Make it your department

All the editable files live in one folder, next to your GTA V executable:

GTA V\plugins\LSPDFR\LSPDFR Enhanced\

• Switch the plugin off first. You do not have to close GTA V - open the main menu, pick Disable Plugin, edit your files, then load the plugin again. It reads them as it starts, so an edit made while it is running is not picked up until then anyway.
• Save as UTF-8. Anything else turns accented names into garbage in the menus.
• Keep it valid XML. Every tag closed, every value in quotes. A missing quote costs you the whole file, not one line.
• Copy, then change. Duplicate a whole entry that already works and edit the copy - it is faster than typing one from scratch and you cannot forget a tag.
• Use a dot for decimals. Coordinates are written x="-1183.118", never with a comma, whatever your Windows language setting says.

Ranks do not work like the other files. There are two copies, and knowing which one you are editing is the whole trick:

• Default ranks files\ranks_*.xml - the presets that ship with the plugin. A new career is built from one of these.
• Profiles\<career>\ranks.xml - that career's own copy. This is the file the game actually plays from.

A rank carries its pay and promotion threshold, and then three lists that can each be set on the rank, on a station or on a unit - the most specific one wins:

<Rank>
  <Name>Police Officer II</Name>
  <RequiredPoints>250</RequiredPoints>
  <Salary>28</Salary>
  <Stations>
    <Station>
      <StationName>Mission Row Police Station</StationName>
      <Vehicles>
        <Vehicle model="police" liveries="1,3" />
      </Vehicles>
    </Station>
  </Stations>
  <Units>
    <Unit id="patrol">
      <UnitName>Patrol</UnitName>
    </Unit>
  </Units>
</Rank>

• RequiredPoints - the XP that promotes you into this rank.
• Salary - hourly pay, paid into your account at the end of the shift.
• Stations - where this rank may report for duty, and optionally the vehicles and uniforms for that station.
• Units - the assignments available at this rank. A unit can carry its own pay bonus, vehicles and uniforms.
• Vehicles - model plus optional liveries, written as a list of numbers counting from 1.
• Outfits - the uniforms on the wardrobe screen. Every one has to exist in YOUR LSPDFR install.

The browser editor is a page on this site, but it is not editing a copy in the cloud - it talks to your game over your account and writes the files on your own machine. Nobody else's game is ever visible to it. There are two ways in, and they end up in the same place:

• From the game: open the main menu, pick Rank Editor and press Open in browser under your presets. It opens the page in your default browser, and the game shows the address in case the browser did not come up - on a fullscreen setup it sometimes does not.
• From the site: sign in and open the rank editor from your account.

With the game running, the flow is:

• Start GTA V with the plugin loaded, and sign in to your account in game - the pairing goes through it.
• Open the editor. The bar at the top turns green on Connected, and the editor downloads everything at once: your presets and the stations, zones, uniforms and vehicles it suggests. From then on the game can be closed.
• Pick a preset from the list on the left, or create a new one, and edit its ranks: pay, promotion threshold, stations, units, vehicles and uniforms.
• Save. The file is written straight into your game folder.

The game does not have to be running at all. Without it, the editor works on what it downloaded the last time it saw your game, in this browser - or on nothing, if it never has; then you type station names, zones, uniforms and vehicle models by hand, or load one of your ranks_*.xml files from plugins\LSPDFR\LSPDFR Enhanced\Default ranks files to start from it. A preset saved without the game stays in this browser, marked as waiting for the game, and goes into your game folder on its own the next time the editor connects to it.

There is a safety net either way: before the plugin pulls preset changes into a career, it puts the previous ranks file next to it as ranks.xml.prev. That copy is also what rescues a career when the main file turns out to be unreadable.

One folder per career, holding the officer (data.xml), their bank, their vehicles, their wardrobe, their inventory, the gear they signed out, the reports they filed, and that career's own ranks and settings. The plugin keeps a .prev copy of each file as it writes, so a single failed save is survivable.

If you want to change the world rather than your officer, everything worth changing is in the seven files above, in settings.ini, or in the two rank editors. There is no reason to open a save.

• logs.txt in the plugin folder is the plugin's own log - start here. The previous session is kept next to it in archive logs.
• RagePluginHook.log next to GTA5.exe catches anything that took the whole plugin down.
• A rejected file names itself in the log, along with the entry it choked on - a typo usually costs you one entry, not the file.