Settings and controls

There are settings in two places. The launcher has everything needed before the game starts. The NodeMP tab in the game’s own options has what you see during a session and how other players’ cars behave. Changes apply right away unless the row says otherwise.

In the launcher

The gear at the bottom of the left rail opens Settings. There are three pages.

Game

• Where BeamNG.drive is installed: found by itself. Browse picks the folder by hand, Find it searches again.
• Graphics mode: Direct3D 12 (the default on BeamNG 0.39), Vulkan, or Direct3D 11 if D3D12 gives you trouble. The game starts straight in the chosen mode.

Launcher

• Language of the launcher. What servers and the game write stays as they wrote it.
• Hold to play: hold the join button for 0.4 seconds. Turned off, one click joins.
• Start with Windows.
• Close the launcher once the game starts: off by default, so the launcher waits out of the way and comes back when you leave the server.
• Folders: where the servers’ downloaded mods and the logs are. Attach launcher.log when you report a problem.
• Client mod: the installed version and Check now.
• Updates: the channel, automatic checks, background downloads, going back a version (more).
• Reset: back to the defaults. Favorites, recent servers and downloads stay.

Account: your name, links to your profile, Sign in or Sign out (Your account).

Downloaded mods

Content on the left rail lists every mod servers have sent you: the file, its size and when it was downloaded. Remove frees the space (close BeamNG.drive first: the game keeps the files open). If you need the mod again, the server sends it on your next join.

In the game: the NodeMP tab

BeamNG.drive’s options get a NodeMP tab. The NodeMP settings button on the mods tab of the pause menu opens it too, as does a key bound to NodeMP: Settings. The tab has a search box, and Show advanced settings reveals the rarer rows.

A row can be locked. Set by the server means the server you’re on decides this for everyone during the session. Locked by the strict session means a strict server turned it off. Your own value comes back when you leave the server.

Section	What’s there
Players	Name tags over cars: whether to show them, your own tag, an Empty tag on empty cars, the distance, fading out far away, shortening long names, player IDs. Markers for deleted cars and for players in free camera. The character you walk as.
Chat	How many lines stay visible while the chat is closed, how many seconds a line stays, the time in front of each line, words hidden as *** on your screen only. A separate overlay window with the chat and the player list.
Cars & network	Your cars: whether edits are sent automatically, protecting your configs from copying, who may get into your cars, whether others may use your triggers and grab your cars with Ctrl. Other cars: see-through after a reset, simplified models, holding them tightly on their real path. Use my local mods in multiplayer.
Debug	Detailed logs and switches for finding problems. Leave them alone unless a developer asks. Tools opens the diagnostics window.

Chat

T opens the chat, Enter sends, Esc closes. Up and Down bring back what you typed before. While the chat is open, your car ignores the keyboard.

A line you send shows dimmed with sending… until the server confirms it. If the server didn’t let it through, the reason replaces it: too many messages, muted on this server, didn’t pass the filter and so on.

Lines starting with / are commands. What they do depends on the server’s resources; on many servers /help lists them.

You can colour text: ^0–^9 and ^a–^f pick a colour, ^#RRGGBB any colour, ^l bold, ^o italic, ^n underline, ^m strike-through, and ^r resets everything.

Keys

Change them in the game’s controls options, in the gameplay category:

Default	Action	What it does
T	NodeMP: Chat	Open the chat.
Tab	NodeMP: Player list	Show or hide the player list.
not bound	NodeMP: Settings	Open the NodeMP tab.
not bound	NodeMP: Diagnostics window	Open the diagnostics window.
not bound	NodeMP: Toggle debug chat	Show or hide the overlay chat window.

For the curious: Launcher.cfg

The launcher’s background part reads a small settings file: %LOCALAPPDATA%\NodeMP\helper\Launcher.cfg. You rarely need it: the launcher passes everything a join needs by itself. Keep the file valid JSON, or the launcher can’t connect.