Almost 20 years since it hit Steam, Garry's Mod finally addresses 'lackluster support for weapons used by NPCs' and gives Dr Kleiner his gun license

I'm always taken by surprise when Garry's Mod receives a new update. Since it came out when I was still a teenager, I just assume it's ancient history. Yet in reality, Facepunch's anarchic toolbox remains very much a going concern. With over 22,000 players in the last 24 hours, Garry's Mod is the 62^nd most popular game on Steam by daily active users (according to SteamDB). That makes it more popular than Monster Hunter Wilds and Elden Ring Nightreign—at least as far as Steam is concerned.

In short, there's plenty of motivation for Facepunch to keep Garry's Mod fresh, and its latest patch livens up how it looks and functions in several ways. Primarily, the November update improves Garry's Mod's water visuals, introducing fluid rendering features from more recent Source engine games.

As the update's Steam post notes. "This includes flow maps, lightmaps, and [the] ability to reflect 3D skybox." However, Facepunch cautions that the changes "may unexpectedly affect a small amount of existing maps" due to some map creators already using modified water materials pulled from newer Source games. "This is unfortunately unavoidable from our end and will need to be individually fixed by map makers", Facepunch notes.

Alongside this, the update ports over a four-way blend shader from Source, which should enable mappers to create more detailed terrain. The most significant improvement from a play perspective, though, is how the update substantially improves NPC weapon handling capabilities.

"A longstanding issue from the very inception of Garry's Mod was the lackluster support for weapons used by NPCs, especially when NPCs use weapons that they never used in Half-Life 2," Facepunch says. The update addresses this issue in several ways. For starters, it stops NPCs from T-posing when using non-default weapons, "such as Metrocops using RPGs or AR2s," Facepunch cites as an example.

The gun handling rework also lets Citizens fire from a crouched position, and enables Combine Soldiers to use all weapons without issue, and also chase players without weapons. And it hands gun licenses to several of Half-Life 2's key characters, namely Judith Mossman, Wallace Breen, Eli Vance, Arne Magnusson and Isaac Kleiner.

This represents the third significant update Garry's Mod has received this year. March's patch brought new NPCs and a new mountable game—the multiplayer mobster deception game Treason. July's update, meanwhile, ported over most of the assets from Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2's episodes by default, meaning those assets will appear in community maps regardless of whether players own the relevant games. Remarkably, next year will represent two decades since Garry's Mod launched on Steam, and there's no sign the gurning sandbox is ready for retirement yet.