Three heists

A heist is the longest thing a crew does on the server, so every step had to be something the players do with their hands, and something the police can answer.

The usual FiveM heist is a laptop puzzle, a drill with a timer and a payout. It works once. After that it is a wait in front of a door, and the client decides when the wait is over. Freedom Roleplay has one rule for this: every hands-on step is a physical minigame with its own tool. The three heists were also designed not to share their main tools. Pacific Standard is a bank, so it is cards, alarm wiring and a thermal lance. Humane Labs is a lab with a diver's way in, so it is bolt cutters, liquid nitrogen and a hammer. Vangelico is a shop, so it is a sledgehammer, a glass cutter and an angle grinder.

The crew holds up the clerk and clones his staff pass with a 125 kHz card cloner and a blank card, which opens the secure door to the stairs. In the alarm room they can first bridge the vault's vibration sensor: measure the loop with a multimeter, pick the right end-of-line resistor by its colour code and cut the wire. Bridging is optional. A crew that skips it, or gets it wrong, triggers the relocker on the first spark, and the vault door goes from three bolts to five. Police on duty can restore a bridged alarm and keep the bridge as evidence.

Each bolt is burnt through with a thermal lance fed by an oxygen bottle the crew sets down at the door. The bottle stays in the world, so police can seize it. Rods burn down and have to be swapped, and the server takes them from the inventory one by one. When the last bolt is cut, the vault door swings open in about twelve seconds for everyone nearby, including players who arrive later. Inside, a hydraulic spreader forces two barred gates, three cash carts wait to be emptied and ten gold bars of 12.4 kilograms each have to be carried out, two per person. One cart hides a GPS bait pack: whoever bags it shows up for the police every 15 seconds for up to ten minutes, unless they take six seconds to pull the transmitter out.

Humane Labs starts underwater. The crew dives into the drainage tunnel and cuts three rusted bars of the grate, top and bottom, with bolt cutters. The grate's vibration sensor raises the alarm the moment the gap is open, and about 20 armed guards hold the tunnel exit, the basement, the lab and the vault corridor. They attack only players the server has marked as robbers; the scientists put their hands up or run.

The vault door has two lock cylinders, and the lab's own liquid nitrogen opens them. A crew member fills a portable dewar at the lab's nitrogen tank, freezes a cylinder, shatters the brittle core with a hammer and punch and turns the cam with a screwdriver. Every pour lowers the dewar's level on the server, and an empty one means another walk to the tank. Two players on two cylinders are faster than one. Behind the door are cash cases with combination locks, opened by putting tension on the slide and feeling which wheel binds, and cryo vats with twelve boxes each. Only three boxes per vat hold project samples; the rest are controls or empty, and the samples have to come out before they thaw.

The jewellery store is the shortest and loudest of the three. Twenty display cases break under a sledgehammer, two to four good hits on the same spot, and dragging a piece past a sharp edge cuts the hand and drops it. The showpiece case does not break: its glass has to come out with a suction-cup glass cutter. A key card opens the locked room with the safe, which takes either a code with a time delay or an angle grinder that is quicker but eats cut-off discs. Inside are six drawers, with decoy pieces among the valuables.

None of the three trusts the client. A heist only starts once the police call has been written; if dispatch fails, nothing is used up and nothing starts. Pacific Standard and Humane Labs never run at the same time, and Pacific also waits for the smaller bank robbery to finish. Lance rods, nitrogen, grinder discs and blank cards are spent on the server, and a minigame result only counts once, after the server has checked it. Doors, frozen cylinders, opened cases and emptied carts are shared server state, so a player who joins halfway sees the vault as it is.

The rule for payouts is that a harder heist pays more. Vangelico is worth about 300,000 euros and needs four police on duty, Pacific Standard about 400,000 with five, and Humane Labs about 450,000 with five, because it adds a dive and armed guards. Like every robbery on the server, the cash rises with the police on duty: 15 percent more at five officers and 30 percent at six or more. Each heist has a 120-minute cooldown, and Pacific and Humane Labs have a time limit of 25 and 30 minutes, after which the building closes and resets.

Each heist has its own server test suite: 164 checks for Pacific Standard, while the existing bank robbery's 9,215 checks still pass next to it. The new minigames also ran under automated players with human pauses, to prove that a legitimate run never trips the cheat checks: 3,600 runs of the cash case, 2,010 of the cryo vats and 216 of the grate, without a single ban.

The first in-game run of Humane Labs still found two bugs. The heist asked dispatch to keep its call open for 40 minutes, longer than the police system allows, so the grate refused to start; the test stub had not enforced that limit and now uses the real one. Then the vault door, cash cases and vats had no interaction, because the lab's zones only loaded within 20 metres of one point. The range now covers the whole lab, and a client test that failed 20 of its 28 cases passes all 28. All three heists were tested end to end in game before release.