FiveM shells or MLOs for housing interiors
On ESX, QBCore or Qbox, shells suit a server that wants many homes for little mapping work: each property is a door that leads into a separate interior model. MLOs suit a server that wants fewer homes that players walk into through real doors, one mapped building per home. Our Housing System V3 & Shell Creator supports all three frameworks, runs all four interior types in this guide, and includes no shells: by default it uses K4MB1’s free starter shells.
What to compare
- How players get in: a teleport through a door, or a walk through the building’s own doors.
- Who supplies the interior, and what you install for it.
- How many looks you can offer, and whether several properties can share one.
- What an admin or real-estate agent does to add a property.
- What owners can change inside: furniture, walls and floors, or built-in styles.
- When the interior exists on each player’s game.
Shells
A shell is one prop model of an interior with no place of its own on the map. When a player enters, Housing V3 creates the shell on that player’s game, Config above the property’s door (vec3(0 by default). It moves the player inside and deletes the shell when they leave.
Because a shell has no fixed place, one model serves any number of properties. A property is a door on the map plus a key from Config or Config in config/interiors.
K4MB1 released 16 starter shells free on the Cfx.re forum on 15 March 2022, with no script to spawn them. Housing V3 uses them by default, and its README links them. config/interiors also has entries for six more K4MB1 packs, among them Main Housing, Illegal Operations and Garages. The property creator lists only the shells your game can load, so a pack you have not installed does not appear there.
A property whose shell is not installed cannot be entered. Our docs list the error Failed to load model x, and the F8 console prints a [tk_housing] [WARNING] line with Shell models are not loaded, make sure you have installed K4MB1 Starter Shells (link in README, followed by the model name.
Shell Creator builds
Admins build interiors in game with /shellcreator, from floors, walls, doors, windows and stairs on a 2-metre grid, and change them later with /shelleditor. One build holds up to 900 objects, 12 named exits and 8 elevator floors (maxObjects, maxExits and maxFloors in Config).
Builds save to data/shells, and import and export codes move them between servers. Real-estate agents can build too when Config is 'job', 'business' or 'both'; the default is 'none'.
A build needs two things on the server. The pieces stream from tk_housing_props, which you receive on the Cfx.re Portal with the script. Its doors need setr game_ in server to work properly, as the setup page says.
A build enters like any shell, through a door and a teleport. Housing V3 creates each placed piece on the entering player’s game, so a 900-object build creates 900 objects. Watch the Housing V3 showcase on YouTube (20:48).
Game interiors
Housing V3 also lists some of the game’s own interiors, such as the casino penthouse and the CEO office garage, marked isIpl = true in config/interiors. Players enter through a door, as with a shell. They come from the game itself, so there is no shell pack to install.
Owners can restyle an interior that has a customization list from its door menu, at the prices in config/interiors or Config. The casino penthouse, for example, offers four colour schemes, nine wall art patterns and open or closed bars.
MLOs
An MLO is a map interior that sits in the world at one place, with its own doors. In the property creator the MLO type is a “custom map interior, drawn in the world with doors you place”: you draw the house or garage area over an MLO already on your map and place its doors.
Players walk in with no teleport, and the doors lock and unlock in place. Doors of an unowned MLO property stay unlocked while Config. Owners place furniture inside the drawn area, but Shell Creator walls and floors go into custom shells only.
Housing V3 includes no MLOs. You buy or map each one, and each MLO is one building at one spot on the map.
Which fits your server
- Many homes to sell, added quickly, with players who accept a door teleport: K4MB1’s starter shells, then K4MB1’s other packs for more looks.
- Layouts no pack sells, or interiors you want to copy to a second server: Shell Creator builds.
- A few homes with the game’s own styling and nothing to download: game interiors.
- A street players walk into without a teleport, or one landmark house: an MLO per property.
Housing V3 creates a shell, and each piece of a Shell Creator build, as a non-networked object, which the native reference says “exists only locally”: only players inside that property have it. Housing V3 does not create MLOs; an MLO is part of the map your server streams. No frame-rate or memory measurement exists for either type, so compare them on your own server.
In Housing System V3 & Shell Creator each property picks its own interior type in the property creator, so one server can mix all four. To see what your server can load, run /addproperty, choose a type and open the interior list. An installed shell with an entry in config/interiors appears there. If a shell is missing from the list, it has no entry or is not streaming on your server.
