by 9d10 Games
Hi! My name is Ilya, I am a designer, maker, and tabletop nerd from Vilnius, Lithuania. May I present to you my 5th crowdfunding campaign – a fully colored, modular, portable set of 28 mm sci-fi “dungeon” tiles, that also converts into various 3D terrain on the go.
I spent a lot of time looking for a high-quality, affordable, sustainable way to produce fully colored terrain. Many options were rejected, before I found the current solution – industrial grade digital printing on plastic film.
How is it made? Large 450×320 cm sheets are printed at a professional print shop in Lithuania (EU), glued onto 2.5 brown-stained HDF board, and precisely laser-cut. (The trickiest part to solve was aligning the print within the laser cutter!)
Four of such sheets make the Core set: all the tiles, portals, and doors. The print is super sharp, colors are most vibrant, the film is scratch-resistant and waterproof too.
Simply reskinning my fantasy tiles would be lazy and boring, thus I ended up with a system of standard 1” grid rooms and wider 40 mm corridors, accompanied with regular 1”-wide doors and larger iris portals.
At some point I realized: with some clips and supports, we can turn these flat tiles into three-dimensional structures. With this simple addition, you can build anything!
Room tiles become roofs, corridors become walls. The Airlock is now a landing pad, rounded 3×3 corners make a power shield generator, and the Greenhouse converts into massive radio telescope!
In addition, I designed a number of smaller scatter 3D pieces, all of which can be used in two or more ways. Upside-down cryopods become market stalls, crates make tables and AC units, generators turn to be dumpsters, standing cargo containers look like data vaults!
I like HDF (high density fiberboard) because it’s affordable, always in stock, cuts nicely with a laser cutter, and is 100% made of recycled wood. HDF is much more durable, and feels more premium in your hands than usual boardgame chipboard. It is as dense as plywood, and has nice weight to it too.
The whole Core set fits nicely into a lunch box, along with doors & 3D scatter. For clips and girders I recommend a small compartment box. I wanted Facility 404 to be easy to store and transport, for those of us who play at a friend’s house or who simply doesn’t have much space at home (me).
The project started as a simple set of tiles for sci-fi RPGs like Starfinder, Traveller, Mothership, CyBorg, AlienRPG, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, and many others…
…Now, with single Core set and an Upgrade kit you can set up a proper 3×3 battlefield for tabletop skirmish games like Space Weirdos (my favorite), Stargrave, Five Parsecs From Home…
…and if WH40k is your jam, Facility 404 makes nice 11e terrain. But please try SW Legion or Xenos Rampant sometime, these are great army games!
The Core set contains all the rooms, corridors and doors you need to set up an exciting indoor encounter: an underground research facility, a corporate headquarters, an abandoned spaceship.
The set composition might change slightly, but the volume of stuff won’t change: the Core set is comprised of eight fully printed 22×30 cm sheets worth of terrain.
The Upgrade kit adds 3rd dimension to Facility 404:
- clips and girders to turn the Core tiles into 3D structures;
- enough pieces to make at least 6 columns;
- 25 pieces of 3D scatter.
The Upgrade kit comes as a single brown-stained 2.5 MDF sheet (clips, girders and scatter parts) and two 22×30 cm sheets of thick color-printed cardstock of scatter terrain. These 3D pieces are 1 part cardstock and 1 or 2 brown MDF parts each, and require a simple one-time assembly with a drop of glue.
The Digital pack includes every tile and bit designed for this project, in both PDF and STL form. The package is work in progress, and I hope to add more designs and variations after the campaign ends.
STL files optimized for FDM printing:
- Tiles, including extra designs and variants.
- Girders & clips, including extra designs and variants.
- Portals, doors, and furnishings from the Upgrade pack (as solid 3D objects).
High-resolution PDF files:
- Tiles, portals, doors & 3D scatter as papercraft models.
- Original colored option.
- Ink-saving black and white option.
- Both A4 and US Letter formats.
I believe our hobby should be accessible to anyone. This free print-and-play includes everything you need to set up any interior encounter for your players: all the tiles from the core set (with some variations too), portals, doors, and a couple of smaller pieces like fans and hatches.
PDF files are 300 DPI full-color in both A4 and US Letter formats. The STLs are simplified flat designs that match their PDF counterpart, if you wish to stick your PDF print-outs to something more firm.
Grab the files from Google Drive, no strings attached. And send me some pictures when you put your kit in use!
