Speculatively plotting GTA 6's map is a painstaking, exhausting, and heroic effort: 'We had 10 people search every street in StreetView, this took weeks—and failed'

If you're a Grand Theft Auto-enjoyed, the painstaking wait for GTA 6 likely seems like a lifetime. Sitting on our hands, watching the clock, marking huge Xs on the calendar day-by-day—May 26, 2026 cannot come quick enough. For one GTA community, though, this is the busiest they've ever been.

Founded in the run-up to GTA 5 well over a decade ago, the Landmarks Map project serves to plot out key Grand Theft Auto locations, and, over the last few years, has turned its attention squarely to Rockstar's next marquee open-world crime simulator outing.

Robert, who goes by the GTAForums pseudonym of lxr, is one of the group's active members—one of 20+ so-called "very active" participants, among a collective of hundreds—who joined in the pre-GTA 5 days, and who's back piecing together number six today. By pouring over the trailers, screenshots, official artwork, and the minute details of the infamous 2022 leaks, lxr offers a glimpse at the amount of effort that goes into the Open Source venture.

"Collectively, we've put in many, many thousands of hours into our work," says lxr. "The core members of the community really know every frame of the footage, and every square mile of the map, inside-out. Also, it's rather crazy how well I know Panama City (the real-world Port Gellhorn) by now. It's pretty desolate, and many of the in-game buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Michael... but I really like the place. Rockstar has made an excellent, non-obvious choice here.

"As an example: once, in order to find a single in-game building, we partitioned all of Panama City into 10 zones, and had 10 people search every street in two of these zones, in StreetView. This took weeks—and failed. Months later, long after we had given up, someone else, who had been searching for similar buildings in all of Florida, managed to find it in southern Miami.

"Another cool find was the gas station with the alligator, from Trailer 1. This was not a place we were expecting to ever identify. But not only did someone find it—we were also able to match a neighboring restaurant with a building from a different clip, which allowed us to place the gas station on the map."

Even a cursory glance at the GTAForums thread illustrates a wealth of fascinating research and discovery, as lxr and his peers meticulously map out a game that's still several months from release.

Lxr namechecks the likes of Fido, "who started it all"; Dupzor, who publishes the community map; RickRick, who maintains a 3D model of Leonida with hundreds of buildings; Jaxrud, who is transforming screenshots into Blender models; and martipk, who has made an ultra-detailed map of the Keys. LongLongTime is another key contributor whose forte is discovering hidden clues within the leaks, while Saukko505 runs what lxr considers to be the best mapping-related GTA YouTube channel. Lxr's own esteemed contributions have come by way of a custom triangulation framework, written in Python.

Add all of that to the community's Discord-based peer review system, whereby members must agree on the veracity of suggested locations, and the sophistication of the Landmarks Project is clear. Lxr adds: "Successfully viewing, comparing, triangulating and then having a location confirmed by the group… that is, of course, very satisfying. But to properly triangulate buildings and camera positions in 3D is actually quite hard—and I learned a lot of math I wasn't fluent in before.

"In principle, what we're doing borrows a lot from machine learning: we're learning optimal positions by minimizing the compound error of observed landmark locations. We start with known camera positions from the leaks, we try to triangulate a few buildings. Then we can use these to triangulate unknown camera positions from the trailers or screenshots. These give us more buildings, which in turn allow us to calibrate more cameras, and so on.

"At least in theory. In practice, the limited resolution of the footage is always going to lead to small imprecisions, and these tend to snowball. Which becomes immediately obvious, since we're able to render accurately placed 3D models into the screenshots."

As of July, 2025, the Landmark Maps team already has accurate maps of GTA 6's major urban centres, including, as lxr outlines, Vice City, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, Watson Bay, Hamlet and Key Lento. Even with information gleaned from the leaks, however, the Landmarks Project is yet to earmark much of the game's proposed rural areas, including the northern and north-eastern parts of the Leonida sprawl.

From the outside looking in, I find it fascinating how much time, effort and application goes into a hobbyist project such as this one, especially when the answers to every single one of the group's queries are less than a year away. As someone who revels in the wonder of exploring new virtual worlds, the whole thing isn't for me, but lxr's response to anyone who may accuse the group of spoiling the surprise is, to me, both endearing and refreshing.

"Now that I'm mapping GTA for a second time, with 13 years in between, I realize that 'mapping GTA' is actually my favorite part of GTA," says lxr. "It's an online multiplayer game, with the opportunity to explore, and become intimately familiar with, the map of the most anticipated game in history, years in advance.

"Think of it as early access. And the ultimate goal is to identify every single building in the game, and to document the progress. This will take years—it's like another game-within-the game, but with an almost infinite supply of content. It's going to be hard for the official story mode to beat that.

"So when the game comes out, others are going to 'explore', and that's fine. But I'm going to head straight to my favorite place, the Miami Marine Stadium, sit down on the stairs, look across the water, and probably feel the biggest type of achievement that is unlockable in GTA 6."