Video Index - Wilderness Tiles

This page contains timestamped links and advice on what videos to reference when making any of my various kind of wilderness tiles - the underlying biomes that make up the landscape of the archive system.

It's designed to be easy to browse, be organised by builds, not videos, and include any advice I wish I could have added to the video, but YouTube wont let me :)

I'm gonna repeat that again just to be clear - these links are ALL TIMESTAMPED where appropriate. They'll dump you out just at the right point in the video I'm talking about :)

Back to Video Index

GRASSLAND SERIES

This series of builds are designed to allow you to show a wide range of grasslands, from rocky to smooth, steep to simply bumpy, and with roads to wind through them all.

You can also use them to show more grassy, open woodlands, though I have a specific woodland series planned for the future - I just need to get some things lined up for it first!

Grasslands

The Grasslands video itself is the first in this series, and it holds up pretty well! Like I say in the 'getting started' video, I'd make them smooth sided now, and use the rugged attachments I first show in the lava tile video, and then again updated for grassland versions in the water tiles video. I'd also make them all magnetic, and not bother with the chipboard - unless you need to thicken out 10mm foam, which It's sometimes useful for.

The most up to date recipe for my dirt mix is in the pinned comment of my basing video, and every video where it's used after.

I made:

4 6" flat tiles

4 6" hill/embankment tiles

4 12" flat/light embankment/plaster rock tiles that I very rarely use for large areas

24 3" tiles that I use constantly and wish I'd made better (flat edges no card scenic, grass and seal while separated)

10 tree compatible grass tiles with large magnets - hold off on these I'm redoing trees...

5 or so decorative 3" tiles (cobblestone walls, plaster rocks)

2 tiles with very small magnetic dirt patches for road signs, gibbet etc

10 concave corners

10 convex corners

4 wavy diagonal half dirt half grass tiles

Dirt:

1 12"

2 6"

14 3"

4 concave

4 convex

Grassland Roads

The roads video was the first update to the grasslands, and a big reason behind making tiles this way - so I could finally have dirt roads that dig into the earth, like crappy dirt roads often do…and it looks glorious! :D

This video also has a removable signpost, gibbet post and system for attaching them that doesn’t involve magnets. But honestly, I'd just use magnets, which I later update in the city tiles video- there's a short section showing the road tile upgrade in it :)

I made:

4 6" corners

4 3" corners

10 3" straight

4 6" straight

4 3"t Junction

1 crossroad

8 footpaths

Grassland Hills

The hills video was a bit of an experiment, but a really damn cool one. The end result is (I think) very realistic, and perfectly playable with most minis, or at least just as playable as all those rubble strewn ruins that seem so popular :)

They work quite differently from classic wargaming hills, and are more part of the landscape itself, rather than something you place ON the landscape. Its…really insanely different looking :)

That said, I've been torn on whether to compromise a realistic look for layout flexibility. I really like the smaller slope corners I made for the lava tiles video, and I've been thinking of making some 6" corners for the taller hill tiles too. So that’s also a viable method if you prefer some smaller scale pieces :)

I made:

4 12" concave corners

4 12" convex corners

6 6" straight banks

4 6x3" straight banks

4 6x3" straight bank roads

Trees

The trees video mainly focuses on the trees themselves, the forest floor video that was meant to follow was held up by a lack of materials being in stock due to covid.

I did however, include some grassland tilesyou can attach these trees to in the meantime, and they can also be attached to the hills on slopes, unlike normal trees :)

These days I'd advise adding this magnet hole from below, like I mention for the road accessories and showed off in the city tiles video. It means you can stick a magnet in as and when you want, and remove it when you're done, saving a ton of magnets if you wanted to…

These trees can be used as either tall or short trees, or a separate trunks, and connect magnetically to the tiles directly. This gives you a ton of flexibility in using them, and allows you to place trees in realistic looking terrain, surrounded by grass or other uneven realistic looking ground cover, and not have any ugly scatter terrain based ruining the effect :)

They can also be used in combination with the city tiles, which I show in that video!

And as I mentioned at the top, I have a set of true woodland tiles planned, I just have some things I want to get lined up first to make it truly epic :)

I made:

1 large

2 medium

1 small

Be warned, I'm redoing these...I have such plans!

LAVA SERIES

Volcanic tiles:

The Volcanic tiles video is the first in the series so far, and focuses on showing ashen, rocky, hellish terrain, including a more gently sloping hill variant method for sloped ash banks.

Alongside this, I made some lava pools with a new technique I'm very proud of, which work alongside homemade LED lightboxes for epic-bright lava tiles that glow even in daylight! You can even put coloured plastic sheets under the lava to turn it into rainbow goop of any colour you like!

I have far more plans for these lightboxes, they're a brilliant way to add insanely bright light beneath terrain, far better than a few simple leds with their own batteries. So sooner or later, expect them to be compatible with other interesting builds :)

I made:

14 3" rocky tiles (limestone tarmac, glass,)

2 3" flat tiles (volcanic base ready and flat plaster rocks with indents in the foam to fit buildings over them)

3 6" rocky tiles

5 6" flat tiles

2 1.5" rocky tiles (to slide 3" tiles along a bit and make them look less like a grid)

10 concave corners

10 convex corners

2 3" lava pools

1 6" lava pool

Lava Rivers:

The lava rivers I'm almost entirely happy with, my only real 'hindsight' issues being to use non-coloured chipboard to add less black fluff to the white clay, and possibly to use air dry clay over polymer clay for the banks - but that isn't something I've had time to properly test :)

Someone did ask why I didn't do all the banks as removable and just make full lava tiles - it would be a lot more expensive in transparent clay :)

I made:

3 diagonal

2 curved

4 straight

2 open lava

12 corner accessory pieces

4 bank accessory pieces

CITY SERIES

City tiles:

The city tiles video covers the basics, straights, corners, open areas, kerb sewers and magnetically attachable LED streetlamps. Ok so maybe a BIT more than basics, but definitely the core!

This project might seem intimidating to a new crafter, especially the clay sections and needing things like texture rollers - but I do mention in the video how you can make these tiles using simple foam to cut in a stone texture to the pavement and road much like I show for the sett paving in the gutters.

It won't have quite as many nice effects like the bumpiness for puddles and the round road cobbles, but its perfectly do-able if you feel more comfortable with something like that, and there's nothing stopping you slicing the tops off with a hot wire further down the road and doing clay tops for the pieces at that point!

A neat trick to make the clay the right thickness without a pasta roller is to use a rolling pin over two pieces of 1/16" thick card, with the clay in the middle. it'll take some effort to get flat, but should work!

The LED streetlamps are also absolutely optional, and can easily be added later when you have a bit more confidence if you wanted :)

Definitely more planned in this series too…

I made:

3x3 types:

Straight road with pavement (x16) (1:1 road to pavement),

straight road with pavement and sewer(x4)

corner with pavement (x4),

concave corner with pavement (x4),

pavement only (10x 3 - enough for a 2ft boulevard with trees.)

Road only (x8),

4 concave grasslands shape corner pavement

4x convex grasslands shape corner pavement

Sewer Tiles:

This set of 3 videos covers 2 different kinds of sewers - empty and full, as well as sloped walls for use in general dungeons. Finally, the bonus video covers sewer corners, and the techniques used on the STL accessories to gain the final result!

The first video (the sewer one) also includes the STL wall stamp vice technique in detail.

WARNING here for anyone attempting these. I used dabbed PVA instead of water ripples for this project, and I almost regretted it. If stored in cold (under 5 degrees C) temperatures, the PVA can 'frost over' and turn patchy, cloudy and white. This happened to me, I panicked, it slowly went away as the pieces sat in a warm room, I calmed down. but now my sewer tiles live in the house, unlike my other tiles (garage). Worth bearing in mind for storage reasons.

Theoretically you could use water thinned woodland scenics water ripples instead of the thinned PVA for yours. My water tiles used water ripples, and live in the sometimes-sub zero garage quite happily.

WATER SERIES

Water tiles:

The water tiles video was a long time coming, but it allows you to make a huge range of water based scenarios, from narrow tight winding streams to wide rivers, lakes, coasts and more :)

There's also the Water tile corners video where I show how to make the corners and the tile edge pieces to hide all those straight lines...

and the resin experiments video where I show the various materials I tried and the outcomes - both of these are both patreon bonus videos :)

As it’s a question that gets asked a fair bit and I forgot to address it fully in the video - I chose black as a base colour as it makes the water more modular. Water is lots of colours in lots of different places, but in almost all places (in woods, on plains, in caves, in deserts, in snow, at sea, on lakes - you name it) it CAN be black. Whereas if you use brown, it looks weird at sea, as does green for the most part, and blue looks very cartoony and strange underground or outside the storm cloaked wasteland keep of the BBEG… so I went with black :)

I may live to regret this, but I like it and how it worked out. If you wanted to go blue, I think you probably could make it work, if you were happy with that slightly jarring contrast in dark/evil areas :)

I made:

4 6" concave corners

4 6" convex corners

6 6" open water

6 6x3 straight bank

6 6x3 open water

2 6x3 island

4 3x3 straight bank

5 3x3 open water

1 3x3 island

Back to Video Index