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Hey, just wondering if anyone has some good ideas for how to store wargames terrain? What do people use, shelves, boxes etc?

Delicately placed in a plastic tub for me. Keeps the dust off, stacks with other tubs and being opaque means I can see what terrain I have without wondering what tub it is in. I dont use padding/bubble wrap, but I dont have any delicate terrain right now either.

I put mine in plastic tubs with a bit of bubble wrap. It works for for all the smaller items. The big items like my Tau landing pad and large hills are more difficult to store without warping, and I haven't solve the problem yet.

Most of my club's stuff was made to be fairly sturdy, so it gets stored in big plastic stacking tubs.
They're then stacked in the cupboard we have in the storeroom.
Some more fragile bits are placed on a shelf.

The only really good way is to put each terrain piece or pieces in their own plastic box and stack them.. Otherwise they're gonna take a ton of space on shelves.

Our FLGS has bookcase shelves in the back of the store, and that seems to work pretty well for a large amount of terrain.

We used to use plastic tubs, but terrain often got damaged in there (since you have to pile terrain on top of terrain). We've mostly just given up on trying to transport it.

Depend on the terrain, but basically it's alot of different sized boxes I have alot of porcelain buidings that have been converted into fantasy buildings. They live in a big tub that I've put cardboard dividers in. Other terrain goes into various sized cardboard boxes and a few are big enough to sit on a shelf by themseves. Road sectons get stacked in smaller boxes, foliage get's tossed in plastic shoeboxes, etc, etc.
Luckily I've got a big shelving unit on the porch that I can keep my terrain in.

Big Rubbermaid tubs. I got rid of all my 40K themed ruins, which saved a lot of space. I only have complete buildings now for Infinity, or Malifaux, and those stack in the boxes like a charm. I have boxes for scatter terrain that are lined with bubblewrap and get a big handful of foam pullouts (from foam trays) to soften impacts. I store all of this in the closet in my home office (one side are the suits, the other's the tubs') I have a shelf in tha closet, and on that Istore the modules for my spaceship interior (all made as boxes with sturdy foamcore sides and 1 1/2' thick floors. Aside from the guilt trip of not being done, those are super safe.

 legoburner wrote:
Delicately placed in a plastic tub for me. Keeps the dust off, stacks with other tubs and being opaque means I can see what terrain I have without wondering what tub it is in. I dont use padding/bubble wrap, but I dont have any delicate terrain right now either.

I think you might mean "translucent" legoburner. Opaque means you CAN'T see through them to sse what's in them.

I use 55l translucent plastic tubs with locking lids - I've got 8 of them chocka with terrain. Enough to do about 9-10 40k tables at 25% coverage. They've travelled interstate by road over some quite crap ones (for cons) and survived the trip quite well. Mix of buildings and hills and stuff. Mostly used for Infinity these days, though.

 chromedog wrote:
I think you might mean "translucent" legoburner. Opaque means you CAN'T see through them to sse what's in them.

I use 55l translucent plastic tubs with locking lids - I've got 8 of them chocka with terrain. Enough to do about 9-10 40k tables at 25% coverage. They've travelled interstate by road over some quite crap ones (for cons) and survived the trip quite well. Mix of buildings and hills and stuff. Mostly used for Infinity these days, though.

er... I meant 3% opaque... yeah that's right :S

If you can find some good stacking boxes with locking lids and a drop door, thats probably the best solution:



That way, if you want the stuff at the bottom you don't have to unstack everything and take the lid off, just open the door, so it works well for transport as well as sitting around in a club/ store home for long periods of time.

In general, they're quite useful as makeshift furniture if you move around a lot, put 4 on top of each other and instant chest of drawers, and when you move house you don't need to pack or unpack since its all already in boxes.

Terrain storage is a constant battle that will never be won. Plastic tubs are my preferred method, but it pays to think about how a piece of terrain will be stored prior to building it. Where am I going to put this should be the first question you answer.

When I first started building terrain, I didn't think about storage! I had so much space...ah...how little I knew then. How little did I understand that once you start making terrain, it doesn't stop. It keeps going...more and more and more!

I swore I was done several times. But I've always wanted a modular tunnel network...and how can you pass up such a great opportunity. If we are playing a pirate game, shouldn't we have ships? And if we have ships, shouldn't we have enough ships to fill a table? We can't very well use 28mm terrain for a 15mm mech warfare game! Scandalous! Back to the hardware store!

Seriously though, translucent plastic tubs are great, but I find it best to locate ones with as straight sides as possible. Most plastic tubs are angled so that they can fit inside one another, but that can make it a little dodgy to get terrain inside of them comfortably, especially if you have things like square or rectangular bases or boxy houses or buildings.

Tubs can also be a little hard on terrain, so keep that in mind. Things can slide about or get jostled. Personally, I feel that terrain should be functional before pretty, so I like to build my terrain to take a beating. I've learned from mistakes. Building a beautiful piece is nice, but if it is fragile there's not much point in it being pretty because it won't stay that way if you use it a lot. And at some point, all of your terrain will be subjected to the 'drop test'. It is inevitable. Whether you drop a whole tub or the cat knocks your new tower off of the table, every piece will get slammed good at least once.

In short, you can build your terrain to make storage and transportation simpler, or you can figure out a more complex storage/transportation system after the fact. I recommend the former if you plan to take your terrain on the road. I have found that messing with foam, bubble wrap, dividers, etc. adds a lot of annoyance and complexity to terrain storage. It can also make it harder for friends to help put things away. If there's some wiggle room in your terrain boxes, it makes it much easier for people to put things away who don't know 'the system', so to speak. If your terrain will only go into the box just so, that can cause problems. But again, wiggle room generally means a higher degree of rough handling.

For example, I have a bunch of rock piles and cactus patches. These guys live in the same clear plastic tote, cacti preferably on top of rock piles. There's room enough in the box that you can pretty much put things inside any which way, and everybody knows that all of the rock piles and cacti go into the same box. The downside is that the terrain can slide around a bit inside the box, and occasionally a cactus will get knocked loose. But it is nothing that a little dab of glue won't sort out immediately, so I don't sweat it.

If terrain is only going to be used where it lives, you can afford to be a little less careful, partly because it won't get handled as much, and partly because you can always clean up in the morning. If you are at the FLGS and it is closing time, terrain needs to get packed away and find its way to the car. You don't usually have the luxury of picking up your toys later.

If you travel with your terrain...got nothing for you - well I do have an idea, just never implemented since I don't have a need for it.

If you stay where you play (or at least your terrain does) - simple adjustable shelves rule.

The concept is pretty simple as seen here:

http://www.finewoodworking.com/item/57199/smart-sandpaper-storage

You cut dado for thin shelves to slide into for your shelves. You can readjust for varying heights quickly and easily by adding and removing shelves. The shelves themselves are cheap and easy to make (I use 1/4" Masonite - but to be honest, 1/8" would work as too). I have them under my gaming table as a pedestal base for it to store terrain tiles (each column holds one "type" of terrain - deserts, grasslands, alien worlds...).

For larger stuff - buildings and what not - I have a bank of full height "book shelves" done up in the same manner with glass doors to keep the dust off.

The dados are pretty easy to hammer out using a router and spacing jig (have the jig index on the previously cut dado).

The theory goes to the same basic design as that - just built using lighter materials (could probably get away with something like 1/8" acrylic...). Handles for ease of carrying and a latching door system. I've built army carriers with the same design that handle the weight of metal armies fine. Most terrain is lighter than them (especially when you have a half dozen shelves filled with metal) - so it should work well enough for moving terrain about.

The only thing which is difficult to deal with with terrain is how to keep it from bouncing about. The figures are normally magnetized and stick well to a sheet of flashing affixed to the shelf. Terrain isn't normally magnetized (though it could be) but another option would be the sticky silicone rubber sheets. They have a bit of grip that should keep terrain in place during normal movements (in and out of the car...around corners at speed...) but not so much stick that they will tear the bottom off your terrain.