BeamNG.drive 0.40 for modders: World Editor changes, the isInside flag, the occupant system, and the three UI breaking changes

24 Oct 2026 · 3 min read · ModsDrop

Pictured: Audi RS6 C8 Avant – Virtual Cockpit and ECU Stage Tuning, from the ModsDrop library.

Most coverage of BeamNG.drive 0.40 is about the Percheron truck and split-screen. For the people who make mods, the interesting part of the 19 October release notes is further down: the World Editor changes, the Lua and JBeam additions, and three breaking changes in the UI layer. Here is the modder’s reading of 0.40 and its hotfixes, with what to update and what to leave alone.

World Editor and tooling

A new Editor Render Settings window.
Terrain Editor fixes; Material Editor fixes with VRAM estimates per material, which is the first time the editor tells a map maker what a texture choice costs; Sites Editor improvements.
Traffic Manager sign configuration lists corrected.
A new Thumbnail Generator Showroom level for producing vehicle and part thumbnails consistently; 0.40.2 renamed the showroom maps to be less misleading.
Endless terrain added, and navigation graph fixes for decal roads, which affect how AI reads roads on maps built with them.
A major cleanup of common assets: duplicate materials removed, broken texture links fixed. Maps that referenced the duplicates by their old names need checking.
Foliage soft collision simplified, with the biggest effect on East Coast, Jungle Rock Island, Johnson Valley and Italy; custom maps built on the same foliage assets inherit the change.

JBeam and vehicle modding

The isInside JBeam flag replaces camera-name detection for occupant volumes. Vehicles that relied on the dash camera name still work through a compatibility layer, so nothing breaks today, but new work should use the flag.
A seat occupant system for modders: seated characters with mass (the default occupant adds 89 kg), fillable by players or dummies. 0.40.2 added safety guards to occupant.jbeam against variable leaks that could crash the game, which is worth knowing if your occupant definitions misbehaved on 0.40.0.
The hydrodynamic retarder is simulated with heat transfer into engine coolant; the Percheron’s JBeam is the reference implementation for anyone building a truck.
The legacy simplified collisions option is deprecated.
Powertrain audio volume is now driven by combustion power, clamped at 1000 kW, which changes how loud a modded engine sounds relative to stock.
German licence plates gained a safety test sticker (added with a * in the plate text); plate mods for Germany may want to follow.
Police light bar modes were reworked; emergency vehicle mods should check their modes.

Input and Lua

A new DEVICE input keyword for bindings.
The Groundmodel Debug panel was revamped.
Startup, level loading and mod mounting were sped up; the developers’ mod-mounting test case went from three minutes to four seconds, which changes how much a large mod pack costs its users.

The breaking changes: UI

Three, all in the interface layer, and they are the reason some HUD apps stopped working on patch day:

The v-bng-panel directive was removed.
createVueApp is deprecated, and ChangeState now only forwards to the router.
setWindowTitle was removed.

If you maintain a UI app built on the old panel directive, it needs a rewrite against the current Vue-based framework. Hotfix 0.40.3 fixed a memory leak in the Vue subsystems, so test on 0.40.3 or later rather than 0.40.0. The “show possibly broken mods” button is gone from the Mod Manager, and 0.40.2 made the manager tolerant of corrupted archives, so your users will no longer see healthy mods vanish because one zip in their folder is bad.

Renderer notes

Vulkan and Direct3D 12 moved to bindless rendering; 0.40.2 fixed occlusion culling under Vulkan on PC and forced DLSS preset K on older GPUs. New anti-aliasing and upscaling options (SMAA T2x, DLSS, FSR 3 and 4, XeSS), stochastic screen-space reflections and specular occlusion change how materials read; a map or car tuned for the old look may want a second pass under the new one. Direct3D 12 VR via OpenXR is PC-only.

Platforms

A native Windows on ARM64 build exists but without the Steam SDK or overlay; Linux updated to SDL 3.4.18; the installer moved to NSIS for the Humble Bundle version. The PS5 version has no mod support at launch and the World Editor stays on PC, so the modding target is unchanged: PC.

A checklist for mod authors

Test on 0.40.3, with Clear Cache first.
Vehicles: check occupant volumes, consider the isInside flag, review engine volume and police modes if relevant.
Maps: look for duplicate-material references, run the AI on decal roads, note the VRAM estimates in the Material Editor.
UI apps: assume a rewrite if you used v-bng-panel.
Update your mod page with the tested version and date. Your users read that line first.

Sources: the official 0.40 release notes and the 0.40.2 and 0.40.3 notes.