License Plate Tutorial

A license plate mod is one of the smallest vehicle mods you can make for BeamNG.drive. It adds a new plate design to the parts selector, with its own background art and generated plate text.

The current plate system uses Skia template files. In practice, that means your mod describes the plate as a small JSON layout: a background image, one or more text boxes, and optional extra artwork such as stickers or badges.

You only need an image editor and a text editor to get started.

You can start from this template mod or create every file by hand. If you use the template, place it in your mods folder, unpack it in the mod manager, then rename the files and folders as shown in the first tutorial.

What To Read First

1. Creating your first plate walks through the folder, background image, template file, jbeam part, and in-game test.
2. Generating plate text explains how to make the game generate different plate numbers without writing Lua.
3. Scripting plate logic shows when and how to add a small Lua resolver for plates that change based on the typed text.
4. Skia template reference lists the supported JSON fields for the template file.
5. Converting old mods explains how to move an older JSON or HTML generator mod to the new template system.