vehicle class. A boat saved as car never shows in the boat garage.

#Plates

The plate links the world, the database and the keys. Keep these rules:

• The plate is unique per row. A duplicate causes the wrong car to load.
• The plate is at most 8 characters in the game, the column can be longer on ESX.
• Spaces count. MIC 001 and MIC001 are two plates, so use one format.

For keys, see vehicle keys.

#Add a car to a player by SQL

You can give a vehicle by inserting a row. Take the column list from your own DESCRIBE, since a missing required column makes the insert fail:

INSERT INTO owned_vehicles (owner, plate, vehicle, type, `stored`)
VALUES ('identifier-here', 'MIC 001', '{"model":-1130810103,"plate":"MIC 001"}', 'car', 1);

The model in the JSON is the model hash, not the name. Your framework or your garage usually has a command or a function that does this properly, which is the safer way when it exists.

#Checklist