Garry's Mod Beginner's Guide

Welcome to the beginner's guide for Garry's Mod!

Garry's Mod, sometimes abbreviated as "GMod", is a first-person sandbox game where you can load up a world (map), and build many/crazy contraptions, explore the worlds or battle other players or monsters. (Like zombies, evil alien soldiers, alien bugs etc.) This guide will give you a look into how to play the game, what to do, and also some useful tips with stuff!

This guide shall assume this is your first time playing the game.

When you start up the game you shall be greeted with a menu: (The background is a slideshow of images that change periodically)

I would recommend that you first take a look at your graphics settings by clicking "Options", then clicking the "Video" tab, then clicking "Advanced...". This is some pretty technical stuff, and you could end up breaking the game if you mess around with these settings!

These particular settings determine how realistic the game's graphics look. Having them low will make the game run faster, but look less detailed. Having them high will make the game look more like real life, but it can slow the game down, and by A LOT if your computer isn't fast/powerful enough! The resolution outside the Advanced settings determines how clear/HD the game looks. Yet again, lower = faster but blurrier, higher = clearer but slower.

Enough of the graphics settings. Before we get to actually playing the game, we need to look at just one more thing... The controls!

If you have played a Source engine-powered game before, such as Half-Life 2, Portal, Counter-Strike Source/Global Offensive or Team Fortress 2, you should probably know (Most of) the controls already. If you do, then you should continue to the next section now. If you don't know the controls, or haven't played any games based on the Source engine before, you probably should read the rest of this section!

The defaults are as follows:
W, A, S and D keys - Move around
Moving the mouse - look around/aim (When you press W, you move in the direction you're looking)
Left mouse button - Fire weapon/tool
Right mouse button - Varies, depending on what weapon/tool you're holding
R key - Reload weapon/varied actions, depending on what tool the Tool Gun is set to
Q key - Open the Spawn Menu. Menu closes when Q key is released! F1 toggles the menu
V key - Toggles "No-Clip". Lets you fly around the level
Left shift key - Sprint (Move faster)/increase flying speed when "No-Clip" is on
Left control (Ctrl) - Crouch (Move slower)/decrease flying speed when "No-Clip" is on
F key - Flashlight (Lights the area in front of you, but can slow down the game when on, due to it's dynamic lighting feature)

That is all you primarily need to know to get started with Garry's Mod. You can learn the rest of the controls by opening the Options menu and clicking the "Controls" tab, or by just exploring the game yourself, and learning the controls and other stuff along the way!

Now we are going to get onto actually playing the game! (Continue to next section)