The Leonida map, and the fan project mapping it

Rockstar hasn't released a map. What we've got is six confirmed regions and a few size comparisons. The one with a name on it is Rockstar art director Aaron Garbut's, in Game Informer's 29 September cover story: Leonida's about twice the size of Grand Theft Auto V's map. Earlier previews put it at roughly three times the size of the Red Dead Redemption 2 world, and Vice City on its own is around twice Los Santos.

The six regions

• Vice City, the modern Miami at the centre of it
• Leonida Keys, the resort coastline
• Grassrivers, the Everglades wetland
• Port Gellhorn, the faded holiday coast
• Ambrosia, the industrial interior
• Mount Kalaga National Park, the remote high ground

Three times Red Dead doesn't mean three times the game

Three times Red Dead Redemption 2 is a headline number, and it needs some care. Red Dead's world was mostly empty on purpose, because it was a game about distance and how long things took on a horse. Tripling that area in a game with cars doesn't triple what there is to do, and a huge map with a fast car on it can feel smaller than a compact one you cross on foot.

The number we'd pay more attention to is Vice City being about twice Los Santos. Dense city space is the expensive kind to build, and it's where players actually spend their hours.

The figures don't line up neatly anyway. Edge's cover feature on 29 October, from a Rockstar demo, repeats roughly twice Grand Theft Auto V, and adds that the total landmass is nearly as big as the playable maps of Grand Theft Auto IV, V and Red Dead Redemption 2 put together. That's land, though, not the area you can play in. And a fan on Reddit who measured the explorable land from official material got about 83.2 square kilometres, around 1.7 times Grand Theft Auto V and just over twice Red Dead Redemption 2 (our map size piece). Rockstar's never given a square kilometre figure, so none of these is official.

Fans mapping it from the trailers

Since 2022, fans have been rebuilding the map from official material. The method's triangulation: line up several landmarks you can identify in one shot and you can work out roughly where the camera was standing. Do that across every trailer, screenshot and promo image and a coastline starts to appear.

It's careful detective work on official media, with nothing leaked involved, and thousands of people have pitched in. Two of the projects are well worth a look:

• State of Leonida at map.stateofleonida.net, a single best-guess version of the full map.
• VIMAP, a community hub created by Saam.exe that collects and curates map layers from thousands of mappers.

Both are fan projects run by the people who built them. We link to them and don't copy them, because the work is theirs.

Clues off the road signs

Trailer 2 handed the mappers some road names. Overhead signs read US 35 North for VCI Airport and Ambrosia, I-97 with a spur, I-397, signed for Port VC and Downtown, and Exit 3 for SW 9th Ave, Southside and Peacock Bay (our read of the signs). The Ambrosia sign sits on a causeway at the edge of Vice City, which tells you which way the interior is.

The same 4K read turned up a prison notice signed by order of the state governor, and LEONIDA on the number plates, so Leonida's run as a proper state (everything we read at 4K).

The leaked blockout isn't the map

On 18 September the full archive from the 2022 Rockstar breach, about 192GB, went public. Within about a day modders had loaded an early map of Grand Theft Auto 6 into Grand Theft Auto V on PC, as TweakTown and The Gamer reported (the story). It's a blockout from 2014 and 2015, with no foliage, basic textures and floating labels, some of it from Rockstar India, and it includes areas that were scrapped.

We won't host or describe that material in detail. And it's worth knowing it exists, because a ten-year-old blockout is easy to pass off as the real map. The fan projects above work from official footage only.

What isn't known

No official map has been published, and one probably won't be before release. We don't know the region borders, the road network's only known in pieces off Trailer 2's signs, and we don't know whether the six named regions are the full list. Southside and Peacock Bay, from that one sign, haven't turned up anywhere else. Any map you see sold as final is a reconstruction, however good it is.