Building a Necromunda & Warhammer 40k Sci-Fi Sprawl

Few tables look better — or play better — than a proper sci-fi sprawl: layered hab-blocks, gantries, cargo stacks and dead-end alleys that turn every activation into a tense, claustrophobic firefight. Whether you run Necromunda in the depths of the underhive or fight 28mm Warhammer 40,000 skirmishes across a ruined industrial district, the terrain is what sells the setting. This guide walks through how to assemble a dense, vertical sprawl from physical printed terrain kits — what to buy, how to lay it out, and how to make it play as good as it looks.

Why density and verticality matter

Open tables favour shooting armies and make most games feel flat — literally. The grim, gothic worlds of the 41st millennium are anything but open. Necromunda in particular is built around multi-level terrain: catwalks, ladders, ductways and rooftops that reward gangs for climbing, flanking and ambushing. The standard guidance for a good skirmish table is roughly 25–30% of the surface covered by terrain, and for a sprawl you want a lot of that coverage to go upward rather than just outward.

Practically, that means three things on the table: tall buildings you can fight inside and on top of, mid-height structures that break sightlines at eye level, and low scatter that creates cover in the gaps. Get the mix right and a 4x4 or even a 3x3 board plays far bigger than its footprint.

Start with a building bundle for the skyline

The fastest way to build a believable district is to start with a bundle rather than buying structures one at a time. Our 28mm UnderNidus Sci-Fi Terrain Bundle is built for exactly this job: ten buildings designed to slot together into a continuous underhive-style sprawl. Because the structures share a consistent industrial-gothic look and a common 28mm footprint, you can crowd them shoulder-to-shoulder without the table reading as a random pile of unrelated kits.

Ten buildings is also the sweet spot for table-filling math. A single skirmish board rarely needs more than eight to ten substantial structures to feel dense, so one bundle effectively furnishes an entire game surface — and gives you spares to reconfigure the layout between sessions so the same terrain never plays quite the same way twice.

Remember these are physical, unpainted printed kits that ship to you for assembly. That is a feature, not a chore: building the sprawl yourself means you control how the levels connect, where the access points sit, and which walls stay open for line of sight.

Add industry to anchor the setting

Hab-blocks alone can feel residential. What pushes a table from "city" to "40k industrial hellscape" is heavy infrastructure — pipework, gantries, loading bays and the grimy machinery that keeps a hive alive. Our Industrial Warehouse Terrain set brings four buildings plus a generous helping of sci-fi junk scatter, which is ideal for representing a manufactorum block, a dockyard, or the working edge of a settlement.

Drop the warehouse complex along one board edge and treat it as the objective-dense "industrial quarter" — the place gangs raid for materials and armies fight to control. The included scatter does double duty here, filling the awkward dead space between large structures with cover that infantry can actually use.

Cargo and containers make the alleys play

The single biggest upgrade to a sprawl's playability is movable, modular cover. Shipping containers and freight are perfect: they're tall enough to block a standing model, short enough to fight over, and you can rearrange them every game to create fresh chokepoints. Our 28mm Sci-Fi Cargo Hauler Terrain set — big rigs and shipping containers — is built to scatter through the streets and loading yards of your sprawl.

Stack a few containers to create elevated firing positions, leave gaps to form firing lanes, and park a hauler across an intersection to force flanking movement. Because these pieces are loose rather than fixed, they're the easiest way to re-tune board balance: if shooting armies are dominating, add a container or two to the open lanes and the game tightens immediately.

Putting the sprawl together

A reliable layout method is to build in three passes. First, place your tall UnderNidus buildings to define the main streets and break the board into zones — avoid a neat grid; offset structures so no single sightline crosses the whole table. Second, anchor one corner or edge with the warehouse complex as your industrial quarter and a natural cluster of objectives. Third, sprinkle cargo containers and haulers through the remaining streets and yards to fill firing lanes and create the close-range ambush points that make underhive games sing.

For verticality, make sure at least a few buildings connect — a gantry, a ladder, or simply two structures placed close enough to jump between. Necromunda's rules reward models that fight across levels, and even in standard 40k a rooftop firing position changes how a unit threatens the board.

A note on scale and game systems

Everything above is built around 28mm heroic scale, which is the standard for Necromunda, Warhammer 40,000, Kill Team and most modern sci-fi skirmish systems. The same terrain works across all of them — a hab-block is a hab-block whether you're running a six-model gang or a small 40k strike force. If you play a mix of systems, that cross-compatibility is exactly why a coherent terrain collection is worth assembling once and reusing for years.

Building it your way

The beauty of assembling a sprawl from physical kits is ownership: you build it, paint it, and reconfigure it to suit whatever you're playing this week. Start with the UnderNidus bundle for your skyline, anchor it with the Industrial Warehouse set, and bring the streets to life with cargo haulers and containers. Assemble, prime, and you've got a sci-fi sprawl that will host hundreds of games — and look the part doing it.