If you already have gmod, skip to step 3

Go to gmod's store page and buy the game which costs as of 12/21/2020 $9.99 bucks. Optimally you could wait for a sale if 1: you dont have enough money for the full price of the game or 2: you simply want to save money.

Now that you have bought it, you are now ready to install the game. It should automatically tell you to install the game after you bought it but if it doesn't, then go to your steam library, click on Garry's Mod then click the big blue install button and wait for it to install.

Once the game is done installing, click the big green play button that appears on your gmod library page. Once the game loads, click "start new game" and for this tutorial, we will select the map "gm_construct" and now click the blue start game button. Use the WASD keys to move, the mouse for looking, Left Mouse Button for attack, Right Mouse Button for alt attack, space bar for jumping, and mouse wheel for selecting your weapon/tool and zooming.

You might say to me "Ok so i know about the basic maneuvers needed to play but how do i spawn stuff in? how do i edit the properties of other objects?" I will cover this in this step. Hold down the Q button to open the spawnmenu and use the mouse to spawn the object that you need to use for optimal playing. You will notice a bunch of other options on the right side of the spawnmenu and they are called tools. I will show you what some of them do. Look at the right side until you see "Rope" and click on it. You will notice that the game auto equips a tool called a toolgun. Anyway, the rope tool will tether 2 objects together or tether 1 object to a part of the world. Click on a spawned object to start a connection and click on another object/part of the world to complete the connection. There are many tools in the game that will make it hard for me to go over them. Now if you hold c a menu opens up called a context menu that can edit the properties of the game itself. You can right click on objects to do many things to them. You can also change your playermodel from this menu and at the top you can change some other options too.

On your library page there will be a link to the gmod steam workshop. This is a place where mod creators can create mods and share them to enhance other's gaming experience. There are many mods that add more weapons, vehicles, ragdolls, and custom scripts. To install a mod of your choice, go to the mod page and click the green subscribe button and the mod of your choice will now affect the gameplay of gmod. To uninstall it, go back to the mod page and click unsubscribe. There are too many mods to go over so i will leave it up to you to find mods that you would want.

You would probably notice a game controller icon at the bottom of the main menu that once clicked on, brings up a menu with a checklist of almost all the source games that are currently on steam. This is used to mount other source games (source being the game engine gmod and other games run on). If you own a source game other than gmod on steam and it is installed on your computer, chances are that that game would appear in this checklist. All you have to do is click on the game controller icon at the bottom of the main menu and check the source game that is on your computer. Many workshop mods require that you have certain games mounted on your system in order for the mod to function which is because that mod uses textures and/or sounds from that game. Anyway, once you have a game mounted, in the new game menu you will notice another tab which has maps from the game that you mounted (although this might not happen for all mountable games) in which you are free to explore and do normal gmod things.

Sometimes you might want to play with a friend that also has gmod and there is a way to do that. In the new game menu, you will notice a drop down menu that has "singleplayer" on it. Click on it and a slew of options will appear. If you have one other friend who wants to play with you, click 2 players. If its 3 other friends, click 4 players and so on. Now you will notice some options that will allow you to increase the maximum number of props, vehicles and other things for a multiplayer game (don't worry these restrictions don't apply to singleplayer). Click start game and and use shift+tab to open your steam overlay and go onto your friends list and click on them to invite your friend(s) to your game. (Please note that when you are playing with mods, your friends will have to install all the same mods you have in order for them to work in multiplayer)

why did i do this to myself