How to add supply drops and treasure hunts to a RedM server

RedM supply drops are timed world events: a crate lands somewhere on the map, every player is told roughly where, and the first to reach it keeps what is inside. Treasure hunts are the slower cousin, a hidden prize found from a photo and a riddle. To add them you need a script that picks the place and the loot, starts events on a timer, and tells players. This guide covers how that works, how often to run it, and how to set the loot so it helps your economy instead of flooding it.

What supply drops do for a roleplay server

• They move people. A notification and a map blip send riders out of town at the same moment, and that is where chance meetings happen.
• They create conflict with a reason. Two gangs arriving at one crate is a scene your staff did not have to write.
• They fill quiet hours. A drop runs whether or not a staff member is online, so the server has something happening at 3 a.m.
• They reward exploring. A treasure hunt only works for players who know the map, or want to learn it.

They are small events, not a replacement for staff-run ones. RedM server event ideas covers how to mix the two.

The free way: running drops by hand

You do not need a script to try the idea. A staff member can pick a spot, announce it in character, spawn a crate prop, and give the winner the items with an admin command. It costs nothing and it tells you whether your players care.

The limits show quickly: it needs a staff member every time, the announcement reaches only players who are watching chat, and there is no record of who won what. If players like it, automate it.

How automatic supply drops work

Poggy's Supply Drops (from $3.99/mo) runs both events on its own. A supply drop goes like this:

1. The script picks one of its drop locations at random and one loot entry by weight.
2. Every player gets a notification with the place name and a map blip.
3. Players close by watch a hot air balloon come down from 40 metres and lower the crate. Players further away find it already landed.
4. The first player to hold G at the crate claims it.
5. If nobody does, the drop disappears after 15 minutes.

It ships with 10 locations, from Saint Denis Docks and Rhodes Train Station to Bacchus Station and Armadillo Train Station, so it works the day you install it. Admins can start a drop at any time with /supplydrop, and anyone can type /nextdrop to see how long is left.

How often should supply drops happen?

Each kind of event has its own timer. After an event starts, a cooldown runs, then a random wait, then the next event. The defaults:

Nothing starts until the first player has loaded in, so an empty server does not burn through events. The random part matters: players cannot set an alarm and camp a spot.

Every time in Config.RandomEvent is in milliseconds. 60000 is one minute and 3600000 is an hour. To run drops only when staff choose, turn off Automatic events in /poggy; the admin commands still work.

A good rule: leave the defaults for the first couple of weeks and watch the Discord log. If drops are often left unclaimed, players cannot reach them in time: give them longer with Config.Supply.DropTimeout (900000, which is 15 minutes) or add locations nearer where people play, rather than running more drops.

What to put in the crate: loot weights explained

This is where most owners go wrong. The chance on each loot entry is a weight, not a percent. An item with weight 20 is twice as likely as one with 10. An entry's real chance is its weight divided by the total of every weight in the list.

The default table in Config.Supply.ItemDrops shows how that plays out:

• It has 26 entries whose weights add up to 452.
• Food such as apples, corn and milk has weight 25, about a 1 in 18 chance each.
• Materials such as coal, copper, wood and wool have weight 20.
• Each of the four weapons (Carcano, Rolling Block, double barrel shotgun, M1899) has weight 1, so any weapon turns up in roughly 1 drop in 113.

At the default pace, a server busy all day sees around a dozen drops, so a weapon crate is a rare, talked-about event, which is the point. If weapons feel too common or too rare, change their weight, not the schedule.

Three checks before you go live:

• Every item must exist. The defaults include items like acid, chocolate and big game meat that not every server has. A crate holding an unknown item cannot be collected; the prompt keeps coming back. How to add items to a RedM server covers adding them.
• Think about your economy. A drop is money from nowhere. Raw materials that feed crafting are safer than finished goods or cash. Balancing a RedM server economy has more on this.
• Pick a crate prop that matches. Each entry has a prop, such as p_crateapple01b for fruit or p_boxlrgmeat01x for meat. A wrong model name gives an invisible crate.

Treasure hunts with photos and riddles

A treasure hunt hides a prize at one of 30 ready-made spots. Players type /clue to open the hunt window: a photo of the hiding place, the reward, and a blurred riddle. Revealing the riddle cuts the reward, by 30% by default (Config.Scavenger.UI.CluePenalty is 0.3). So the player who knows the map wins more, and the one who needs help can still find it. An unclaimed hunt disappears after 45 minutes.

Rewards are cash, gold or items, picked by weight from Config.Scavenger.RewardTypes. The defaults are 16 to 80 dollars in cash, or 10 to 30 gold nuggets. For money, use whole dollars or halves such as 16.5; some cent values cannot be rolled and the hunt fails to start.

Adding your own hunt

1. Take a screenshot of the hiding place that hints without giving it away, and save it as a .jpg. A .png shows as a broken image.
2. Copy it into the script's ui/images folder.
3. Stand on the spot, open /poggy, add a hunt, and press use my position.
4. Set the photo's file name and write the riddle.
5. Save and restart the script. /scavengerhunt starts one now so you can test it.

Local knowledge makes the best hunts: a spot your players ride past every day but never look at. New drop locations are added the same way; pick open ground with clear sky above it, because the balloon comes down from 40 metres.

Keeping the race fair

• First hand on the crate wins. There is no splitting and no second claim, so fights over a crate are settled in the world, not by the script.
• Winners stay quiet by default. Config.ShowCollectedByNotifications is off, so the whole server is not told who took the crate. Turn it on if you want rivalries.
• Staff get a record. Two Discord webhooks, one for drops and one for hunts, post each new event and who claimed it. The console command testdiscord checks a webhook works.
• Admins are your framework's admins. poggy_core reads them, so there is no separate list to keep up.

Installing it

Poggy's Supply Drops (from $3.99/mo) needs Poggy Core (Free) 0.13.0 or newer and runs on VORP Core, RSG Core and QBCore RedM. It uses no database tables, so there is no SQL to import. Add ensure poggy_supplydrops after ensure poggy_core in server.cfg. Its config, translations (English, Spanish and French) and the whole hunt window are open files, and every setting can be changed in game under /poggy. Step by step: how to install a RedM script.