What is EventLab? A beginner's guide to custom events

EventLab is a set of in-game tools that lets you design your own events instead of only playing the ones the game provides. Rather than racing a fixed route the developers laid out, you decide where the event starts and ends, what the rules are, and what obstacles or props stand in the way.

At a high level it gives you control over a few things: the route or arena the event takes place on, the rules that govern it, and props you can place into the world to shape the experience. Combine those and you can build something that plays nothing like a standard race — a precision course, a survival challenge, or a party mode invented entirely by a player.

The point is creative freedom. The built-in races are a starting point; EventLab is where the community goes beyond them and makes the game its own.

Because EventLab is so open-ended, players use it for wildly different things. A few kinds of creation show up again and again.

Obstacle courses and stunt gauntlets are a staple — long, ridiculous runs packed with ramps, loops and near-misses that test your nerve more than your lap time.

Drift and precision challenges use tight layouts and scoring rules to reward car control rather than raw speed, giving drifters and technical drivers a place to show off.

Off-road adventures and hillclimbs send you across terrain the normal races never touch, turning the open world into a rally stage or a mountain climb.

Party and mini-game modes lean into chaos — tag, king-of-the-hill style scrambles, elimination games and other multiplayer silliness designed to be played with friends.

Recreations and tributes are where builders get ambitious, using props and clever layouts to evoke a famous track, a movie scene or a mode from another game.

Like everything else in the Forza Horizon sharing system, EventLab creations are passed around with share codes. The important difference is the kind of code they use.

Tunes and liveries are tied to a specific car, so their codes only make sense alongside a particular model. EventLab creations are not car-specific — a course or game mode is a place and a set of rules, not a setup for one vehicle. That is why they are shared as event codes rather than car codes.

On this site we keep event codes in their own category for exactly that reason. When you grab an EventLab code you are downloading a whole custom event, and in most cases you bring your own car to it.

Playing a community creation is deliberately simple, and the flow is the same idea as any other share code: the code points at an upload on the game's servers, and entering it pulls that upload into your game.

In broad terms you head to the part of the game that handles shared or downloaded content, choose the option to enter a code, and type in the event code you found. The game looks it up, downloads the creation, and adds it to your game so you can launch it like any other event.

Exactly where that menu lives can shift between Forza Horizon titles and updates, so if you cannot find it straight away, look for wherever the game groups creative or community content. Once it is downloaded, you start it, pick a suitable car if the event asks for one, and play.

A racing game has a finite number of official events, and even a big one eventually gets familiar. EventLab is a large part of why Forza Horizon stays fresh long after you have seen everything the developers made.

Every creation someone uploads is a new reason to come back, and the best of them get shared, remixed and improved by other players. That constant stream of community-made content gives the game a much longer life than its official events could on their own.

It also lowers the barrier to being a creator. You do not need outside software or special skills — the tools are right there in the game, so anyone with an idea can build it and hand it to the whole community with a single code.