The Valve-approved Half-Life remake is joining the Garry's Mod family 'by popular demand'

Sandbox fun times simulator Garry's Mod has gobbled up pretty much every official Valve Source game into its toybox at this point, but there is land yet to conquer. Facepunch announced this week that the 20-year-old game's next patch, planned for April 29, will finally bring Black Mesa into the fold.

"By popular demand and with approval from its developers, this update will be adding mounting support for Black Mesa in Garry's Mod," the blog post reads.

That's great news if you're one of the tens of thousands of folks still playing Garry's Mod daily. Black Mesa, if you missed it at the time, is an official Valve-approved Source remake of Half-Life 1 made by the Crowbar Collective.

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It's an excellent reimagining of the original that makes major improvements to Half-Life's animations, sounds, and weapon feedback—relevant features that Garry's Mod creators will soon be able to utilize in their own stuff.

While Garry's Mod has no shortage of add-ons that attempt to modernize Valve's base Source assets, there are loads of custom modes that could benefit from Crowbar Collective's take on the Black Mesa facility. You'll have to own Black Mesa to properly use its assets in Garry's Mod, and to celebrate, the pair of games are on sale as a bundle for $13.

That's the flashiest bullet point of the update, but far from the only ones. The full patch notes list over a hundred minor bug fixes and asset changes, some of which include deleting functions that served no purpose in Garry's Mod and were a "waste of resources." I guess that can happen when one game gets sporadically patched for 20 years.

It's a good time to reacquaint yourself with Garry's Mod, as its spiritual sequel S&box is right around the corner. S&box, much like Gmod, leverages a custom version of Valve's Source 2 engine to make and modify games to your heart's content, but it's also going much further. Facepunch says S&box is more like a complete game engine that can be used to make entire games and even publish them as standalone releases on Steam. It's out on April 28, the day before the Garry's Mod patch.

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