🛡️ Factions and the MDC

What it is

A faction is an organisation with a purpose beyond selling things: a police department, a fire service, a hospital, a government, a court, a news network, a gang, a cartel, a motorcycle club. Factions have ranks, a bank, a stash, a fleet, a radio channel, a chat channel, duty, and leaders who decide who joins and who leaves. They are the backbone of long running roleplay on the server: the arrests, the trials, the turf, the news reports and the emergencies all come from factions doing their jobs against each other.

Factions come in types. Government, law and emergency factions are legal: they go on duty, draw equipment from a loadout, and their law enforcement members use the Mobile Data Computer, the MDC, to run people, vehicles, warrants and cases. Gangs and the illegal side of "other" factions are managed through Illegal Faction Management, have labs, corners and supply drops, and have a different relationship with the police. Companies are separate: see Companies.

The two staff teams behind the scenes are Legal Faction Management (LFM) for the government, law and emergency factions and Illegal Faction Management (IFM) for the criminal ones. Both work through applications, reviews and Discord; players deal with them when they want to found a faction or when something needs a ruling.

The factions

The live list changes as factions are founded, merged and closed. The Los Santos Police Department is suspended at the moment. /finfo shows your own faction's details; the Official Discords channel on the main Discord lists every faction server with an invite.

How to start

Joining. Factions recruit in character. Police departments run application processes on their own Discords and academy days in game; gangs recruit on the street, through friends, or by noticing you. When a faction takes you on, a member with the Invite permission types /factioninvite with your id or name and you are added at the lowest rank at once, with a notification: "You have been invited to Los Santos Police Department!" There is no accept step, so make sure you actually want in before you say yes to the recruiter.

Leaving. /fleave steps you down from your active faction. You will need a fresh invite to come back.

Founding a faction. New factions go through the faction management teams. Legal factions are created by LFM through an application and a review; illegal factions through IFM. Ask on the main Discord for the current process, and read Staff and support for who to talk to.

Ranks. Every faction has a ladder of ranks with a level and a set of permissions (invite, kick, promote, bank, fleet, stash, and for law factions an MDC access level). The boss is simply whoever holds the top rank. Leaders edit ranks, including their own, from the faction panel; the top rank always stays above every other rank and always keeps the power to promote, so a faction cannot lock itself out of its own ladder.

Step by step: your first duty

1. Open the panel

   /fmanage (or /faction) opens the faction management panel: members, ranks, the bank, the fleet, the stash and your faction's settings. Read the rank ladder so you know who outranks whom.

2. Go on duty

   /duty opens your duty loadout: pick your equipment and clock on. Your character is now on duty for the faction, which turns on the radio, the faction's vehicles and, for law enforcement, the MDC. /dutyoff clocks off. Legal factions measure activity in duty hours, so this is also how your attendance is counted.

3. Tune the radio

   /setslot <1-6> tunes your radio to one of your faction's slots; /setslot alone lists them. /r <message> broadcasts on the tuned frequency, or on the faction's main channel if you have not tuned one. /f <message> is faction chat, out of the radio, for everyone in the faction.

4. Show your badge

   /badge shows your badge to the people around you. For law enforcement it is how you identify yourself at a stop; for everyone else it is the faction's card.

5. Know your emergency button

   /panic triggers the panic button for government, law and emergency members: your position goes to every colleague on duty. Use it when you are in trouble, not when you are bored.

6. Check your activity

   /fas shows your Faction Activity Score: your eligible faction hours over the last 30 days divided by 30, with your 30 day and 7 day hours, active days and the faction's requirement if it has one. Legal factions count duty time; gangs count presence in the city. AFK time counts for nothing.

Money and kit

Every faction has a bank. /factionbank shows the balance, /factiondeposit puts money in, and withdrawal is a rank permission. /factiontransactions prints the history. Faction leadership adds vehicles to the fleet with /factionfleet while sitting in one, and members with the fleet permission can drive them. Legal factions build the loadouts that /duty issues with /loadout, so a patrol officer and a detective can clock on with different kit.

Illegal factions receive resources through IFM drops, which are requested by leaders and approved by staff, and run their own economy through labs, corners and suppliers. That side is described from the player's view in Drugs and in full in the in-game handbook for the ranks that need it.

The MDC

The Mobile Data Computer is the police database. On duty law enforcement open it with /mdc. What an officer can do inside depends on the MDC access level of their rank: lookup, standard or full. Lookup ranks can search people, vehicles and companies, read the penal code, and see warrants and BOLOs. Standard ranks can add notes and flags to a person, read phone details, issue fines and charges, request warrants, create BOLOs, run dispatch, write reports, work cases and evidence, and book prisoners. Full access is for supervisors: reviewing, serving and withdrawing warrants, expunging records, reviewing reports and seeing who has looked someone up.

What that means for you, whoever you are:

• Your person record holds your name, licences, criminal record, active warrants, flags and notes officers have added. A note about the way you drove off from a stop stays until an officer removes it.

• Your vehicle record holds the plate, the VIN, the odometer and any illegal modifications found on a search. A scratched VIN with mismatched plates makes the car unidentifiable, and that itself is a red flag.

• Warrants and BOLOs are how officers find you later. A warrant is on your record until it is served or cancelled; a BOLO is a lookout for a person or a vehicle.

• Cases tie evidence, statements and people together for court. The Superior Court reads them.

• Bookings happen through the MDC when you are arrested: the charges, the sentence and the cell. See Custody and the law.

Every MDC action is audited with the officer's name, so a search on someone with no reason is visible to the department's leadership and to staff. If you think you have been looked up without cause, that is a complaint for the department in character and, if it goes nowhere, for staff through a report.

Some law factions do not have the MDC: the fire service, the Medical Examiner and the National Guard do their work through other tools, and Legal Faction Management can switch a faction's access on or off.

Emergency services

Police, fire and EMS share a set of tools for working calls. Most of them only do something when you are on duty in the right faction.

Scenes and callouts. The city raises its own incidents: NPCs get into trouble and call 911, and there are 72 interactive callouts that react to what responders say and do. /onscene opens the scene panel for the call you are standing on, with the actions your service can take, from talking to a witness to arresting someone. NPCs from calls can be run on the MDC by name, phone number, ID, plate or owner, and an arrested NPC can be taken into custody and booked in. See Custody and the law.

EMS and casualty care.

Fire and utilities. /isolate [id] isolates the nearest utility incident (a gas leak, a burst water main, a downed power line or a transformer) for the fire service or utility crews.

The Emergency Services Portal. /esp opens the portal for EMS and LSFD members on duty. Doctors use it to prescribe medicines, including repeat prescriptions for long-term conditions; see Hospitals and medicine.

ALPR and dispatch sounds. With the ALPR scanner switched on (/alpr), it reads the plates of the vehicles around you and alerts you to hits. /alprhistory opens your scan history and hits, /alprmute mutes the hit alert sound, and /dispatchmute mutes dispatch call sounds.

Faction Discords

Every official faction has its own Discord server, and the bot keeps the invites current in the Official Discords channel on the main server. Departments run their applications, rosters, training and internal comms there; gangs use theirs for the same thing with fewer forms. Joining a faction's Discord is normally the first step to joining the faction. See Official Discords.

Tips

Related commands

Worked example

See also

• Custody and the law for the arrest, booking and jail side of the MDC.

• Drugs for the illegal faction economy from the player's view.

• Companies for the difference between a faction and a business.

• Official Discords for every faction server.

• Hospitals and medicine for prescriptions and hospital care.