EventLab is one of Forza Horizon 5’s most ambitious features, turning the entire Mexico map into a sandbox where players can design their own races, stunts, and challenges rather than just driving the routes Playground Games built. What started as a route creator has grown into a full creative toolset with over a million player creations shared to date. This guide covers how to build your first custom event, the rules and props available to you, and how to share your work with the wider community.
What Is EventLab and How to Access It
EventLab is the Forza Horizon series’ creator toolset, letting players design custom events, stunts, rules, prop placement, and jumps anywhere on the map. Within EventLab you can customize practically anything about an event, including the layout of the track, the time of day, the weather, traffic density, and even certain physics parameters that affect how the event plays. To get started, head to any race icon on the map, either by fast traveling to it or driving up to it, and select Enter Event as if you were about to race normally. Instead of choosing to participate, select the option to create your own route rather than joining the existing one, which drops you into the EventLab editor for that location.
Building Your First Custom Race
Once inside the editor, the core building blocks are start points, checkpoints, and a finish line, which you can place anywhere within the available creative space rather than being locked to the game’s premade routes. This makes it possible to build anything from a faithful recreation of a real racetrack to a sprawling point-to-point route that crosses multiple biomes on the map. Start simple with your first creation: place a clear start and finish, add a handful of checkpoints to define the racing line, and test drive the route yourself before adding complexity. Testing early and often is the fastest way to catch awkward corners or checkpoints that are easy to miss.
Setting Rules, PI Limits, and Vehicle Restrictions
Beyond the physical layout, EventLab lets you configure the rules that govern how an event plays. You can set Performance Index limits to keep a race competitive within a specific class, restrict which vehicle types are allowed, and choose specialized modes such as drift scoring or timer-based challenges instead of a standard race format. These rule sets are what separate a simple point-to-point drive from a genuinely competitive event, since a well-tuned PI limit or vehicle restriction forces racers into closer, more interesting competition rather than letting the fastest car in the game win by default. Take time to test your rule set with a few different car classes to make sure the restrictions actually produce the kind of racing you intended.
Placing Props, Stunts, and Environmental Effects
EventLab also includes an extensive library of props that can turn a straightforward race into a stunt showcase or an obstacle course. Available props include jumps, floating arrows to guide players through freeform sections, explosive barrels, and hollow balls, among many others, all of which can be resized, rotated, and combined to build elaborate set pieces. Seasonal theme packs are also available, letting creators build events around specific visual or environmental themes tied to the game’s seasonal content. Combining props thoughtfully, rather than simply scattering as many as possible, tends to produce the most memorable creations, since a well-placed jump sequence or a tight prop-lined corridor can define the entire feel of an event.
Sharing Your Creations With Share Codes
Once you have built and tested an event, sharing it with other players is done through a Share Code. To find the code for something you have created, head to the Creative Hub and select EventLab, then choose My Events and navigate to My Shared Events. If a Share Code is hidden on that screen, pressing the reveal button will display it. These Share Codes are what other players enter to load your exact creation, whether it is a serious circuit design or a purely comedic stunt setup, making them the key mechanism for distributing community content outside of the game’s built-in browsing tools.
Editing Creations After You Publish
Earlier versions of EventLab required creators to rebuild an event from scratch if they noticed a misplaced prop or wanted to adjust a rule after publishing, which discouraged a lot of players from refining their work over time. That changed with an update that let players return to previously published EventLab races and edit them directly, removing the need to recreate a route from nothing just to fix a small mistake. This made it far more practical to treat a creation as a work in progress, publishing an early version, gathering feedback from other players, and then going back in to adjust checkpoints, props, or rules based on how people actually experienced it.
Discovering and Playing Community Creations
You do not need to build your own events to get value out of EventLab, since the community hub has accumulated over a million player creations, ranging from serious, professionally designed tracks to intentionally absurd challenges. Players can browse and filter these community-created events directly within the game to find designs made by other creators, making it easy to spend an entire session just working through user-made content instead of the default career races. This constant stream of new, free content is one of the reasons EventLab has become such a significant part of the game’s long-term appeal.
What EventLab 2.0 Added
Playground Games later expanded the tool with an update called Horizon Creatives, which introduced EventLab 2.0 and a set of features aimed squarely at serious creators. This included new quick capture nodes that let players quickly combine multiple props into seamless long or wide environmental structures, along with a new selection mode that allows creators to select multiple objects at once and move, resize, duplicate, or delete them as a group. These additions significantly sped up the process of building large, detailed creations, which had previously required moving and adjusting props one at a time.
Getting Your Creations Noticed
If you want your event to stand out among the community’s huge library of shared creations, treat the first minute of the experience as the most important part of the design. A clean, clearly signposted opening section that immediately tells players what kind of event they are in, whether that is a technical circuit, a stunt gauntlet, or a drift course, does more to hold attention than a complicated layout that only pays off after several minutes of driving. Testing your creation with friends before sharing it widely is also valuable, since someone unfamiliar with the layout will find confusing checkpoints or awkward prop placement far faster than you will after building the route yourself. Finally, keep the length reasonable for the type of event you are making, since short, replayable stunt routes and drift courses tend to get revisited far more often than sprawling point-to-point circuits that take several minutes to complete. If you want a broader look at everything else Forza Horizon 5 has to offer beyond EventLab, check out our complete Forza Horizon 5 guide for a full overview of the game’s world, cars, and progression systems.