How to Install BeamMP (BeamNG.drive) and Join a Server

BeamNG.drive is the best crash physics anybody has ever put in a game, and for years the only person who got to watch was you.

The cars in it are not models with a damage texture that swaps in when you hit something. They are built from a lattice of nodes and beams that bend, buckle and tear under real forces, which is why a front-end collision in BeamNG deforms differently every single time and why a car with a broken suspension arm actually drives like a car with a broken suspension arm. It is genuinely remarkable, and the obvious next thought — I want to do this at somebody else — was not something the game shipped with.

BeamMP is the community's answer. It is a third-party multiplayer mod, made by people who were not the developers, and it works well enough that a large number of people treat it as though it were an official feature. Listings for it collect on the BeamMP hub here.

What you need before anything else

You need BeamNG.drive itself, which is a paid game on Steam. There is no free version and BeamMP does not change that — the mod adds multiplayer to a game you own, it does not give you the game.

You also need a machine with real processing power. This is the part people underestimate. Soft-body physics is enormously expensive to simulate, and in singleplayer you are simulating a handful of vehicles at most. On a busy multiplayer server you are simulating everybody's. A computer that runs BeamNG comfortably alone can struggle badly with fifteen other cars in view, and the bottleneck is almost always the processor rather than the graphics card.

If you need to make an account first, our Steam guide covers it and the security worth turning on.

How the mod is put together

This is worth understanding before you install anything, because it explains every problem you will later have.

BeamMP is two pieces. There is a launcher that runs on your machine, and there is server software that other people run on theirs. The launcher's job is to start BeamNG with the multiplayer client attached to it, so that the game you have owned all along suddenly has networking bolted onto its side.

That arrangement is the source of the mod's single defining quirk: it is tied to a specific version of BeamNG. When BeamNG updates — and it updates regularly — the multiplayer client stops matching and stops working, until the BeamMP team catches up and releases a build for the new version. This is not a bug and nobody has done anything wrong. It is what happens when a mod hooks into a game's internals without the developer's help.

The practical consequence: if BeamMP suddenly refuses to work and you changed nothing, check whether BeamNG updated. It probably did. Waiting is usually the whole fix.

Installing it

1. Install BeamNG.drive through Steam and run it once. Let it do its first-launch setup and let it build whatever caches it wants to build. Do this before you touch the mod.

1. Get the BeamMP launcher from the project's own website. Not from Steam, because it is not on Steam, and not from a mirror somebody links you in a chat — this is software that hooks into your game, and where you got it matters. The project maintains its own downloads and its own documentation, and that documentation is more current than anything written elsewhere, including this page.

1. Run the launcher rather than the game. From this point on, launching BeamMP is how you start a multiplayer session. Starting BeamNG directly from Steam gives you the singleplayer game you already had. The launcher handles the rest, including asking you to link an account the first time.

1. Find the multiplayer interface once the game is up. The mod adds its own screen for browsing and joining servers, and it lives inside the game rather than in the launcher. If you are looking for a Steam server browser you will not find one, because Steam has no idea any of this is happening.

I am deliberately not giving you exact folder paths or exact button positions here. The launcher has been reorganised more than once, and a confident instruction that matches a version from two years ago will send you looking for something that no longer exists. The project's own setup notes are short and they are correct.

What people actually do on these servers

The obvious answer is crashing into each other, and plenty of servers are exactly that. The less obvious answer is that BeamNG's physics made several other things possible that nobody planned.

Cruising is the largest category by some distance. A group of people driving sensibly around a large map, in convoy, talking. It sounds like nothing and it is the reason a lot of these servers have regulars. BeamNG's maps are big and its driving model rewards smoothness, so a long drive with company is genuinely pleasant.

Police pursuits turn the game into a chase simulator. One or several players run, the rest chase, and BeamNG's damage model means a pursuit ends in a way that feels earned rather than scripted. Servers running this build up elaborate unwritten rules about what counts as a fair stop.

Racing in its various forms — drag strips, circuit laps, drift events with people scoring each other. The physics are not built for competitive racing the way a dedicated sim is, and the community has never much cared.

Demolition derby needs no explanation and is exactly as good as it sounds.

Which of these a server is running is the first thing to establish before you join, because turning up to a careful cruising server and driving into people is the fastest way to be removed from one.

Server culture, and the rules that are not written down

Because BeamMP servers are small and run by individuals, they develop house rules quickly and they enforce them socially rather than mechanically.

The recurring one is about ramming. On a cruising server, driving into another player is not a prank, it is the thing that gets you removed, and the regulars will have had this conversation many times before you arrived. On a derby server the opposite is true and driving carefully is the strange behaviour. Neither rule is signposted in the game, because the game has no mechanism for signposting it.

The second recurring one is about vehicles. Some servers restrict what you can spawn, either because a particular mod causes problems or because a thousand-horsepower car ruins a cruise. Read the server's own description and its chat before you spawn something enormous.

The third is about spawning at all. Every vehicle in the world is being simulated by every client, so a player who spawns twenty cars and leaves them scattered across the map is degrading the experience for everybody, quietly, in a way that is not obvious to them. Clean up after yourself. This is close to a universal rule.

None of this is heavy going, and most servers are relaxed. It is worth knowing simply because the failure mode — being quietly removed from a server for something you did not know was a rule — is confusing when it happens.

Mods, and why the first join takes a while

BeamNG has an enormous vehicle and map modding scene, and BeamMP servers make heavy use of it. A server running custom cars and a custom map needs you to have those files before it can show you anything.

Expect the first connection to a modded server to spend a while transferring content. This happens once per server rather than once per session, and afterwards joining is fast. A server with a large mod set can push a substantial amount of data, and a loading screen that appears to be stuck on a filename is usually working.

The other side of this is that your own installed mods can conflict with what a server sends. If a specific server misbehaves for you and nobody else, the mods you added for singleplayer are the first thing to suspect. Disabling your own additions and rejoining is a quick test and it resolves more cases than it has any right to.

Performance, and how to make it survivable

Turn your view distance and traffic settings down before you complain about frame rates. On a busy server the physics load scales with how many vehicles are being simulated near you, and the game gives you levers for that.

The other thing worth knowing is that not every problem you see is your problem. Vehicle positions are synchronised over a network, and networks are imperfect, so a car that appears to jitter or clip through something is showing you a synchronisation artefact rather than a physics failure. Collisions between two players' cars are approximations in a way that a collision with the world is not. Everybody accepts this, because the alternative was no multiplayer at all.

If ping and update rates are unfamiliar territory, tick rate explained covers what the numbers mean, and most of it transfers directly.

Running your own

The server software is available for people who want to run one, and a BeamMP server is not a demanding thing to host compared with the client.

The considerations are the ordinary ones. You need a machine that stays on, a port reachable from outside your home network, and a decision about how many people you actually want. How many slots should a game server have is worth reading before you pick a number, because the instinct to set it high is nearly always wrong — an eight-slot server with eight people in it is a community, and a sixty-slot server with eight people in it looks abandoned.

Where to host a game server covers the region question, which matters here because vehicle synchronisation degrades noticeably with latency.

Problems you will actually hit

The launcher says the game version is unsupported. BeamNG updated ahead of the mod. Wait for the mod to catch up, or roll the game back if you know how — and if you do not know how, wait.

You launch and land in singleplayer. You started the game from Steam instead of from the launcher.

Stuck downloading a server's content. Give it longer than feels reasonable on a first join, particularly on a heavily modded server.

Cars behave strangely on collision with other players. Network approximation. Not fixable at your end.

Terrible frame rate with lots of cars around. Processor limit, not graphics. Reduce how much is being simulated near you.

Where to go next

The interesting comparison is not other driving games — it is other games that got multiplayer this way. FiveM does the same trick for Grand Theft Auto V, and MTA:SA did it for San Andreas years before anybody thought it was possible. Both grew far past the mod they started as, and both taught their communities the same lesson BeamMP teaches: a third-party multiplayer layer lives at the mercy of the base game's update schedule. FiveM artifact updates and server queries is about precisely that relationship.

If it is the driving itself you have taken to, Assetto Corsa and Assetto Corsa Competizione are where the serious sim racing community lives, with organised leagues and a completely different attitude to hitting things.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. BeamMP (BeamNG.drive) servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.