The FiveM clothing YMT limit, and how to get past it

What actually breaks

Every addon clothing collection ships one .ymt file per gender — the CPedVariationInfo that tells the game which drawables exist. GTA V loads only a limited number of those per gender, and the budget shrinks with every DLC Rockstar adds.

Go one over and the game does not politely ignore the extra pack. It crashes while loading the ped model, and it takes down every ped of that gender — not just the one wearing your new item. That is the tell: the crash follows the gender, not the garment.

How many slots each game build gives you

The budget is not a straight line — it jumps back up whenever Rockstar reorganises the DLC list. Picking the right sv_enforceGameBuild is the single biggest lever you have.

A single basic clothing pack costs two of these — one male, one female. So on build 3889 you fit roughly one and a half packs before things start falling over.

Why the female ped almost always breaks first

Two reasons, and they compound.

First, high heels and hair modifiers need a creaturemetadata file, and that file burns a slot of its own. In practice those mods are female-only, so the female budget is quietly spent faster than the male one.

Second, Cfx's own bug reports note that crashes in this class are “much more frequent with the female freemode ped”. So the symptom you see is almost never “this female item is broken” — it is “the female side hit the ceiling first”.

How to confirm it is the limit and not the pack

Two tests settle it in about ten minutes.

1. Count your slots. On the server, count every mp_f_freemode_01_*.ymt and every *creaturemetadata*.ymt across all streamed resources. Compare that to your build's row above.
2. Isolate. Start a bare server running only the suspect pack and a spawn script. If it does not crash there, the pack is fine and you are over the limit.

Fix 1 — move to a build with more slots

Free, instant, no repackaging. If you are on 3889 with about three slots and you switch to 2612, you get twenty. Set it in your server.cfg:

set sv_enforceGameBuild 2612

The catch is that a lower build means no vehicles, weapons or map content from later DLCs. Check what your server actually needs before moving.

Fix 2 — merge many items into one collection

This is the real fix. A slot is consumed per collection, not per garment — and one collection holds up to 128 drawables per component type. Ten chains in ten resources cost ten slots. The same ten chains in one collection cost one.

A merged pack looks like this:

mychains/
  fxmanifest.lua
  mp_f_freemode_01_mychains.meta
  stream/
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains.ymt              <- ONE, carries them all
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains^teef_000_u.ydd
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains^teef_diff_000_a_uni.ytd
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains^teef_001_u.ydd
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains^teef_diff_001_a_uni.ytd
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains^teef_002_u.ydd
    mp_f_freemode_01_mychains^teef_diff_002_a_uni.ytd

Rules that must hold or the pack misbehaves:

• Drawable numbers run from 000, with no gaps. Skip one and everything after it becomes unreachable.
• The collection name must be the same string in the ymt filename, inside the ymt, in the meta's dlcName and fullDlcName, and in the ^ prefix on every file.
• numAvailTex is the sum of textures across all drawables of that component, and it is a single byte — keep it under 256.
• Male and female remain two separate collections. Two slots is the floor for a pack that covers both.

Fix 3 — replace instead of add

A replace mod overwrites an existing vanilla item rather than declaring a new collection, so it costs zero slots. There is no ymt and no meta at all — just the model and texture, named after the vanilla slot they stand in for:

mp_f_freemode_01_mp_f_bikerdlc_01^teef_017_u.ydd

It works, but it is a trade rather than a free win, and the official guidance is that addon remains the safer default:

• The vanilla item you overwrite is gone for everyone on the server.
• Replacing a collection can shift later drawable IDs, which breaks other addons and any saved outfit that stored an absolute ID.

Keep replace for the case where you are genuinely out of slots and cannot move build.

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