How to Install Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas and Join a Server

The hardest part of playing Multi Theft Auto today is not the mod. The mod is free, it installs in a few minutes, and it has been maintained continuously for longer than most studios stay in business.

The hard part is having a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that it will accept.

That is the whole first section of this guide, and it is worth reading properly, because almost every "MTA will not install" post ever written comes down to somebody having the wrong San Andreas. Once you are past it, listings for the mod collect on the game's hub and everything works the way it has worked for twenty years.

What Multi Theft Auto is

It is a multiplayer modification for the PC version of San Andreas, and it is far more ambitious than that description suggests. Rather than simply putting several players in the same city, it exposes the game to a scripting system that server owners use to build essentially whatever they want.

The result is that an MTA server is not "San Andreas with other people in it". It is a game somebody wrote, running on top of San Andreas. Roleplay economies with jobs and property. Race servers with hundreds of custom tracks. Drift competitions. Zombie survival. Cops and robbers. Freeroam sandboxes with custom vehicles that were never in the original game.

Two things make that possible. The scripting layer is genuinely powerful, and the client downloads a server's content when you connect — scripts, models, maps, sounds — so joining a server that has built its own world does not require you to install anything beforehand.

The project is free and open source. It has been going, in one form or another, since not long after the original Grand Theft Auto III came out on PC.

The San Andreas problem

MTA needs the original PC release of San Andreas. Specifically the earliest, unpatched version of it.

The versions of San Andreas sold digitally in the years since are not that. They were patched, and the patches changed the executable in ways the mod cannot work around. And the Definitive Edition — the remastered trilogy — is a different game built on a different engine. It does not work with MTA and no amount of trying will change that.

So the situation is:

• An old retail disc copy is the straightforward case. That is the version the mod was built for.
• A later digital copy needs to be brought back to the original version before MTA will use it. The MTA community documents this thoroughly, because everybody hits it.
• The Definitive Edition is not usable for this. Buy it for the campaign if you want to, but it is not the route to a multiplayer server.

This guide is not going to link you to a game download. Old game installers on unfamiliar sites are how people acquire things they were not shopping for, and there is no responsible way to phrase "just get it from somewhere". If you own San Andreas, the community's own documentation covers making your copy compatible. If you do not, that is the obstacle, and it is a real one.

Installing the mod

Once you have a working San Andreas, MTA itself is straightforward. The installer asks where San Andreas lives, sets itself up alongside it rather than overwriting anything, and gives you a separate launcher.

You launch MTA. You do not launch San Andreas and then attach something to it. The mod's own client is the program you run, and it starts the game for you.

A few notes that save time:

Install San Andreas somewhere ordinary. A path with unusual characters in it, or a location the operating system protects, causes a category of failure that is tedious to diagnose.

Keep the single-player game intact. MTA does not modify your San Andreas installation in a way that breaks the campaign, and other mods installed into San Andreas can and do interfere with MTA. A clean copy for MTA is the low-effort answer.

Anti-virus software has opinions. A program that launches another program and injects into it looks exactly like something malicious to heuristic scanning. This is a known and long-standing annoyance rather than a sign of a problem.

Finding a server

The MTA client has its own browser, and it is better than most in-game browsers because the scene is small enough to be legible. Tabs for internet servers, local ones, favourites and recently played. Filters for player count, gamemode and ping.

Two things to understand about what you are looking at.

The scene is genuinely international, and English is not the default. Some of the largest and longest-running MTA communities are Brazilian, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and Romanian. A server with two hundred players on it may well conduct all of its roleplay in a language you do not read, and turning up expecting to be catered for is poor manners. There are English-speaking servers; you sometimes have to look for them rather than sorting by player count.

Gamemode tells you more than the name does. A server called something evocative might be a roleplay city or a drift track. The browser shows the gamemode, and it is the field worth sorting on.

The list here is queried from outside the client, so the player counts are measured rather than claimed. That matters in a scene where a handful of servers have historically been generous with their own numbers — what makes a server listing trustworthy goes through how to tell.

Connecting directly

The client accepts an address. Type or paste the full thing, including the port after the colon.

The port is the part people drop. A host running several MTA servers on one machine cannot give them all the same port, so the numbers before the colon on their own will find nothing at all. If a server is listed as online and your client says it does not exist, that is the first thing to check.

MTA also understands its own protocol links — an address in the form mtasa:// followed by the server details, which opens the client and connects in one action. Server owners put these on their forums and Discords, and clicking one is the least error-prone way to join anything.

Favourite anything you like. Small-scene servers fill at particular hours in particular timezones, and a server that looked empty on a Tuesday afternoon is a different place on Saturday night.

The first join downloads things

When you connect to a server for the first time, it sends you what it needs you to have. On a plain freeroam server that is quick. On a large roleplay server with custom vehicles, custom maps, custom interiors and a decade of accumulated scripts, it is a real download and it happens while you watch a progress bar.

This is once per server rather than once per join, and the files are kept afterwards. If a join appears to hang on a filename, it is working. Leave it.

What the servers are actually like

Roleplay is the largest category by some distance, and the most demanding. You apply, or you read a rules page, or both. Jobs, wages, vehicle ownership, police forces with hierarchies, and a set of conventions about staying in character that regulars enforce with real seriousness. Turning up and driving into a crowd will end your evening quickly.

Race is where MTA started and it never went away. Custom tracks, checkpoints, and a physics model people have been mastering for two decades. The good race servers have map rotations hundreds of tracks deep.

Drift servers do what they say, with scoring, and they overlap culturally with the sim racing scene more than you would expect.

Freeroam is the sandbox: spawn vehicles, mess about, no objective. Best place to get your bearings.

Cops and robbers, zombie survival and a long tail of others each have their own regulars.

If you want a sense of how to read a roleplay server's rules and pick one that suits you, our guide to choosing a roleplay server is written about FiveM, and the reasoning transfers almost entirely.

Every server is a program somebody wrote

This is the mental adjustment that makes MTA make sense, and it has consequences worth spelling out.

On a Counter-Strike server, the game is the game and the server adjusts it at the edges. On an MTA server, the game is whatever the owner's code says it is. The interface you see, the keys that do things, the menus, the economy, the vehicles, the rules of physics in some cases — all of that is script running on top of San Andreas.

So a few things follow.

Controls are not consistent between servers. One roleplay server opens its main menu with one key and another uses a different one entirely. Every server that expects you to know something will have documented it somewhere, and the in-game help command is the first thing to try.

A bug is the server's bug. If something behaves strangely on one server and correctly on another, the difference is code somebody wrote rather than the mod. Reporting it to the server's staff gets it fixed; reporting it to the MTA project does not.

Servers can update while you are on them. Scripts are reloadable, so an owner can push a change mid-session. This is normally invisible and occasionally spectacular.

Server quality varies enormously. A community that has been refining its code for a decade is a very different place from one that started last month with a downloaded gamemode. Frame rate, stability and how much the world actually reacts to you are all downstream of that.

The upside of all this is the reason MTA has lasted. Anybody who learns the scripting language can build something, and the barrier is low enough that a great many people did.

Problems

The installer cannot find San Andreas. Wrong version, or a path it cannot read. The version is the likelier of the two.

The game launches and immediately closes. Usually another mod already installed into San Andreas, or anti-virus intervention.

Connection fails on a server everyone else can reach. Check the port. Then check whether the server has a password, then whether your client version matches what it expects — MTA updates and servers set a minimum.

The download on first join stalls. Some servers host their content poorly. Waiting is the answer; if it genuinely never finishes, that is the server's problem rather than yours.

Terrible frame rate on a busy roleplay server. San Andreas is an old engine being asked to draw a great deal it was never designed for. Turning down draw distance helps more than anything else.

Where this lineage goes

The other San Andreas multiplayer project is SA-MP, which took a different technical route and built a scene of its own — in some regions a larger one. The two have coexisted for years and a lot of communities have run servers on both.

Everything that happened next happened on Grand Theft Auto V. FiveM is where the roleplay scene largely moved, and alt:V is the other framework doing the same job. Both inherited conventions that MTA invented, including the resource-download-on-join model and the entire idea that a server is a program somebody wrote.

The obvious question about what happens next has been asked repeatedly since the sixth game was announced, and we have gone through the evidence in what to expect from GTA 6 roleplay servers and whether FiveM-style servers will exist for it.

MTA will still be here either way. It has outlived two console generations and three storefronts already.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.