s&box and Garry's Mod: What Carries Over and What Is New

Nearly every article about s&box calls it the successor to Garry's Mod, and almost as many people ask whether it's simply "Garry's Mod 2". The answer matters for traders as well as players. It decides whether anything you own from the old game counts in the new one, and where s&box's item economy came from. The short answer: the people and the spirit carry over, the code and the inventory don't.

Same studio, different project

Garry's Mod and s&box both come from Facepunch Studios, the company founded by Garry Newman, who created Garry's Mod. Garry's Mod is a sandbox built on the Half-Life 2 engine and assets, with Lua scripting for its addons. It became one of the best-known community-content games on Steam. Facepunch also makes Rust.

s&box is a separate product. In Facepunch's description it's a game creation platform: an editor, an engine and a library of community games, all inside one Steam app. Facepunch has repeatedly said it isn't a sequel. PC Gamer quoted the studio as saying "s&box isn't Garry's Mod 2" and that it's built to go beyond what was possible before, not just modernise it.

Garry's own release post on April 28, 2026, the day s&box launched on Steam, put it more personally:

It would have been easy to have taken Garry's Mod and applied it to Source 2. I wasn't happy to do that.

He described the road to launch as "multiple years, multiple false starts and multiple engines". The version that shipped runs on Valve's Source 2 engine.

What carries over

The idea and the people

The sandbox lives on. s&box has a Sandbox mode that new players are pointed to on first launch, and community-made games are the core of the platform, as Garry's Mod's game modes were. Garry has written that many Facepunch staff got their start in the Garry's Mod community. At launch he promised weekly updates, the same release-and-improve approach he says the studio took with Garry's Mod and Rust.

Content you already own, partly

s&box's game mounts let you use assets from other Steam games you have installed. Facepunch's documentation says mounts convert models, textures, materials and sounds on the fly. They work only at runtime, can't be published or shipped with a game, and require you to own and install the original game. Since a June 2026 update, mounted games appear in a list on the main menu. A community-maintained list of mounts includes Garry's Mod and Half-Life 2, with differing levels of support for things like sounds and animations.

So you can bring familiar props into Sandbox mode. You can't build a product on someone else's assets.

Some familiar references

The cosmetics nod to the old game too. The Physics Gun Tshirt, a Common activity drop, is named after the tool Garry's Mod made famous. It had a lowest Steam ask of $0.19 as of October 14, 2026.

What doesn't carry over

Lua addons

Garry's Mod addons are written in Lua for a different engine. s&box games and tools are written in C#, using the latest .NET according to Facepunch, so existing addons don't run in s&box. There's no official compatibility layer, only small community experiments. Creators have to rebuild their work.

The Workshop model

Garry's Mod relies on Steam Workshop subscriptions for addons. s&box deliberately doesn't. Its FAQ says Facepunch built sbox.game so that players don't have to install addons, much as you don't download a video before watching it on YouTube. The Workshop survives in one narrow role: cosmetic creators publish their items there so Valve's system can pay them.

Your inventory

Garry's Mod has no tradable item economy on Steam. A Steam Community Market search for its app returned zero items on October 14, 2026. Nothing from a Garry's Mod account carries into s&box's inventory. Every s&box cosmetic is new, sold in s&box's store or dropped by its activity system since late 2024.

What's genuinely new

Paying creators

Garry wrote in February 2025: "One of my big regrets with Garry's Mod is that we didn't let creators monetize." s&box has two answers. The Play Fund pays game developers based on how much people play their games. Store cosmetics pay their creators a cut through the Workshop, an approach Facepunch says is modelled on Rust.

An item economy

Because store cosmetics are Steam Inventory items, s&box has a real market. As of October 14, 2026, sboxskin.gg tracked 249 tradable items, with 233 listed on the Steam Market and a total listed market cap of $28,388.70. The items catalog shows all of them, and the market cap page shows how they rank. Garry's Mod never had anything comparable.

A path off the platform

In March 2026 Facepunch announced a licence with Valve that lets creators export games built in s&box and release them as standalone Steam titles. Facepunch says it takes no royalties on these. Steam's normal terms still apply.

Open code

Facepunch publishes s&box's code on GitHub under the MIT licence and invites developers to read it, change it and adapt it to their own projects.

Why this matters for the market

• No legacy supply. Every item in circulation was created by s&box's own store and drop system, so its history is short and fully visible.
• Brand value is shared, mechanics aren't. Familiarity with Garry's Mod brings players in, but prices follow s&box's own store windows and drops. Nostalgia doesn't set them.
• Cosmetics cross games. Facepunch's Steam page says cosmetics carry across every game on the platform. One purchase works everywhere on s&box, which is the main reason anyone wants them.

If you're coming from Garry's Mod, the marketplace overview explains where s&box items trade, and the community guides page collects Steam guides for getting started. Bring your instincts, but expect to start your collection from scratch.