Welcome to my GTA: San Andreas Modding Guide and Modlist.
In this guide, you’ll learn the basics of installing mods, good practices, which mods to avoid, and which ones are worth your time — all while staying up to date with the best creations from the community.

Read First

Read every single readme.txt from the mods you install, read the mod pages, and read this entire guide carefully.
Most installation problems (about 90%!) happen simply because people skip the instructions. Nowadays, no one wants to read anything — and that’s exactly why things break.

So here’s the deal:
If you don’t take the time to read everything properly, I will NOT provide support.

Got it? Good.
Now let’s get started.

Overview

This guide will walk you through the basics of GTA: San Andreas modding, providing recommendations for what to install on a clean game setup, aiming for a Vanilla+ experience. It’s not a strict modlist — most mods mentioned here are optional and depend on your personal preferences.

Much of the early structure of this guide is based on the excellent First Steps tutorial by Junior_Djjr at MixMods. This work wouldn’t be possible without his original documentation and contributions to the modding community. The general organization of this guide also takes inspiration from The Phoenix Flavour for Skyrim — one of the best-structured modding guides ever made.

I won’t explain how to obtain or install the base game here — there are plenty of tutorials online, including one on MixMods.

If you have read everything, you can proceed to the Prerequisites