Gmod Introduction

Those of you who came to this blog looking for information on Gmod, both on basics, information, is it worth the price?, and even how to play and set up servers, you came to the right place. I will constantly update the info so check back often.

So what is Gmod?

Gmod is a first person construction game on the PC. Available on Steam for a mere 10 dollars. The game itself is a mod from half-life 2 created by valve. Gmod although was modified and created by Garry Newman along with his team, Team Garry. This is a wonderful game to play if you are into building creations, role-playing, meeting new people, learning new things, and even fighting zombies on those boring days.

Getting Started

So you bought the game. Now your at the main menu wondering what the game is like. Well go ahead and click "Play Single-Player" for starters and choose a level that looks or sounds cool in the name. Wait about five minutes for it to finish loading the level and you'll be sitting there with a blue glowing gun wondering where do i start? Somethings you might want to know include:

• Press V for toggle noclip (noclip allows you to fly around as well as passing through objects and the world
• Press and hold Q for the menu
• Changing weapons is like it was in half-life 2 where the scroll wheel can change the weapons or the numbers 1-6 can change the weapons you currently have out.
• People online will constantly refer to something known as console. This is a command box within the program when you pause that allows certain commands to be typed in to alter your game experience. Most are only available if you are in Single-Player or if you are the host/owner of a Multi-Player server. To activate console in game; press escape to pause, go to options, Keyboard tab, hit the advanced button on the bottom of the window, and check the box that says "Enable Developer Console (~)". Now during game play or when you are at the menu you can click ~ the button right below Escape to enable console and type in commands.

• People will also refer to addons within the game, Gmod is a game widely supported by the community with thousands of mods. To locate and search for mods, go to garrysmod.org in your Internet browser. Once there, you should see popular and recent mods, along with a search bar. Look on the website for anything that interests you and download it. Installation of the mods I will explain later. 

• Make sure you have an appropriate steam community name cause that is what Gmod will use for your in-game name. Mingebag emphasis a new guy at Gmod because back when Gmod was older, you had to change your name through the options in Gmod and the default name was Mingebag. Just a little history for you new Gmod players.

Gmod Tools Introduction

Now that you've read through the introduction for the basic boring information, now it's time to move onto the fun part; explaining the tools you have at your disposal to build some crazy contraptions like rides and houses, to reeking havock with lasers and explosions. Okay first load up a level like explained in the Introduciton and pull up the Q menu. It should look something like this:

(have in mind I have a lot of addons that you will not recognize from props, tools, and vehicles, to entities and npcs)

Now this above is what you should have on your screen, if you loaded the map called gmod_construct which is the default map with Garry's Mod. I have a statistics bar in the bottom right hand of my screen, ignore that. So you should have your health in the bottom left, and you should notice that you have this weird looking blue gun in your hands. This is known as the phys_gun or the Physics gun. What this can do is if you left click and hold u can pick up and move a prop (item) around. if you right click it freezes the prop (when you freeze it, let go of left click). To rotate the prop, while holding left click hold down E and move the mouse to rotate the object, if you also hold down shift at the same time, it rotates the prop to exact 45 degree angles. So that's the Physics gun. Now if you hit 6 once you will get the screenshot weapon where you just click to take a picture that saves it into your gmod folder, this is not very important. Now then, double click 6 and click left click on your mouse to pull out the tool gun. This is a very important weapon, if you can call it that. You use the tool gun with your left and right click, depending on what tool you have selected in the menu, it will exhibit a different effect with each click from welding, hydraulics, emitters, thrusters, turrets, materials, color, paint, and more.

Okay so now pull out your tool gun. You should see something like this:

To change the tool of use, click and hold Q, hover your mouse over what tool you want to use and click it. Gmod will automatically change the tool gun to the one you just selected from the list. Also press and hold C when out of the Q menu to pull up a little properties menu for the tool or you can just modify the properties of the tool through the Q menu. Refer to other posts of tool names on how to use each individual tool.

The Q Menu

Okay so here is the Q menu. I will refer to this as the Q menu because of the fact of the default button to pull up this menu is Q. So anyway, you will see a bunch of props you can spawn with their icons. Simply aim, open up the menu, and click on a icon of a prop to spawn it where you aimed in the game. Above the icons you will notice names of props and such, click different names to pull up different spawn-lists (the icons of the props you can spawn). To the right of all this is the location of all your tools. To select one just simply click on it and the tool gun will become the tool you selected. Even further to the right are the properties of the tool you have selected. Individual terms of each tool will be listed under each tool's post. Getting along, you will see a tab at the top of the menu, located next to props called browse. This is another way to browse for spawn-lists but in file format like shown below:

I do not recommend the use of this very much because it is annoying to navigate and will take sometime to load. Although this method does allow the searching of some props, that are not listed in the spawn-lists in the prop tab. Okay then, onto the next tab, being NPC's. NPC stands for non-player character, like in half-life 2 the residents of the apartments and city that talk and interact with you along with other games like Mass Effect (party members), Halo (other marines), it just goes on and on. You will see a menu like this:

Again I will have more NPC options than you due to mods that I have gotten from garrysmod.org. Disregarding that, you will see portraits along with names of different NPC's. If you click one of the portraits, it will spawn an NPC where you were aiming before you opened up the Q menu just like a prop would spawn. Now look down below the portraits, you will find a drop down menu and check boxes, let me explain what each one does. 

• Disable AI - AI stands for Artificial-Intelligence, so disabling this will stop the NPC from reacting to you in anyway, it will not react to it's environment or anything.
• Keep Corpses - This will keep the corpse of the NPC if it is killed, normally left unchecked, the NPC will disappear few seconds after dying. Leaving this unchecked is a good option to reduce strain on your graphics processor.
• Allow Join Player's Squad - For those who haven't played half-life 2, NPC's like Rebel NPCs can join the player's squad and fight for the character, along with the medic can heal the character. The squad can hold up to five people, and only certain NPCs will work.
• NPC Weapon - This is a drop down menu of the possible weapons the NPC can spawn with. Be warned, certain NPCs like combine will recognize the player as an enemy and attempt to kill you with any weapon it is given.

After playing around with this fun menu for a bit, move onto the weapons tab up on top. The weapons tab will look something like this: 

Okay, okay, as you can guess like everything else, I DO HAVE MODS. This includes the non-CSS weapons you see on the page. And to make this clear someone did make a nuke mod, and Ironman, just to cover that. You honostly do not need to know much about this page and it should be pretty self-explanitory. Click on the picture of one of the weapons and it will be added to your weapons and be pulled out when you add it unless you already have it in your inventory. To change weapons I have already explained but either use the mouse wheel or click 1-6 on the keyboard, and sometimes weapons will pile up on one number so to access those weapons click the number a certain multitude of times. Also incase you haven't noticed yet, the text you see about each group of weapons like "Other" and "Counter Strike" are groupings. Click those gray texts and it will close or open the group, this applies to NPCs, tools, and more. Now move onto the Vehicles tab, it should look like this, again minus the addons i have: 

This tab acts the same way the weapons tab does, but as you can guess it spawns a vehicle insted. To go into a vehicles you look at the seat and press "E" or whatever you have assigned the action button in your keyboard mapping in the options menu. There are some seats in the vehicles menu, now these are stationary, they will not move. They are used for custom vehicles. Like if you build a vehicle out of props and the wheel tool or thruster tool then you can weld a seat on your vehicle to be attatched to the vehicle you just created. Anyway that's about all you need to know about vehicles, we will get more in depth with vehicles with Vehicle control, easy engine, and pod controller later, much much later. There is a lot to cover. The next and final tab is the entity tab. Aren't you glad this section is almost over. *sigh* Almost to the building part after I get the entity tab explained and then tools. Then we start creating stuff. You're gonna like the first project, if your into funny stuff. Aside from the mini rant I went on, move on to the Entity tab: 

You will probably see a couple entities when you first start off including bouncy ball and maybe a few others, I'm not sure what the updates gave you as far as entities without addons. Anyway, they work the same way as a vehicle does, you spawn one by clicking the picture. You will have to learn what each entity you get does on your own because each entity has a custom script (script is a notepad document of coding with a .lua ending in your gmod directory for entities). Anyway that raps up the Q menu. Now move on to "Using the tools".

Using the tools

Okay so FINALLY got done explaining the Q menu, man that took longer than i wanted it to. If anyone actually reads this so far, I'm still working on this, only in my spare time, this will grow to be like a 50-100 page blog probably.