The Rusty Anchor

The Rusty Anchor is a waterside bar in the Leonida Keys, and you can read its sign in the official screenshot set. There's a timber porch, hand-painted signage, picnic benches out front and palms behind, and at least one person face down on a table in the middle of the afternoon.

Where the Keys cast overlaps

This is where the Keys half of the cast crosses over. Cal Hampton, the conspiracy hobbyist who listens to Coast Guard radio for fun, is placed here. Brian Heder runs a boat yard nearby, and Jason lives on his property.

Every Rockstar game has one of these: a low-stakes spot the story keeps coming back to, which is what makes a place feel lived in and not staged.

It happens often enough to count as a design habit. Red Dead Redemption 2 had the camp, a place with no mission attached to it where the cast just existed and you could sit down. Grand Theft Auto V had a lot less of that, and it's one of the few things people regularly say the later game lost.

Keys dive bars and the boats that drink there

The Keys dive bar is a specific and very real institution. It's open to the water, it has no windows worth talking about, there's a menu of fried things, and the crowd is half tourists and half people who turned up decades ago and never left.

Historically they're also where a lot of the Keys smuggling economy got arranged, for the simple reason that everybody with a boat drank in the same handful of places. The Keys are a hundred and twenty miles of islands joined by one road, and the water's always been the quicker way to bring something in.

That history isn't there for decoration. The story starts in the Keys, the Ultimate Edition parks a speedboat in the game, and Rockstar has built a bar into the middle of it with three named characters tied to the area around it.

A hand-painted sign

The sign's hand-painted, not printed, and it's worn, not new. Rockstar's art department is unusually consistent about this. The age of a sign is how the studio dates a business without narrating it, and the same trick is doing the heavy lifting at the Starlet Motel up in Port Gellhorn.

A bar that painted its own sign and never replaced it has been there a while, and it isn't chasing anybody new.

What isn't known

We don't know whether you can go inside, whether it works as a mission hub, a save point or a meeting place, or whether there's anything to do there beyond drinking. Rockstar has shown the outside and put characters near it, and it hasn't described the place once.