GMod Tower was a network of servers, designed as a social media platform for users to play minigames with friends and socialise in a hub area. In July 2009, four developers working under the name 'PixelTail Games' opened a Garry's Mod server called GMod Tower. Players recreated it in others, such as Rocket League and Fortnite Creative.

Game modes based on Prop Hunt were later included with games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Fortnite Battle Royale, and Genshin Impact. In Prop Hunt, the players on one team are disguised as props and set to hide on the game map while the other team seeks after them. The game mode Prop Hunt was created by Andrew 'AMT' Theis and popularised through Garry's Mod. To do the latter, Detectives are given special equipment, such as DNA scanners that can trace a dead player's killer. While Traitors attempt to eliminate all other players, Innocents and Detectives need to co-operate to identify and eliminate all Traitors. Detectives are known to all players, whereas Traitors are only known to other Traitors and otherwise appear as Innocents. TTT assigns players to three groups: Traitors, Detectives, and Innocents, similar to the party game Mafia. The winner of this contest was Trouble in Terrorist Town ( TTT), which was added to the game in July 2010, alongside another mode, Dogfight: Arcade Assault. In late 2009, Facepunch launched the 'Fretta Contest', a competition in which people were to develop Garry's Mod game modes using the proprietary Fretta programming framework, with the winning game mode to be added to the base game. Fretta Contest and Trouble in Terrorist Town This was replaced by support for the Steam Workshop in version 13. Garry's Mod version 12 introduced the 'Toybox' section, through which the player could browse and install user-created mods.

Specialised servers, known as Fretta servers, rotate between custom game modes every fifteen minutes.

Notable mods (known as 'addons') include Spacebuild, Wiremod, Elevator: Source, DarkRP, Prop Hunt, and Trouble in Terrorist Town. Garry's Mod includes the functionality to modify the game by developing scripts written in the Lua programming language. The 'tool gun' is a multi-purpose item for tasks such as welding and constraining props together, and altering the facial expressions of ragdolls. The individual limbs of ragdolls can also be manipulated. Using the 'physics gun', ragdolls and props can be picked up, rotated, and frozen in place. The player is able to spawn non-player characters, ragdolls, and props, and interact with them by various means. Garry's Mod is a physics-based sandbox game that, in its base game mode, has no set objectives. The player character (right) positioning characters from Team Fortress 2 on a couch using the physics gun

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