K9 Trace

What it is

Search, alert, and find — a professional K9 unit, deliberately non-weaponized, with a bounded search loop and every find handed straight into the ChainLock custody chain. Designed so the scene tightens when the dog alerts, and so it never becomes a chaos pet. For police factions that want K9 to mean procedure. Designed for Qbox, QBCore, and ESX Legacy through ForgeCore. Escrow split publishes at release. In development; performance [measured-pending]; no runtime proof published — pending Shadow bench.

The problem it exists for

Most FiveM K9s are a dog model with a follow command — a cosmetic that trots behind the handler and contributes nothing to the scene. The search that should be the tense center of a traffic stop resolves as an officer typing a command, and the K9 unit, a real specialization in actual policing, is reduced to a skin. When it isn't cosmetic, it's the opposite failure: a weaponized chaos-pet that turns every stop into a mauling.

Why we're building it

A dog that alerts is one of the few mechanics that makes a whole scene hold its breath — everyone watches the animal, because the animal knows something the players don't. We want that moment built as a search tool with rules, not a pet with a bite command. It's also a strangely empty category: in our July 2026 survey of 13 stores, the only K9 item we recorded was a ped/model bundle at $39.99 — an asset, not a gameplay script. No verified price for an actual K9 search system exists in our data (see /guides/fivem-script-prices).

What it's designed to do

Design intent, not shipped behaviour — none of this has been built yet.

• Designed around the search as a scene — a scent trail that can be followed and can go cold, an alert that means something, a find that lands in the evidence record instead of vanishing into chat.
• Designed as a professional tool with limits: deployment rules and handler control, not a combat pet.
• Designed to be performance-bounded from the start, because an AI-driven ped is exactly the kind of entity that gets expensive when it's written casually.
• Designed to hand its finds to ChainLock Evidence and the MDT, so a K9 hit becomes part of the case rather than a story the handler tells.

What is not proven

The section every product page should have and almost none do.

• In development and not purchasable — authored in the studio repo, with no runtime proof published pending the Shadow bench.
• No resmon figure — [MEASURED-PENDING]. An AI ped running trail logic is precisely the kind of system where that number decides everything, and we don't have it.
• The $19.99–24.99 planned band is a target, not a commitment until the studio pricing lock.
• No release date.

What we're building toward

A K9 pacing a lineup of cars, locking onto one, tail rigid — the whole scene tenses.

Current status, stated exactly

• resmon [measured-pending]
• escrow manifest — at release
• framework support — decided at build, published at release
• open-vs-escrowed manifest — published at release, file by file

What to verify before buying any law & order resource

This applies to every product in this category, ours included, whenever it arrives. Hold K9 Trace to exactly these when it launches — and if it fails one of them, don't buy it.

• Ask what the dog actually detects and how. If the answer is a random roll with an animation on top, you're buying a coin flip in a dog suit.
• Ask for the resmon figure with the dog active and tracking, not kenneled — idle numbers flatter AI peds (see /guides/fivem-resmon-script-performance).
• Ask whether an alert is decided on the server. A client that decides what the dog smells can search anyone, or no one (see /guides/fivem-server-security-net-events).
• Distinguish the model from the mechanics. Some listings sell a dog ped, not a search system — know which one you're pricing before you compare numbers.

Universally: ask for the measured resmon figure with its method and date, the exact list of which files ship open versus escrowed, a dated changelog, and the refund window. Four answers. Any of them missing is an answer too.