How to Install San Andreas Multiplayer and Join a Server

The commonest way to fail at installing San Andreas Multiplayer is to buy San Andreas.

That sounds absurd and it is completely true. SA-MP is a modification that hooks into one specific build of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas — the original PC release from 2005 — and the copies sold today are not that build. Digital storefronts have shipped several later revisions over the years, mostly because the licensed radio soundtrack had to be cut down as music rights expired. Those revisions moved things around inside the executable. SA-MP expects the old layout, finds something else, and refuses.

So before anything else: the version of the game matters more than owning the game. Listings for it collect here, and three of them are on the site as this is written, which is a fraction of what actually exists — more on that below.

Which San Andreas you need

The multiplayer mod attaches to the 2005 PC release. Not the console versions, which cannot run it at all. Not the mobile port. Not the remaster.

The remaster deserves its own sentence, because people buy it by accident constantly. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas — The Definitive Edition is a separate product built on a different engine with different files, and no version of SA-MP works with it. Buying it because it was the San Andreas on the storefront is a wasted purchase for this purpose.

If you already have a disc copy from the mid-2000s sitting in a cupboard, that is the ideal starting point and it is worth digging out.

If you are buying digitally, understand what you are getting into. The community has spent two decades dealing with the version problem, and every long-running server's forum has a thread about it. Read that server's own instructions before you start patching anything — they know which build their players use, and the guidance from a community that has been solving this since 2006 is better than anything generic.

We are not going to print exact patching steps here, because the correct answer depends on where you bought the game and has changed several times. What you should know is the shape of the problem: you need the original executable, later purchases do not give you one, and the fix is a well-trodden community path rather than something you have to invent.

What SA-MP actually is

It is a client modification and a server platform, both written by a small independent team rather than by Rockstar. The client sits inside your San Andreas installation folder and adds a launcher. The server side runs a script written in Pawn, a small embedded language, and that script defines the entire game you play.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. SA-MP servers are not variants of San Andreas with a few settings changed. The script controls the vehicles, the money, the jobs, the police, the property system, the commands and the rules. Two SA-MP servers have about as much in common as two Garry's Mod servers do, which is to say the engine and nothing else.

A server can be a straightforward deathmatch. Far more of them are not.

Roleplay is the scene

The overwhelming majority of the SA-MP population plays roleplay. Not "roleplay" as a loose theme — structured, enforced, occasionally bureaucratic roleplay with an application process.

You pick a character. You get a job, which might be a legal one and might not. There are police factions with ranks and internal discipline, criminal organisations with their own hierarchies, businesses that people actually run, and a property market. Breaking character is a punishable offence on a serious server. So is shooting somebody without an in-fiction reason, which the community calls deathmatching and treats as vandalism.

Some of these servers have been running the same continuous fiction for over a decade. Characters have histories. Buildings have owners who have owned them since before the current staff team joined.

If that appeals, read the server's rules page before you connect rather than after. If it does not appeal, freeroam and deathmatch servers exist, and they are much easier to walk into.

This is the same lineage that produced modern GTA roleplay. Our guide to choosing a FiveM roleplay server covers the descendants of this culture on GTA V, and much of what it says about reading a server before joining applies here without modification.

Installing the client

The client is not on Steam and there is no storefront involved. You download an installer from the project's own distribution and point it at your San Andreas folder. It adds its files alongside the game and gives you a separate launcher to start from.

Start that launcher rather than the game. Launching San Andreas normally gives you single player, which is not what you are here for.

The launcher opens on a server browser, and it is a proper one — a list, a set of tabs and a filter box, all far more usable than the in-game browsers of that era. There is an entry field for adding a server by address. That field is the most useful thing in the application.

Some setups want the game to have been run once in single player before the mod behaves. Doing that costs a minute and rules out a category of confusing failure, so do it.

Connecting to a specific server

Two routes, and one is much better than the other.

The browser's Internet tab lists what the master server knows about. It populates unevenly, and the ordering does not tell you much about which servers are worth your evening.

The direct route is to get the address first and enter it. SA-MP addresses are an IP and a port together, and 7777 is the conventional port — which means a host running several servers on one machine has moved all but one of them somewhere else. Copy the whole thing. An address without its port is the single commonest reason a server that is definitely online appears not to exist.

The launcher keeps a favourites list. Put the servers you like into it on the first evening, because finding a specific server again through the Internet tab is genuinely tedious.

Once you connect, expect the server to send you into a login or registration flow immediately. Most roleplay servers store your character against a username and password held on their side, entirely separate from anything else you own. That account is per-server. Twelve servers means twelve accounts.

What to do in the first ten minutes

Chat opens with T, and commands are typed into it starting with a slash.

/help is close to universal and is the right first thing to type. Beyond that, the command list belongs to the server's script and nothing is standard — the command that opens a job menu on one server does nothing at all on the next.

Read the welcome text that appears when you spawn. It is usually the only place a server tells you its own conventions, and on a roleplay server those conventions are enforced.

If a server has a rules page, forum or Discord mentioned in that welcome text, it is not decoration. Serious SA-MP communities run administration out of those places, and turning up without having read them is how people get a short ban on their first evening.

About that server count

Three listings is not a picture of SA-MP. It is a picture of how many SA-MP servers have been submitted to and approved on this site.

The genuine scene is considerably larger, concentrated on a handful of very old and very large roleplay communities, and much of it lives on its own forums rather than on general server directories. Populations skew heavily towards particular regions, and a server that seems quiet in a European evening is somewhere else's prime time.

We would rather say that plainly than imply a directory listing represents the whole population. If you run one, the hub is where a listing appears, and our note on what makes a server listing trustworthy explains what we check.

The other San Andreas multiplayer

SA-MP is not the only mod that did this, and the alternative is worth knowing about before you commit an afternoon to version patching.

Multi Theft Auto is a separate project with a separate codebase, a separate scripting language and a separate installer. It solves the same problem — multiplayer in San Andreas — with different engineering and a different culture around it. Its scripting is more flexible, its map editor is a real one, and the servers built on it lean in a different direction from SA-MP's roleplay monoculture.

Trying both costs nothing but disk space, and people who bounced off one have often been happy on the other.

There is also an open-source continuation effort around the SA-MP server platform, built to be compatible with existing clients and scripts. It exists because a closed platform maintained by a small team is a fragile foundation for communities that have been running for fifteen years. If a server you join mentions running on something other than the original server binary, that is what it means, and it does not change anything on your end.

When it goes wrong

The launcher says your game version is unsupported. The version problem described at the top. Nothing else is wrong.

The game starts in single player instead of connecting. You launched San Andreas rather than the SA-MP launcher.

You connect and are immediately disconnected. Either the server is full, or its script wants a login you have not completed, or it has a client-side requirement it did not communicate. The server's own forum is the place this gets answered.

The server does not appear in the browser but you know it is up. Enter the address by hand. Master server listings lag and sometimes lie.

Everything runs badly on a modern machine. A twenty-year-old game on current hardware hits problems the developers never anticipated. The community fixes for frame rate and resolution on modern displays are well documented in the same places that handle the version question.

Where this leads

The whole modern GTA multiplayer landscape descends from what SA-MP proved: that a small team could bolt a scripting platform onto a single-player Rockstar game and that thousands of people would build worlds in it.

FiveM is the direct spiritual successor on GTA V, and it is enormous. alt:V does the same job with different architecture. Both took the SA-MP roleplay model and gave it better graphics, and both inherited its habits — the character applications, the whitelists, the very long rules documents.

If you are wondering what happens next, our pieces on what Rockstar has confirmed about GTA 6 multiplayer and whether GTA 6 will have FiveM servers cover the state of that question. The short version is that this pattern — community modification long outliving official multiplayer — has repeated for three games running.

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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. San Andreas Multiplayer servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and San Andreas Multiplayer's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.