Mods and maps

Mods are ordinary BeamNG zips: a map, a car, a sound pack. The server hands them to players, and the launcher downloads them before the game starts. Players install nothing by hand.

Add a mod

1. Put the mod’s zip into the content/ folder next to server.toml. In Docker that’s data/content/.
2. Restart the server. It reads the folder only when it starts.

The log then has a line such as serving 2 mods (148.3 MB) from content/. A file that isn’t a zip is skipped with '…' is not a ZIP file and will be ignored.

After replacing or removing a zip, restart the server too.

A map of your own

Put the map’s zip into content/ and name the map in [server] map:

[server]
map = "/levels/my_map/info.json"

my_map is the map’s folder inside the zip, under levels/. To find it, open the zip and look at the folder in levels/.

If the map has a picture of its own, the server shows it in the server list (Get listed).

How players get mods

Before a join, the launcher downloads the zips the player doesn’t have yet and keeps them in its cache. The next visit downloads nothing. The server’s card shows the files and their total size, and players can filter servers by download size. So keep the folder lean: every new player waits for every megabyte.

A mod that isn’t sent

Sometimes a mod may not be passed around and players have to get it themselves. Open content/mods.json (the server writes it) and set "protected": true on that zip:

"big-map.zip": { "protected": true }

The entry has other fields too; leave them and change only protected. The server then never sends that file. A player who doesn’t have the mod is told by the launcher which cache folder to put it in. The mark survives replacing the zip.

Client scripts aren’t mods

Resources can send Lua scripts to players as well, but that’s a different mechanism: the scripts arrive on join and don’t go into content/. See Resources.

The two can work together. Since client mod 1.7.6 a resource’s scripts can switch on Lua from a mod in content/. The mod then needs no start-up script (scripts/…/modScript.lua) of its own: its Lua runs when the resource loads it and is switched off when the player leaves. Client scripts shows how.