Forza Horizon 5 modding: tools, liveries, and the offline-only rule

Forza Horizon 5 runs on Playground Games' in-house ForzaTech engine, and that single fact explains most of what its modding scene looks like. There is no official mod SDK, no Steam Workshop, and no Creation Kit equivalent. The game ships with a built-in anti-cheat and an integrated check that watches for memory editors at launch. So the community that grew around it is not the asset-replacement, load-order culture you see in Skyrim or RimWorld. It is a smaller, sharper scene built around standalone tools, save editing, and the game's own livery and tune sharing.

Where the community actually lives

Most of the open-source work happens under the Forza Mods organisation on GitHub. The flagship project is Forza Mods AIO, a free C# "all in one" tool that bundles teleporting, car unlocks, credit editing, and visual tweaks behind a single menu for both Forza Horizon 4 and 5. Around it sit smaller utilities: SaveTools for reading and editing save containers, Car-Table for unlocking the full garage, Fov-Menu for pushing the field of view past the in-game slider, and ForzaModelTool for swapping car parts and wheels. Because these are published on GitHub rather than a closed forum, they fit naturally into the OpenMods catalogue, which indexes mods and tools that live in public repositories.

Alongside the code tools is the part of "modding" that Playground actually sanctions: liveries, tunes, and blueprints. The in-game creative suite lets players paint vinyl-group designs and share them through EventLab and the design search, with no external files required. It is the single most active corner of the FH5 customisation world, and it carries zero ban risk because it runs entirely inside the game's own systems.

The toolchain primer

There is no loader to install. Tools like Forza Mods AIO run as separate executables that attach to the game process while it is open. The standard, repeated advice from the community is blunt: run them with the game in offline mode, never in online Horizon Life. The anti-cheat does not police a separate background service so much as it flags manipulated sessions, and using a trainer while connected is the fastest way to lose your progress.

What you'll find on OpenMods

The OpenMods catalogue skews toward GitHub-published projects, so for Forza Horizon 5 that means the tooling side rather than the livery side: the AIO menu, save utilities, and the FOV and model tools. It is a deliberately narrow slice of the wider scene, and it is honest to say the catalogue here is a fraction of what exists across Nexus pages, Discord servers, and the in-game design hub. If you are after vinyl designs or tunes, the game's own search is the right place. If you want the open-source tools, OpenMods and the Forza Mods repos are.

Before you start

• Back up your save before running any editor. SaveTools and AIO both touch the save container, and a bad write is far easier to recover from with a copy on disk.
• Keep mods offline. Online ranked progress, the Horizon Life shared world, and your account standing are all on the line if you attach a tool mid-session.
• Cheat Engine is detected at launch even when idle in the background. Close it fully before starting the game if you are not actively using it.
• Tools track game versions. A title update can break AIO's offset-based features overnight, so check the repo's issues before assuming a feature is broken on your end.

For the step-by-step version of all this, see the Forza Horizon 5 getting-started guide. If you are looking ahead, the Forza Horizon 6 scene is only just getting started.