Garry's Mod

The 2006 Source engine sandbox every game on this site descends from, and still $9.99 on Steam twenty years on.

Updated 2026-09-07

What Garry's Mod is

Garry's Mod started as a mod for Half-Life 2 and became its own game on Steam in 2006. The idea is the same one GoreBox, Melon Sandbox and People Playground later copied: a physics engine, a spawn menu, a physics gun and a tool gun, and no goals. You weld props together into cars and catapults, pose ragdolls, and, mostly, play the game modes the community built on top. Trouble in Terrorist Town, Prop Hunt, DarkRP and Sandbox are still full of players every day.

It runs on the Source engine, which is why it needs other Valve games mounted for full content. Owning Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 fixes the pink-and-black missing textures that new players run into.

Price, and is Garry's Mod free?

It costs $9.99 on Steam and has for years. It drops to $4.99 in almost every Steam sale. It is not free, and the "garry's mod free" or "gmod unblocked" pages are either cracked copies that can't join servers (Valve Anti-Cheat blocks them) or browser games that use the name. The PC page covers the download and what the game needs.

Garry's Mod is only sold through Steam. There is no Android, iOS or console version.

Mods and addons

Garry's Mod calls its mods addons, and they all come from the Steam Workshop, which has more content for GMod than for almost any other game. Subscribe on the Workshop page or in the in-game addon browser, and it's active next launch. The big categories:

• Weapons (SWEPs) and entities (SENTs).
• Player models and ragdolls, which is where most of the copyrighted-character content lives.
• Maps, from recreations of real places to purpose-built game mode arenas.
• Tools for the tool gun, like Wiremod, which adds circuits and logic to contraptions.
• Game modes: TTT, Prop Hunt, Murder, DarkRP and hundreds more.

Addon conflicts are the main cause of crashes. If the game breaks after subscribing to something, disable addons in halves until you find it.

s&box: the successor

Facepunch released s&box (pronounced sandbox) on Steam on 28 April 2026 at $20 after five years in a free developer preview. It runs on Source 2, scripts in C#, and its engine is open source under the MIT licence. It is a platform for making and playing games rather than a straight sequel: the sandbox game mode is one option among many, and the tools are aimed at people who want to build. Garry's Mod is not going anywhere and is still the cheaper, simpler place to play the classic modes.

There is no "Garry's Mod 2". When people search that, they mean s&box.

No mobile, no console

Garry's Mod has never been on Android, iOS, PlayStation, Xbox or Switch, and the Source engine dependencies make it unlikely ever to be. The Android page goes through what the "gmod apk" listings install and which mobile games are the closest thing.

Common questions