Garry's Mod is a physics sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios and built on Valve's Source engine. There is no fixed objective. You are handed a toolbox and a world, and what happens next is entirely up to you. Since its full release in 2006 it has grown into one of the most modded games on Steam.
The heart of Garry's Mod is its community gamemodes. DarkRP turns the sandbox into a chaotic roleplay city, Trouble in Terrorist Town runs tense social-deduction rounds, and Prop Hunt hides players in plain sight as furniture. The Steam Workshop holds millions of addons, maps, and tools that drop straight into a server.
Sessions range from a few friends messing with the physics gun to 60-slot roleplay communities with their own staff and rules. On a private dedicated server you control the gamemode, the addon list, and the player cap, and the world stays live whether or not you are online.
Garry's Mod servers are driven almost entirely by the Steam Workshop. Server owners build a Workshop collection, point the server at it, and every player downloads the addon set on join. Popular gamemodes like DarkRP, TTT, Prop Hunt, Murder, and custom Sandbox setups each have their own addon and config requirements managed through the control panel.
On the hardware side, Garry's Mod leans hard on single-core CPU performance because the Source engine and most addons run on one thread. Heavy prop counts and busy DarkRP cities push the processor first. NVMe storage keeps big Workshop collections loading fast, and a roomy RAM allocation prevents addon-heavy servers from stuttering. A small build server runs fine on a 3 GB plan, while a large modded DarkRP community is better served by the 14 GB plan.
| Server type | RAM needed | Players | Recommended plan |
|---|
| Small sandbox / build server | 3 GB | Up to 16 | 3 GB plan |
| Standard gamemode server (TTT, Prop Hunt) | 6 GB | Up to 32 | 6 GB plan |
| Large modded DarkRP community | 14 GB | 32+ | 14 GB plan |
Running Garry's Mod on a dedicated server means your gamemode and Workshop collection stay live around the clock, your config survives restarts, and admin tools give you full control over player slots, addon loadouts, and map rotation. No player holds the session hostage because there is no local host.
PingPlayers pairs dedicated hardware with Ping AI, which handles server setup, Workshop addon installs, and config troubleshooting so you spend time playing and building rather than reading Lua error logs.
