Garry's Mod's long legs are aspirational. 19 years after the popular Half-Life mod's initial release, it's still being fine tuned, and its November 2025 update is no slouch in the department, improving some of the game's visuals and inconsistencies.
The most evident change in this latest update pertains to Garry's Mod water visuals. According to the game's patch notes, liquid surfaces should, broadly speaking, now look far more realistic and dynamic, utilizing rendering features from more recent Source Engine games to spice things up a bit.
The change in water visuals apparently might disrupt a few existing maps, which were already using modified materials, and need to be fixed by the map makers. But hey –new, better-looking water is dropping in Garry's Mod, that's pretty cool.
Speaking of map makers, the November Garry's Mod patch is also introducing a four-way blend shaper from new Source Engine games that should also help create more realistic environments, especially ones where different meshes collide, like a street meeting the grassy patch of land around which it is built.
Additionally, Garry's Mod developer Facepunch Studios has apparently been hard at work trying to improve what it calls the title's "lackluster support for weapons used by NPCs, especially when NPCs use weapons that they never used in Half-Life 2."
Evidently, NPCs will no longer awkwardly T-pose when they use weapons that they were never meant to initially use, and across the board, they seem to have had a lot of behavioral issues ironed out. More of these characters from the base Half-Life games, like Eli Vance, can use a greater amount of weapons than they previously could.
And, if that wasn't exciting enough, players also have access to new "toys for everyone," like a flechette gun and a jalopy seat. Stay weird, Garry's Mod.
You can see the full and extensive patch notes here.
With "gracious permission from Valve," Garry's Mod update adds "most of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Episodic content" to remove "majority" of infamous pink and black missing textures
