Guide
Your Garry's Mod server: what you should know
Why your own Garry's Mod server?
Garry's Mod lives on its gamemodes: DarkRP for roleplay, Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT) for murder-mystery rounds, Prop Hunt or Murder for party nights, and Sandbox for free building. On your own server you choose the gamemode, addons and rules and can grow it into a community project.
Addons via the Workshop
Create a collection in the Steam Workshop with all the addons your server should use, and enter its ID in the panel as the Workshop ID. The server then loads the addons on start. So that your players receive the content automatically too, call resource.AddWorkshop("<ID>") for each addon in a Lua file under lua/autorun/server.
For a publicly listed server you also enter a GSLT token. Create one for free at steamcommunity.com/dev/managegameservers with App ID 4000.
Do you still need FastDL?
Not for Workshop content. FastDL (sv_downloadurl) is only needed for your own files that aren't on the Workshop. That requires separate web space for players to download from.
Setting up DarkRP and TTT
- TTT ships with the game. Set the gamemode to
terrortownand pick attt_map as the start map, for example from the Workshop. - DarkRP: upload it via SFTP to
garrysmod/gamemodes/darkrpand set the gamemode todarkrp. Custom jobs and changes belong in thedarkrpmodificationaddon so a DarkRP update doesn't overwrite them. - Admin permissions are usually handled with ULX and ULib.
How much RAM does a GMod server need?
Garry's Mod's standard server is a 32-bit program and can use at most about 4 GB per server. It also runs almost entirely on one CPU core, so lots of addons slow it down through the CPU rather than the RAM. Rough guidance, not a guarantee:
- Sandbox or TTT for up to about 16 players: 2 GB
- DarkRP with many addons or large Workshop collections: 3–4 GB
More than 4 GB does nothing for a single GMod server.
How it works at Prepaid-Host
You book cloud RAM for a fixed term and pay up front, with no subscription trap. Since a GMod server only uses a limited amount of RAM anyway, you can split a larger package across several servers, for example TTT and DarkRP side by side. The servers are located in Frankfurt am Main and protected against DDoS attacks.
