A fan has recreated the Grand Theft Auto VI map inside the city-building game Cities: Skylines II, at a claimed 1:1 scale, and the result is genuinely impressive. It reportedly took around 145 hours of work, it is functional with simulated traffic and citizens moving around, and you can load it yourself with the map ID 153426 if you own the game and the required add-ons.
Of course, this isn't the actual map of Leonida. It's a fan recreation of a fan estimate. It's based on a community map, like the one we have. It isn't based on something Rockstar Games has actually confirmed.
Even so, mods like these are very much welcome. Without much more official information available, having a functioning city you can pan around and move through, with a sense of real scale and density, feels much better compared to an abstract map. More importantly, it's another example of the Grand Theft Auto community doing Rockstar's work for it.
With the studio showing almost nothing, fans have reconstructed the map, modelled locations, and now rebuilt the whole thing in another engine, purely to have something to explore while the real game stays locked away.
What the Recreation Actually Achieved
The Feature | The Detail |
|---|---|
Scale | A claimed true 1:1 recreation of the Mapping Project map |
Areas included | Vice City, Vice Beach, the Leonida Keys, Port Gellhorn and more |
Functionality | A working city with traffic and simulated residents |
Time invested | Around 145 hours of work |
Access | Loadable with map ID 153426, given the right game and add-ons |
What the fan built in Cities: Skylines II and the effort involved.
Unfortunately, there's a real risk having over efforts like this. Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive have a well-documented history of shutting down fan projects they see as stepping on their intellectual property. This particular recreation lives in a grey area, since it is built on community-estimated data inside a third-party game rather than using GTA 6 assets directly. The best case scenario is that it makes it less likely to become a target of another takedown.
We're hoping Rockstar leaves this alone. It's not hurting anybody and it clearly comes from a place of enthusiasm.
Ultimately, as detailed and lovingly made as this is, the actual GTA 6 map will differ from it, possibly in significant ways. Rockstar has not shown the finished map, and the real thing will have countless details, changes and additions that no amount of leak-based detective work could predict. When the official map finally arrives, expect it to confirm what the community got right and to reveal a great deal of brand new information the community could never have known.
So load it up, take the tour, and appreciate the ridiculous amount of effort involved. Just know that the genuine thing sitting in Rockstar's vault, waiting for an official reveal, will likely dwarf it in size, scale, and detail.