The first thing you need to understand about Garry’s Mod in VR is that nobody asked for this to be polished. The second thing is that it doesn’t matter.
Here’s the setup reality: you subscribe to a Steam Workshop addon, download an external C++ module from GitHub, switch Garry’s Mod to the x64 branch, and pray your existing addons don’t explode. It’s about twenty minutes of actual work if you know what you’re doing, and an hour of confused forum scrolling if you don’t. The original VRMod dropped years ago as a rough experiment that warned users outright — the developer’s words — that “performance is bad and the projection is not perfect.” What exists now is a refactored community fork called [G]VRMod: Ultimate, and it’s the first version I’d call genuinely usable.
What you get is the full Garry’s Mod toolbox, but you’re inside it. The Physgun doesn’t just move props — you grab them with your actual hands, rotate them with wrist flicks, and yeet them across the map with a throwing motion that feels exactly as stupid as it sounds. The Gravity Gun becomes an extension of your arm. Picking up NPCs and ragdolls works. There’s hand collision with walls and props, which means you’ll bonk your virtual knuckles on doorframes and it actually registers. The pickup system has weight limits, visual halos, and full multiplayer sync. Someone spent an unreasonable amount of time making sure you can properly headbutt a Combine soldier.
The weapon system is where it gets genuinely impressive for a community mod. Any scripted weapon can become a melee tool with velocity-scaled damage. You can physically swing the crowbar and stunstick. Grenades get thrown with actual arm motion. There’s a per-weapon adjustment menu, vehicle motion driving with wheel gripping, hybrid helicopter controls where you tilt your hand like a flight sim, and even tank support with head-based aiming. A one-handed category-based weapon menu replaces the flat-screen UI. You can use the numpad tool, the spawn menu, chat, and console — all from inside the headset.
None of this should work as well as it does. And yet, “as well as it does” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Performance is the dealbreaker hiding behind the fun. Garry’s Mod performance was already a dice roll in flatscreen — one map runs at a smooth frame rate, the next drops to slideshow because someone spawned three hundred explosive barrels. In VR, that variance becomes physically uncomfortable. The community advice is to run windowed, drop resolution, disable VSync and motion blur, turn down shadows and water reflections, and cap your FPS to your headset’s refresh rate. Even then, a crowded multiplayer server or a graphically dense custom map can tank the experience. I can’t overstate how much this depends on what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with.
Comfort is equally unpredictable. The mod offers multiple locomotion modes — right hand, left hand, HMD-directed, legacy — plus teleport options and room-scale support. There’s seated mode with offset adjustment and a height calibration wizard. That’s all good. But fast vehicle sections, hoverboats, or just running around a cluttered map while your frame rate dips can trigger motion sickness in a way that native VR titles rarely do. The Source engine was not built for this. Post-processing disabled helps. Avoiding certain maps helps. But if you’re sensitive to artificial locomotion, this is a rough ride.
The social angle is what saves it. Garry’s Mod has always been a multiplayer sandbox first, and throwing VR into that mix — standing in a room with friends who are on flatscreen, building contraptions together, throwing props at each other, accidentally crashing the server because someone spawned a drivable toilet — is genuinely hilarious in a way that polished VR titles rarely achieve. There’s a looseness to the physics and a chaos to the community that makes the jank feel like part of the charm rather than a bug.
But let’s be clear about who this is for. If you want a smooth, curated VR experience with consistent performance and professional polish, this is not it. If you’re the kind of person who already has fifty Garry’s Mod addons installed, knows how to troubleshoot Source engine quirks, and thinks “I wonder if I can make this work in VR” is a fun Saturday project — this is absolutely for you. The setup burden alone filters out casual users, and the performance variance filters out anyone who needs reliability.
Facepunch Studios, the developer, has shown no interest in official VR support. Their focus is on S&box, the successor. That means this community mod is the only way in, and its future depends on whoever’s maintaining it this year. Right now that’s [G]VRMod: Ultimate, and it’s actively updated. But community mods are community mods — support comes and goes.
So here’s my call. Garry’s Mod in VR is the most fun you’ll have with a physics sandbox that might make you sick. The hand interaction with props, the melee combat, the vehicle driving, the multiplayer chaos — it all clicks in a way that feels inevitable once you’ve tried it. But the setup friction, performance lottery, and comfort issues are real. This is a B-tier VR experience powered by A-tier ideas. If you already own Garry’s Mod, the addon is free, and an afternoon of tinkering costs you nothing but time. For everyone else, know what you’re walking into: a sandbox that rewards patience and punishes expectations.