The development of s&box, the highly anticipated spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, has taken a significant leap forward with its massive October 2025 update. This latest patch delivers a sweeping set of engine-level improvements that touch nearly every aspect of the platform, from how players find content to how the game handles complex physics and rendering.
The full details were laid out in an extensive post on the official s&box website, titled "October 2025 Update." For players and developers alike, this update represents a major step in refining the s&box experience into a more polished and powerful creation suite.
A Streamlined Start and a New Way to Discover
One of the first things returning players will notice is the removal of the traditional launch options window. The game now boots directly, a change designed to reduce friction. The powerful s&box editor has been decoupled from the main game and is now distributed as a separate tool on Steam. As developer matt explained, this move simplifies the workflow and will, in the future, allow editor-specific files to be excluded from standard game installations, saving valuable disk space.
Perhaps the most user-facing change is the complete overhaul of the game's main menu. The old, static list of gamemodes—often dominated by sheer popularity—has been replaced by a new, dynamic shelf-based discovery system. Inspired by modern streaming services like Netflix, this new interface is designed to help a wider variety of community creations surface and shine.
Garry himself described the philosophy behind the change, aiming to keep the in-game catalogue feeling fresh and exciting. The community's reaction has been swiftly positive. On the r/sandbox subreddit, a thread discussing the update was filled with praise, with one user encapsulating the general sentiment by calling the new discovery system "awesome and exactly what gmod needed all these years."
Physics and Creation Get More Powerful and Intuitive
For creators, the update brings a host of quality-of-life and capability improvements. Prop interactions have been expanded, allowing objects to be configured in ModelDoc to ignite and explode, opening new doors for complex contraptions and gamemodes.
The beloved Duplicator tool has also received significant upgrades. It now natively supports physics joints, meaning your complex constructions will copy and paste correctly. Additionally, holding the Shift key allows you to duplicate additional unconnected objects, and duplicated ragdolls now behave more consistently, eliminating a common source of frustration.
Under the hood, the physics engine itself has been refined. The iconic physgun now uses a control joint for manipulating objects, resulting in much smoother and more predictable movement. A long-standing visual bug causing ghost collision artefacts when rolling objects on mesh colliders has been successfully squashed, leading to a cleaner visual experience.
Rendering Performance Sees Massive Gains
The October 2025 update is a boon for performance, especially for players with mid-range systems. Key rendering features have been heavily optimized. Screen-Space Reflections (SSR) now run an impressive four to eight times faster, while bloom effects see an even more dramatic performance increase, rendering up to 14 times faster after pipeline refinements.
Furthermore, the engine's internal asset verification process has been modernized, moving from the older CRC32 system to the modern xxHash3 algorithm. Developers claim this technical change delivers a "more than hundredfold speed increase" during the verification process, meaning less waiting and more playing.
Players also gain more control over their visual experience with new in-game graphics settings for volumetric fog, post-processing, and motion blur intensity.
Editor Workflow and The Road to Standalone Games
The in-game editor and UI haven't been left behind. The update introduces multi-edit dropdowns for efficient bulk editing, new Sprite Resources, infinite-scroll package lists, and more resilient UI error handling to prevent crashes from minor issues. Early functionality for "cloud entities" has also been activated, allowing for limited persistence of objects across server sessions—a foundational step for more ambitious MMO-like gamemodes.
Finally, the post closed with an encouraging note on one of the community's most-requested features: standalone game exports. Garry confirmed that work is progressing and, crucially, that licensing discussions have resumed. The team reaffirmed its plan to eventually allow developers to export games built in s&box directly to Steam, free of any royalty obligations, once the necessary legal frameworks are in place.
According to the SteamDB record for build 20207120, this substantial update went live on October 1st, 2025. A later internal build (20318110) was also spotted on October 9th, hinting that the development team is already building on this solid foundation for the future.
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