Methodology

Every place on the Leonida Map carries a confidence label. This page explains what has to be true before a label is applied, what we do when we get it wrong, and three cases from one week that show the system working.

What counts as evidence

Only first-party material can put a location at a confirmed tier: Rockstar's own trailers and gameplay footage, its official screenshots, and the copy on its own pages and product listings. Press coverage, community maps and fan wikis are treated as leads. A lead tells us where to look. It is never proof.

We work from Rockstar's own masters, not from re-uploads. Each frame we cite is located to an exact timestamp and frame index in the official file, and the frame itself is stored under a content hash so that anyone can check the pixels we looked at against the ones we describe.

Claims, not records

A location record makes several separate claims: that the place exists, what it is called, which region it is in, where it sits on the map, and what kind of place it is. Each claim is assessed on its own. A record's confidence is the confidence of its weakest load-bearing claim, so a perfectly legible sign does not carry a record to Confirmed if nothing supports where we have pinned it.

Signage is read strictly. A name painted on the building itself is direct evidence for that name. A highway sign pointing toward a district is not: it tells us the district exists somewhere, and we record that as an inference. A watermark, an advertisement or a vehicle livery is never premises signage, however clear the lettering.

The gate

1. Detect. A monitor sweeps official and press sources daily. Everything it finds enters at the lowest confidence.
2. Structure. Findings are deduplicated and turned into candidate records with their source ceiling attached. A press source can never lift a candidate above Likely.
3. Judge. Evidence is assessed claim by claim on a review sheet. A human approves every sheet. The tool recomputes every ceiling at apply time and refuses any verdict that exceeds the evidence.
4. Observe. Media evidence is captured against the official master with exact locators and a per-claim note on whether the observation is direct or inferred.
5. Log. Every verdict is written to an append-only ledger with the hash of the record before and after. Nothing is edited in place.

Names we will not use

Leaked material is never published, cited, or entered into the database. We keep a blocklist of names that exist only in leaks, and every candidate name is checked against it before it is stored. If Rockstar later publishes such a name in official material, an exception is recorded with the official source before the name can be used. Until then it stays out, even when the press is already using it.

Three cases from one week

An alias that came from a leak

Our airport record carried a spelled-out alternative name, with a note claiming it was visible on signage in the reveal trailer. A frame-by-frame check found the sign shows only the abbreviation. The expanded form had entered through a leak-derived map and been laundered into a confident note. We retracted the alias, corrected the note, and logged both changes. Days later the expanded name turned up on a vehicle livery in official footage. That does not restore the alias automatically: the retraction was correct on the evidence of its day, and the reinstatement, if it comes, will be a second dated entry with its own official source.

A diner that was never shown

A diner had been confirmed against a scene in the gameplay presentation. A full sweep of all 26 minutes and 48 seconds found no such scene. The record's own note conceded the setting had first surfaced in 2022, which is to say in the leak. The record was removed from the public map and the name added to the blocklist.

A garage whose source was wrong

A pre-order garage was recorded as named on Rockstar's editions page. It is not; the current page says only that the car has a garage near Ocean Beach. The name is real, but it lives in Rockstar's product description on the platform storefronts. The evidence pointer was corrected and the actual sentence stored as the record's evidence. A right answer with the wrong citation is still a correction.

Positions

Rockstar has published no coordinates. Every pin on the map before launch is placed against community-consensus geography and is approximate. A confidence label on a record speaks to whether the place is real and what it is called, not to the precision of its pin. Since 7 September 2026 that is recorded in the data itself: every record carries a placement field, approximate or exact, and approximate pins wear a dashed halo on the map. The region a place is filed under is part of that placement. Where Rockstar's own material names the region, we record it as evidence; where it does not, the region is our reconstruction and the label does not vouch for it. No record is exact yet. After launch, positions become verifiable in-game and will be corrected against play, and the placement field will change with them.

Corrections

The correction trail is public and permanent. When evidence changes, the label changes, the date is recorded, and the previous state remains in the ledger. We would rather show you a retraction than hide a mistake.

If you can show that something on the map is wrong, write to hello@leonidadaily.com with the official source. Corrections from readers are credited.