You fight your way through a tough mission in Grand Theft Auto 5, the cutscene wraps up, and you are already thinking about how that new outfit or weapon will change your next job, maybe even planning to buy GTA 5 Money so you can kit everything out properly, then you open the menu and the reward just is not there, and for a second you start wondering if your save is broken or if the game has eaten your progress again.

Wardrobe unlocks that never show up

Missing clothes after a mission is probably the most common complaint, and it often has nothing to do with a real bug, because the game is a bit picky about when it actually locks in the reward, and if you switch from Franklin to Michael or Trevor the moment the cutscene ends, before that little spinning save icon appears, the autosave can miss the unlock flag entirely so the new suit never gets added to the wardrobe list, which makes it feel like the game lied to you.

The easiest way to fix this is to replay that mission and force the game to take its time, so let the mission complete, drop back into normal control and just hang around for a few seconds until you clearly see the autosave icon pop up, do not hit quick restart, do not pull up the character wheel, and once the save is done, go straight back to the right safehouse for that character, because Michael's clothes live in his own closet, Trevor's in his trailer, Franklin's in his home, and they do not magically sync across wardrobes even if the reward text sounded shared.

Weapons locked behind odd triggers

Weapon unlocks can be even more confusing, because Ammu-Nation looks like it should sell you everything if you have cash, but the shop stock is tied to story beats, so until you push the plot far enough that specific guns are allowed, they simply will not appear on the shelf no matter how much money you are sitting on, which makes a lot of players think their game version is bugged or their save file is out of date.

There is a trick a lot of people miss, though, because some weapons need to be picked up in the world first before the game treats them as properly owned, and if you grab a rare rifle or launcher from a mission area, a police shootout or a hidden spawn on the map, the game usually flips a switch so that gun becomes purchasable and customisable later, then it is worth cycling through all three protagonists afterwards because certain weapons initially sit on Trevor or Michael only, and the inventories blend more as the story goes on, so swapping characters and checking their weapon wheels right after a big mission can save you a lot of second guessing.

Special abilities and slow progress bars

Special ability upgrades are another place where people get stuck, since you hammer the ability during free roam and the bar barely moves, and that is because the game heavily favours using those skills during missions, where it quietly throws extra experience at you for burning through the whole bar and surviving the job, so if you really want to level up that ability, you are better off picking a fight-heavy mission and leaning on it hard from start to finish instead of just messing around in traffic or random street fights.

A good routine is to stick with one character at a time, pick a mission with a lot of combat or driving, trigger the special ability whenever it is up, drain it fully, and then focus on finishing the mission without dying or restarting checkpoints, because those restarts can roll back some of the progress you just made, and after a couple of clean runs you should spot real movement on the stat screen instead of the tiny bumps you get from messing around in free roam, which makes the grind feel a lot less pointless.

Checking rewards before you move on

To dodge the worst headaches, it helps to get into a simple habit, right after a mission completes and the game finishes saving, open the stats, check your ability bars, walk into a clothes shop or Ammu-Nation and make sure the new gear has actually appeared so you do not get five hours down the line and realise something never unlocked when it should have, and if you are the sort of player who likes to skip the grind and jump straight into the fun stuff, a dedicated platform for like buy game currency or items in RSVSR can make that smoother, and as a reliable option you can pick up extras through rsvsr GTA 5 Money to push your GTA 5 setup even further.