In this Gaming Station session Eon loads up BeamNG, drags vehicles onto a map, and runs a string of crash experiments. The "drag" here isn't a drag race — it's Eon literally dragging cars and planes around with the mouse, dropping them, and seeing what the game's physics do to them. Along the way he keeps fiddling with one powerful setting: gravity. "Let's change the gravity," he says, over and over — and that one slider turns a normal car crash into something wild.
Gravity is just a setting you can change
BeamNG lets Eon pick Earth gravity or switch it to floating (almost no gravity at all). The moment he does, the whole world changes. "Even the car floats," he notices. "Even the car flow. Now the wind is blowing the engine." With a plane, low gravity lifts everything off the ground — but it also means he can't steer well: "How am I free to control this?"
That's the real lesson hiding in the chaos. In real life, gravity is a constant force pulling everything down at the same rate. In a game, gravity is a number the physics engine uses for its math. Turn that number way down and cars, logs, and broken plane wings all drift upward like they're in space. Eon is discovering that a simulation only obeys the rules you give it — change a rule, and physics behaves differently. He even keeps trying negative gravity to see things fly up.
Soft-body physics: why everything crumples
The reason these crashes look so satisfying is soft-body physics. Most games treat a car like a solid brick, but BeamNG builds each vehicle out of a flexible frame, so it bends, dents, and breaks realistically. Eon narrates the damage play-by-play:
"The wing completely ripped off... it ripped to one single W... now the engine are dead... did the nose come ripped off? Oh, it just one single body."
When two fast cars smack together, "the front of the whole entire car broke." A big crash leaves the wreck looking "like a spaghetti right now... like the black hole." A plane that hits too hard loses both wings, then the cockpit, then becomes "one single body" tumbling across the map. Eon is watching a model do what a real crumple zone does — absorb a hit by deforming instead of staying rigid.
Crash dummies, license plates, and lots of trial-and-error
Eon keeps adding a crash-test dummy (and a license plate) before he crashes a car. He's not always sure why: "I replaced the dummy... so it have the fuel tank." Sometimes a vehicle won't behave until he gets the dummy and plate sorted out: "Dummy me out... still no. What?" Real engineers use crash-test dummies the exact same way — as stand-in bodies that show what a crash would do to a person, without anyone getting hurt. When a hill launches a dummy, Eon yells, "the dummy got scooped up!"
This whole session is honest trial and error. Eon doesn't know every button — "I don't know how to paint," "I don't know how to change," "I just mess up every time" — but he keeps trying, resetting, and watching. He also explores the map's mods: a giant spiky ball on a chain (he first calls it a "bow chain," then corrects himself: "it's the spiky ball... spiky ball plus chain, that's what we got"), trampolines, a log semi that spills logs everywhere, and a "polar party" pool. Each one is a new thing to test.
Why the game lags and loads slowly
Eon runs into slow loading and heavy lag all session. One map — the "house" one — is "the hardest one to load." And every time he spawns more vehicles, it gets worse: "it's already lagging, bro," "it's so laggy, man." There's a reason. Each car is a detailed soft-body object, and changing gravity means the computer must recalculate the motion of every piece of every vehicle, every fraction of a second. Pile on planes, logs, dummies, and a spiky ball, and the machine has a mountain of math to do — so it slows down. The lag isn't the game being broken; it's the computer working hard to run a realistic simulation.
Try it
In any game with a settings or "sandbox" menu, find a slider you can change — gravity, speed, or time of day — and change just one thing. Watch closely: what happens that's different? Then change it back and try a different value. That's exactly what Eon did with gravity, and it's how real testers learn what each rule in a simulation actually controls.