BenzyPlates — Plate Reference

Everything about GTA’s plate designs: which is which, how to identify them on your own server, the image specs, the Chop Shop DLC plates, and the advanced normal-map option. If you only read one doc, read this one — it’s what makes “which image replaces which plate” unambiguous.

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The plate designs

There are 13 license-plate designs: the six standard ones (on every build) and seven from GTA Online’s Chop Shop update (game build 3095+, see below). Each has a fixed texture name that BenzyPlates matches on, so identification is always exact. The index is the game’s own number for that design (what vMenu shows).

Index	Plate design	Texture name	Default image file	Default
0	Blue on White 1	plate01	0_blue_on_white_1.png	on
1	Yellow on Black	plate02	1_yellow_on_black.png	on
2	Yellow on Blue	plate03	2_yellow_on_blue.png	on
3	Blue on White 2	plate04	3_blue_on_white_2.png	on
4	Blue on White 3	plate05	4_blue_on_white_3.png	on
5	North Yankton	yankton_plate	5_north_yankton.png	on
6	eCola	plate_mod_01	6_ecola.png	off
7	Las Venturas	plate_mod_02	7_las_venturas.png	off
8	Liberty City	plate_mod_03	8_liberty_city.png	off
9	LS Car Meet	plate_mod_04	9_ls_car_meet.png	off
10	LS Panic	plate_mod_05	10_ls_panic.png	off
11	LS Pounders	plate_mod_06	11_ls_pounders.png	off
12	Sprunk	plate_mod_07	12_sprunk.png	off

• Blue on White 1 / 2 / 3 are the three standard San Andreas civilian plates — white background, blue text. They differ only in subtle details (spacing/wear), which is why it’s worth identifying them in-game (below) rather than guessing.
• Yellow on Black and Yellow on Blue are the two colored variants.
• North Yankton is the pale, snowy plate from the game’s prologue.
• eCola, Las Venturas, Liberty City, LS Car Meet, LS Panic, LS Pounders, Sprunk are the seven Chop Shop DLC plates — base-game content, but only on game build 3095+ (see the dedicated section below).

Honest note on the indexes. Different community lists occasionally number the three “Blue on White” designs in a different order. BenzyPlates replaces by texture name, which is never ambiguous — but if you care exactly which white plate is which, identify it in-game (below) and trust your eyes. You can also remap any index↔texture pairing freely in Config.Plates.

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The Chop Shop DLC plates (build 3095+)

Indices 6–12 (plate_mod_01–plate_mod_07) are the seven plates GTA Online added in the Chop Shop update — eCola, Las Venturas, Liberty City, LS Car Meet, LS Panic, LS Pounders, and Sprunk. They’re part of the base game files (no add-on needed), with two conditions:

• Game build 3095+. These textures only exist when your server runs game build 3095 or newer. Set it in server.cfg:

  sv_enforceGameBuild 3095

  (Any higher build works too.) On an older build the textures aren’t present, so these entries do nothing — no error, the plate stays stock. The standard six (0–5) are unaffected and work on every build.
• Off by default. Unlike the standard six, these ship with enabled = false in Config.Plates, because each is a nicely-designed branded plate you may want to keep. Replacing them is opt-in: set enabled = true and drop your image into plates/ only for the ones you’re making art for.

Everything else is identical to the standard plates — same plates/ folder, same 512×256 size, same per-plate Config.Plates entry, same runtime swap.

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Identify each design in-game (recommended)

The placeholder images that ship with BenzyPlates make this easy — each one prints its own slot right on the plate (the index and design name across the top, <texture> · replace me across the bottom). So:

1. Start BenzyPlates with the included placeholder images still in plates/.
2. Look at vehicles in the world. Each plate you see tells you, on its face, exactly which design and file it is — as traffic spawns you’ll come across them.
3. To check a specific one on demand, change a vehicle’s plate design the way your server already does it — a mod shop / Los Santos Customs, a plate menu, or whatever plate-changing resource you run — and read the label on the result.
4. Now you know which file maps to which design on your build. Replace those files with your art and restart.

This is why the placeholders are labeled: they turn “which is which” into something you simply read off the plate, with no guesswork and no extra commands.

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Image specifications

Spec	Value
Format	PNG
Size	512 × 256 (the size of templates/template.png; a 2 : 1 plate)
Color	Full‑color RGB; the plate shows on an opaque surface

Build your art on the included templates/template.png — it's the blank plate (white, rounded border, two screws on top) at the exact size, so anything you draw lines up with the real plate. The shipped placeholders are all made this way.

Tips:

• Start from the template. Open templates/template.png, add your design, export a 512×256 PNG. Keeping that size means no stretching.
• Keep the center readable. The plate’s number/letters are drawn by the game on top of your image, so leave the middle legible — exactly like the placeholders do.
• One image per design. Each entry in Config.Plates points at one file via its image field. Keep the default file names or set your own.

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Normal maps

A normal map is the blue-ish image that shapes the plate’s surface — the raised border and the screw bumps, not the colors. BenzyPlates ships one, templates/plateNormals.png (copied into plates/ as the working file), and applies it to every plate by default through Config.DefaultNormal. That’s what makes the plates sit on the vehicle like real, screwed-on plates that match the template.

You normally never touch this. When you do, the per-plate normal field controls it:

normal value	Effect
nil (default)	Use the shared Config.DefaultNormal (plateNormals.png).
'somefile.png'	Use that file as this plate’s normal map (put it in plates/).
false	No normal-map swap for this plate — keep its untouched base-game normal.

To change it for every plate at once, edit Config.DefaultNormal — set it to '' to apply no normal map at all and keep each plate’s base-game one. Custom normal files live in plates/ (shipped by the plates/*.png wildcard). If a normal file is named but missing, BenzyPlates keeps that plate’s base-game normal and notes it in the console.