Garry’s Mod, the giant physics sandbox born from Half-Life 2, contains an immense number of player-made maps for an impressive amount of games and other purposes. A new upcoming mod for Garry’s Mod, titled Jazztronauts, will make use of every single one of those maps.
Jazztronauts (no relation to the band) is an upcoming free mod for Garry’s Mod that lets you “…explore, ransack, and tear down random levels with your friends.” The mod starts the players off in a hub world where a big screen allows the players to randomly flick through a feed of levels on the Steam Workshop. After locking in on a level, the players pile into a bus, drive down the road between worlds, and crash into the destination level chosen by the players.
Once there, players run around the map and use special guns to mark level entities to be whisked away by Doctor Kleiners from Half-Life 2. These stealable items include characters, objects, and even the triggers that would cause events to happen in a normal playthrough of the map. Stealing all this random stuff and picking up special shards tends to cause the levels to fall apart, revealing a pink, glittering, cat-filled space behind the world. The mod does this by having the server download the maps and rendering parts of the map as the brightly-colored void.
When the players are done, they slap down a temporary bus stop and the bus will smash a hole in the world to pick you back up. Back at the hub, you can total up your haul by pulling a lever, which parts glittering curtains and causes a tube to drop all of your assorted trash to rain down.
Jazztronauts will be out sometime later this year. You can follow the game’s progress on its Twitter. If you want to see some gameplay, you can watch Twitch streamer and Youtuber TieTuesday play about four hours of it below: