With all that said, Garry’s Mod is unfortunately an imperfect science. This mod takes some of the less stable elements of the Source engine and pushes them way past what they were designed to do, resulting in bouts of instability and unexpected behavior. While you won’t see anything weird from making a simple box with four wheels in an offline session, it’s not uncommon to see the game crash and burn horribly when playing on servers with more than a couple of people involved. Servers can be seen restarting constantly after an unexpected crash, and failed contraptions often devolve into a kind of “physics black hole” when put together incorrectly, with pieces spinning out of control and threatening to bring the game down unless stopped. These effects are exacerbated even further with all of the popular add-ons floating around, resulting in a negative stigma being attached to overly-complex contraptions that might increase lag or instability. A lot of the physics processing can also be really processor-intensive, resulting in most servers enforcing a low maximum player limit to balance out the latency levels.

And yet, it is often said that art is painful – and there is no question that the potential creative benefits behind Garry’s Mod far outweigh the current problems it faces, as there really is no other mod in existence that provides the kind of open-ended possibilities this one does. If you’re looking for something just a little bit different to try, get some friends together and get this mod. When you’re up until four in the morning putting the finishing touches on a custom-designed remote-controlled nuclear delivery platform to wipe out your friends on the moon, you’ll know you’ve made the right choice.

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