Earlier this week, Rockstar Games released the latest big update for Grand Theft Auto Online. It added a new, large-scale art heist complete with some interesting paintings, as well as the usual assortment of new cars and clothing you’d expect from a GTA Online update. But this update also added two trees on a small hill near a road. And these two trees led to a lot of online anger and confusion about whether they were added to screw players over or help people out.
On July 14, Rockstar released the Kortz Heist update for GTA Online across console and PC. The big star of the update is a new art heist that players can complete either solo or with some friends. To even start this heist, you need to own a mansion and have upgraded it to install the newly added Art Studio. And one of these mansions is located up in the hills of Los Santos near a curvy downhill road that many players skip by hopping over a small mound. Well, after the July 14 update, GTA dataminer Lucas7Yoshi spotted a small, undocumented change: Rockstar had added two trees to the mound on that curvy road.
some map changes and fixes which ill document in this thread as I bother to look at em
Rockstar added a tree in this corner cut for some reason, by the mansion pic.twitter.com/zGsN9mi01s
— Lucas7yoshi_RS – Lucas7yoshi, but rockstar (@Lucas7yoshi_RS) July 14, 2026
That initial tweet didn’t get spread around too much, though some players called out Rockstar for trying to block a small shortcut like that with trees. But then someone on Reddit screenshotted the tweet and posted it in the GTA Online subreddit and more directly called out Rockstar Games for trying to block players from saving a few seconds via a shortcut.
“This is the most baffling change I have seen on this update,” claimed the poster.
Pretty quickly, this post on Reddit exploded. It now sits at over 12,000 upvotes and has nearly 400 comments, many of which are different flavors of players complaining about Rockstar, the update, and the current state of GTA Online. For many, these two new trees were a perfect example of Rockstar trying to make the game more of a grind for players in every way possible. Players pointed to the fact that in the finale of the Kortz Heist, Rockstar seemingly blocks off every tunnel in the city to stop players from using them to evade police easily. So it didn’t surprise many already frustrated players that Rockstar would add a few trees to a small corner cut to make GTA Online more of a grind.
Except there was a problem: The trees were likely added to make the shortcut easier and more effective.
As documented by a few different players who actually loaded up the game and tested out the corner cut after the trees had been added, the new foliage doesn’t block the shortcut at all. Instead, the trees act as a natural guide that pushes players more to the right, helping them land on the road and not inside the dreaded “Tennis Court of Shame,” which is a tennis court lower down the road that many players accidentally fly into when trying to take the shortcut, getting stuck in the process. People also pointed out that you can still cut through the trees if you want to; they just help visually guide players away from that damn tennis court trap.
Of course, until Rockstar Games confirms anything, we can’t say for sure if the trees were added to help or hurt players. But it does seem like a GTA Online developer noticed players using that shortcut and decided, in a new update that would force players to travel to and from their mansions, to add some trees to help people out. Instead, a lot of gamers got mad. There’s plenty to be mad about when it comes to Rockstar and GTA. But these trees…leave ’em alone, okay?
