Cipher Drone

A deployable police drone for QBox and QBCore — smooth flight, thermal, spotlight, tracker darts and real counterplay.

Website  ·  Setup guide  ·  Releases  ·  Discord

---

Features

• Physical placed drone (no instant spawn flying) with target-to-connect / pack interactions
• Tactical NUI HUD: angular panels, scanline texture, corner-bracket screen framing, segmented meter bars
• Cinematic NUI boot/uplink sequence with a progress bar and scrolling system-check log
• Reactive lock-on reticle (brackets close in and turn red when aimed at a valid tracker target) and a heading-up mini-radar showing active tracker pings relative to the drone
• Heading compass strip
• Smooth mouse-controlled flight, independent camera look from drone yaw
• Configurable speed, acceleration, altitude, and range with a grace period
• Spotlight & thermal modes (tuned see-through fade so it's not a full-building x-ray)
• Tracker dart system: route ping, PD-wide live tracking, rain/water decay, vehicle-bay removal zones
• Shoot-down: drones take real damage and have a scripted destroy sequence (fall, smoke, sparks)
• Jamming: a criminal-side deployable that degrades a nearby operator's control (jitter/drift), not a hard kill
• Minimap follows drone, battery system, job restrictions
• ox_inventory / qb-inventory support

Requirements

• QBox (qbx_core) or QBCore (qb-core) — auto-detected by bridge/framework.lua
• ox_inventory or qb-inventory
• ox_lib (optional but recommended — keybinds and the [E] interaction prompts fall back to native FiveM equivalents without it)

Install

1. Drop the cipher-drone folder into your resources.
2. Add ensure cipher-drone to your server.cfg.
3. Add the drone item to your inventory system — item name is pd_drone (kept as-is from the original release for compatibility with existing inventory configs, not renamed to a cipher_-prefixed name).
4. If you're using the jamming system, also add the cipher_jammer consumable item to your inventory config.
5. Tune config.lua — see the callout below before you go live.
6. Restart the resource.

Configuration

All settings are in config.lua.

Job restriction

Config.General.allowAll = false
Config.General.allowedJobs = {
    police = true,
    sheriff = true,
}

Shoot-down

Config.Drone.canBeShotDown = true
Config.Drone.baseHealth = 200
Config.Drone.damageMultiplier = 3.0  -- effective HP = baseHealth / damageMultiplier
Config.Drone.destroyedFallSeconds = 2.5
Config.Drone.destroyedSmokeFx / destroyedSparksFx

Set canBeShotDown = false to make the drone immune to gunfire instead (invincibleIfDisabled controls that case).

Jamming

Config.Jamming.enabled = true
Config.Jamming.item = 'cipher_jammer'
Config.Jamming.maxDistance = 60.0        -- meters from the jammer to the drone
Config.Jamming.durationSeconds = 20
Config.Jamming.cooldownSeconds = 90
Config.Jamming.intensity = { ... }        -- jitter/drift tuning

The jammer is a fire-and-forget consumable used at the player's current position — no aiming required. It has no blip visible to the drone operator; the only feedback the operator gets is the degraded-control effect and the HUD's JAMMED indicator, by design (stealth is part of the counterplay).

Tracker darts

Config.Tracker.maxDistance = 1200.0   -- meters from the dart's ORIGIN before tracking is lost
Config.Tracker.durationSeconds = 45
Config.Tracker.counterplay.removerItem / removeCommand
Config.Tracker.counterplay.vehicleRemoval.zones

Thermal

Config.Camera.thermalSeeThrough
Config.Camera.thermalSeeThroughFadeStart
Config.Camera.thermalSeeThroughFadeEnd
Config.Camera.thermalSeeThroughHighlightIntensity

HUD

Config.UI.showCompass = true
Config.UI.showRadar = true
Config.UI.radarRange = 300.0   -- meters; tracker blips beyond this clamp to the radar's edge

Turn either off individually if you want a cleaner camera view. The HUD's tactical monospace font (Share Tech Mono) loads from Google Fonts — it degrades gracefully to a local monospace font if the client has no internet access, so it's safe to leave as-is even for offline/LAN setups.

Before going live

• QBox + ox_inventory: qbx_core has no server-side "useable item" registration API (unlike qb-core), so the drone and jammer items won't do anything out of the box. In your ox_inventory item definitions, set client.event to cipher-drone:client:useItem for the drone item and cipher-drone:client:useJammerItem for the jammer item. On qb-core this is automatic via Framework.CreateUseableItem — no item config changes needed.
• Config.Drone.model is a placeholder prop (ch_prop_casino_drone_02a) — verify it spawns correctly on your build, or swap in your own.
• Config.Tracker.counterplay.vehicleRemoval.zones ships empty — add your own bay coords or vehicle-tracker removal won't have anywhere to happen.
• Item name pd_drone is unchanged from the original release; the new jammer item (cipher_jammer) needs adding to your inventory config since it's net-new.
• If you're not running ox_lib, keybinds fall back to native RegisterKeyMapping/RegisterCommand — players can rebind these from the FiveM pause menu keybind settings.

Notes

• Only allowed jobs can use the drone when allowAll is false.
• The tracker's maxDistance is measured from the dart's origin, not from whoever is currently looking at their map — an officer far from the target still sees the blip as long as the target hasn't wandered out of range of the dart itself.
• Shoot-down damage is client-reported (the same trust model already used for battery/range), consistent with the rest of the resource.

---

Documentation

Full setup guide, requirements and troubleshooting: xyralscripts.dev/docs-cipher-drone

Support

• Found a bug? Open an issue
• Need setup help? Join the Discord — check the setup guide first, it usually has the answer

The rest of the Cipher line

All free, all source-available.

Script	What it is
Cipher	modular criminal device for QBox and QBCore — gang ops, blackmarket and boosting in one encrypted tablet.
Cipher MDT	multi-department MDT for QBox — police, EMS and fire with live CAD, records, patient care and a live unit map.
Cipher Admin	advanced admin suite for QBox and QBCore — player management, bans, reports, inventory tools and entity inspection.
Cipher Trucking	civilian trucking job for QBox and QBCore — live route map, truck ownership, fuel and maintenance, and companies.
Cipher MultiCharacter	cinematic character selection for QBox and QBCore — identity dossiers, saved appearances, spawn cameras and configurable slots.
Cipher Dispatch	multi-department live dispatch for QBox and QBCore — responder tracking, priority calls, TAC radio and provider integrations.

License

Free to use on any server you own or operate, including commercial ones. Do not redistribute or resell — see LICENSE for the full terms.