How death works in FiveM: last stand to respawn

On a FiveM server a script decides what happens when a player’s health runs out: it puts the player down, gives EMS time to revive them and then lets them respawn at a hospital. On ESX and QBCore the default ambulance job does this. Hospital MLOs and EMS clothing packs are maps and outfits; they change none of these rules.

Our Advanced Ambulance Job replaces the default ambulance job on ESX, QBCore and Qbox. The flow here is how it works with its default config.

How it works

1. Injury. Every hit lands on a body part with a type, such as shot, stab, fracture or burn, and a severity. Injuries apply debuffs such as slower movement, aim shake or bleeding, each with its own chance and health threshold in Config.Debuffs. A bleed injury drains health over time until it is treated; a tourniquet stops bleeding on arms and legs.
2. Last stand. A fatal hit puts the player in last stand instead of killing them. They can crawl while a 60-second timer runs (Config.LastStand.time). IsLastStandInjury in client/main_editable.lua decides which injuries lead to last stand; by default every injury does.
3. Death. A player hurt again during last stand dies. A player still down when the timer ends bleeds out and dies. With Config.LastStand.enable set to false, a fatal hit leads straight to death. A dead player can send a distress signal, once a minute at most (Config.DistressSignal); by default EMS get a notification with the street and a map blip. With our Dispatch System and Config.Dispatch set to 'tk', the signal arrives there as a call for the ambulance job.
4. Revive. A medic revives the player with CPR (70% success), a defibrillator (100%) or an adrenaline syringe (50%), set in Config.ReviveOptions. CPR and the defibrillator are limited to the ambulance job by default; the adrenaline syringe has no job list in the config. Once a body is in a body bag, revival is off and only a hospital respawn is left.
5. Respawn. After 300 seconds (Config.Death.time) the player can hold the respawn key for 3 seconds. They wake at the nearest location in Config.Respawn.locations, and 500 in-game money is taken from cash, or from the bank when cash is short. Items and weapons stay by default (Config.Respawn.items.remove).
6. Hospital care. Hospital beds and the medic NPC treat injuries, remove bullets and can revive. Both stop working when more than 2 EMS are online (maxEMSCount).

EMS work between these steps: the skeletal view shows each body part’s health, injuries and bullets, 13 treatment items remove injuries by type and severity, and stretchers and wheelchairs move patients. Staff can run /revive <id>, which is registered as a restricted command, so it needs an ACE permission such as the add_ace group.admin command allow line in the Cfx.re example server.cfg.

What it connects to

• Frameworks and resources: supports ESX, QBCore and Qbox, and a custom framework with setup; ox_inventory, qb-inventory or qs-inventory; ox_target or qb-target. The stretcher and wheelchair model resources must be started in server.cfg.
• Other scripts: they read a player’s state from state bags, such as deathState (0 alive, 1 last stand, 2 dead), isDead and isInLastStand (state bags). The server export revive(playerId, healInjuries) revives a player from another script.
• Distress signal route: Config.Dispatch picks the route, and SendDistressSignal in client/main_editable.lua, an editable file, holds the code for each one.
• Police evidence: with Realistic Evidence System V2 (sold separately) and Config.UseTKEvidence set to true, removing a bullet gives a fragment police can analyse.

Advanced Ambulance Job has its own bullet effects by body part in Config.BulletEffects: head shots shake the camera, torso and leg hits can ragdoll, and arm wounds shake the aim. Bullet Effects is a separate script that sits beside the ambulance job a server already runs. It comes as an ESX package and a QBCore package that also runs on Qbox. In the ESX package, Config.ReviveEvent names the revive event it listens for (esx_ambulancejob:revive by default), and Config.ReviveRemoveBullets decides whether a revive clears the bullets.

What to check before you choose

• What runs death now. On ESX, esx_ambulancejob holds the death screen and the respawn and bleed-out timers, and the ESX docs say its death handling will move into es_extended (ESX docs, read 19 October 2026). On QBCore, qb-ambulancejob holds the EMS job and death and wound logic. On Qbox, qbx_medical tracks health, damage and status effects. Know which resource handles death on your server before you add another death script.
• Your timers and costs. Decide the last stand time, the respawn wait, the respawn cost and whether a respawn removes items, then set them in config.lua.
• Who may revive. Each revive option has its own jobs, grade and success chance.
• Your hospital map. Hospital locations default to Gabz Pillbox Hospital and can be moved to any MLO in the config.

The Advanced Ambulance Job showcase runs 5:45 and was published in December 2025, so later updates may differ from it. On a test server with the default config, down a player and time it: 60 seconds of last stand, then a 300-second wait before the respawn key works.