Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Game Mechanics and Glitches/Phonecalls

Phonecalls are triggered after certain events (often finishing a certain mission).

There are two different kinds of phonecalls:

• High-priorty calls have a recall delay of 20s before Badlands and 15s after finishing the mission Badlands. These calls are usually ones that unlock missions (Most Threads).
• Low-priority calls have a recall delay of 60s. These calls include e.g. the Catalina troll calls after CJ parts ways with her (MOB_RAN Thread).

The delay counts from the last time the game considered you busy, this includes being on a mission, receiving a phonecall, cancelling a ringing phone. So for example a high-priority call might come 15s after you finished the last mission or 15s after you last cancelled a call. Even though you can't receive phonecalls when you have a wanted level, it doesn't count towards the delay, so you can receive a phonecall directly after you loose your wanted stars.

Answering/Cancelling phonecalls

The ringing phone counts as a small mission, setting $ONMISISON=1, which means you can't start any missions. Once the call is finished (either because you cancelled it or you accepted and finished it), it will set $ONMISSION=0 again.

You can cancel calls by shooting or getting into a vehicle, which will set $ONMISSION=0 after about 1.6 seconds (timed from between the "Press TAB to answer phone" dialog disappearing to mission markers re-appearing on the map, counted frames on video). So the effective delay after you cancelled a phonecall will be 16.6/21.6/61.6 seconds after you performed the action to cancel (e.g. shooting).

Holding Calls

Holding TAB will hold the phonecall as long as you let go of it. This way you can keep it ringing even when going into an interior, even though it might not actually be ringing anymore. You can also use weapons while doing this, which would normally cancel the call. You can't actually answer it in an interior though, but you can carry it through one and then answer it in an environment where you can, e.g. outdoors or in a cutscene.

List of Calls

The following threads, which are started/stopped as the game progresses, are used to check for different groups of phonecalls (check delay in ms):

• MOB_LA1 (90)
• MOB_CAT (120)
• MOB_SF (150)
• MOB_VEG (180)
• MOB_LA2 (250)
• MOB_RAN (1000)
• MOB_GF (150)

In the table the number behind the thread name is the order the calls are checked in that thread. This list is not necessarily complete.