Guide · Quiet hours
Keep police RP busy when the city goes quiet
On most FiveM roleplay servers there's a stretch of the night when two officers are on duty and nothing happens. They patrol for twenty minutes, then log off, and the next criminal who logs on finds no police at all.
Why it matters
Police RP feeds the rest of the city. Criminals want someone to run from, EMS want scenes to work, and new players judge a server by its first hour. When officers drift away during quiet stretches, the gap grows: fewer cops means fewer chases, which means fewer criminals, which means even less for the next cop to do.
The fix isn't more content for peak hours. Peak hours look after themselves. It's giving the few people on duty off-peak a reason to stay in the car.
Five ways owners handle it
1. Schedule staff events
A staff member runs a robbery, a pursuit or a traffic stop scenario at a set time. It works well and players love it, but it needs a staff member awake at 4am, and it's hard to keep up every night.
2. Recruit for the empty shifts
The long-term answer. Find out which hours have players online but no police, and recruit officers who play then, often from other time zones. You need data on when the gaps are; see finding your PD coverage gaps.
3. Run an NPC callout script
Callout scripts spawn NPC suspects or scenes on a timer. They're good for single-player style patrols, but they usually run whether the city is busy or not, can pull officers away from real RP, and the NPCs don't roleplay back.
4. Add quiet-hours calls to your dispatch
Instead of spawning anything, send a believable call into the dispatch your officers already use: an alarm at a store, a suspicious vehicle in a car park, a noise complaint. Officers respond, investigate and write it up. The call only goes out when the city has been quiet for a while, so it never competes with a real scene.
You can build a simple version yourself (see adding automatic calls to ps-dispatch). The hard parts are pacing it to how many people are online, not repeating the same call at the same place, and stopping the moment real alerts start coming in.
5. Invite civilians into the scene
The best quiet-hours call is one a real player turns into a scene. If a civilian is standing near the call, invite them to play the caller or a witness. Nobody should be pulled in without saying yes.
What good quiet-hours calls look like
- Only when it's quiet. Wait for a stretch with no real alerts, and stay off entirely when the city is busy.
- Paced to the population. With 5 players online a call every 15 minutes is plenty; with 35 online, real RP should carry the night.
- At real places. Use a list of businesses and MLOs on your map, never where players are standing, so nobody gets accused of something they didn't do.
- Written by people. Calls that read like a real 911 caller. Keep them short and specific.
- Measured. Count how many calls officers actually pick up. If they ignore a call type, drop it.
The quick way: Overshift
Overshift does option 4 and 5 for you. It watches your city, and when police are on duty and nothing has happened for a while, it sends a call into ps-dispatch, cd_dispatch, qs-dispatch, rcore_dispatch, core_dispatch or lb-tablet, paced to how many players are online. It works on QBCore, Qbox and ESX, and the free plan needs no account or licence key.
The defaults suit most cities: a call after 12 quiet minutes, at most 4 an hour, and nothing at all once 40 players are online.