Why a FiveM weapon is pink, white or untextured

#First, narrow it down

Before changing anything, answer one question: is it pink for everyone, or only for some players? Pink for everyone points at the files. Pink for one person points at their cache. That single answer removes half the possibilities.

#Cause 1 - the .ytd is missing from stream/

The most common cause, and the easiest to check. Open the resource's stream/ folder and confirm a .ytd file is actually sitting next to the .ydr. Packs get repacked and reuploaded, and texture dictionaries go missing in the process more often than you would expect.

If it is missing, there is no fix but to get the original file. A .ytd cannot be reconstructed from the model.

#Cause 2 - two resources stream the same dictionary name

Texture dictionary names are global across the whole server. If two resources both stream a file called w_ar_ak47.ytd, one of them wins and the other's models get the wrong textures - or none. This is why weapon packs from different authors so often break each other.

To confirm it, stop every other weapon resource and restart with only the broken one running. If it looks correct on its own, you have a collision.

The fix is to rename the dictionary so it is unique, which means renaming the .ytd file and updating the texture reference inside the .ydr to match. Renaming only the file leaves the model asking for a name that no longer exists, and you get pink again.

#Cause 3 - the texture is in an unsupported format

The engine reads DXT1, DXT3, DXT5 and uncompressed formats. A dictionary rebuilt with a newer BC7 compression, or with dimensions that are not powers of two, may load without error and still draw nothing.

Open the .ytd in a viewer and check the format and dimensions of each texture. Anything that is not a power of two (512, 1024, 2048) or uses an exotic compression should be re-saved as DXT5 with mipmaps.

#Cause 4 - the resource is not actually started

If a weapon resource fails to start, the model can still arrive from a different pack that happens to contain it while the textures do not. Check the console output at boot and confirm your resource is in the started list, not just present on disk.

#Cause 5 - client cache

If it is pink only for you, or only for players who were online during a restart, clear the cache. On the client that means deleting the FiveM Application Data cache folder; on the server it means bumping the resource version so clients re-download.

1. Fully close FiveM.
2. Open the FiveM Application Data folder and delete the data/cache directory.
3. Rejoin. The first load will be slower because everything downloads again.

#Avoiding it in the first place

Two habits prevent almost all of this: give every weapon a dictionary name unique to your server, and never run two packs that were built from the same source models. Resources exported from our library are given unique names automatically for exactly this reason, and every texture is written back in its original format with its mip levels intact, so a rebuilt dictionary behaves like the one it replaced.