BeamNG.drive Modding on OpenMods

A soft-body physics sandbox with a massive vehicle-mod scene

BeamNG.drive (in Early Access since 2013) is BeamNG GmbH's soft-body vehicle physics simulator. The modding architecture is built around Lua scripting and a JBeam vehicle-definition format, both deliberately exposed for modders. The community has produced thousands of vehicles, dozens of maps, and a long tail of gameplay scripts.

BeamNG's official mod hub (beamng.com/resources) is the primary distribution channel, paired with an in-game Repository browser that handles downloads, updates, and dependency tracking.

The toolchain

• In-game Repository: the official mod browser. Subscribe-equivalent flow, syncs automatically.
• beamng.com/resources: the web-side of the same Repository, useful for browsing in advance.
• JBeam format: the vehicle-definition format. Plain-text, hierarchical, fully documented.
• World Editor: official in-game level editor.

What you'll find on OpenMods

BeamNG mods live primarily on the official Repository. GitHub hosts source for some larger mods, especially level mods and scripting frameworks. OpenMods catalogues GitHub-published BeamNG mods.

Practical notes

• Vehicles, levels, scripts, configurations: the four mod categories. Most mods are vehicles.
• JBeam authoring is genuinely accessible. Plain-text format, hot-reloads in-game, well-documented. Lower barrier to entry than most modding scenes.
• Major updates can break mods. BeamNG patches every few months. Most popular mods are kept current.
• Performance scales with active vehicles. Soft-body physics is CPU-heavy; mod cars are no heavier than vanilla but loading dozens of vehicle types affects startup.