Behind the Build — Elderbloom Terrain Set 1

Behind the workshop: Why I Made Elderbloom Alien Jungle Terrain

The Eldar finally got Exodites. I wanted them to have a world worth fighting over.

When Games Workshop revealed its new Exodites, I had the same response many long-suffering Eldar players probably had: finally.

Exodites have lived in the background of Warhammer 40,000 for decades—maiden worlds, dragon riders, world spirits, ancient stone monuments, all of it—without ever receiving a proper modern miniature range. Then GW suddenly brought them onto the tabletop as an elite group of mounted specialists defending a dangerous jungle world from Orks. It was a very good day to be the sort of person who has been waiting far too long for space elves riding dinosaurs.

It also created an immediate problem.

The models had a world. The tabletop did not.

GW supplied card templates for spirit steles, trailstones, nexoliths, and other Exodite structures, along with guidance for building a dense maiden-world jungle. Those templates are a clever and accessible starting point. My brain, however, immediately went where it always goes: What would this look like as fully sculpted terrain?

That question became Elderbloom.

This One Was Personal

Eldar have always been my favorite army.

Yes, I know they are called Aeldari now. I started playing them when they were Eldar, and I have endured enough editions, codices, and catastrophic saving throws to qualify for grandfathered terminology.

They have also always been an army that asks a lot from the person playing them. The exact rules change, but the basic personality tends to survive. They're fast, highly specialized, brutally effective in the right position, and surprisingly easy to remove once your opponent gets a clean shot. GW has described them in much the same terms—mobile, hard-hitting, built around precise roles, and fragile when the enemy manages to pin them down.

In less diplomatic language, Eldar are glass cannons wearing very expensive jewelry.

They can cross the board, remove exactly the unit they were designed to kill, and then die because someone nearby coughed with sufficient conviction. When they work, they feel elegant and surgical. When they don't, you get to place several beautifully painted models back into their foam while your opponent mutters something that's not very useful like, “Wow, they really are fragile.”

Eldar players accept this because we're not making decisions based on sanity or our emotional health. We saw the helmets, grav-tanks, gemstones, and elegant murder clowns and made our choice. Suck it.

My old Eye of Error blog contains years of evidence. Dark Eldar conversions, rebuilt Raiders, Coven armies, Grotesques, Pain Engines, Mandrakes, Wraithknights—I kept returning to that corner of the setting because its visual language gave me room to change things while still making them recognizable. A model could be beautiful, grotesque, graceful, threatening, or all four at once.

I eventually had to sell my Eldar army while going through a divorce. Divorce has an impressive ability to turn lovingly painted miniatures into groceries and legal expenses, usually without consulting the army’s original owner. I don't recommend it as a collection-management strategy.

You remember the armies you had to let go, though. They remain in the back of your mind, usually better painted than they were in reality and apparently containing none of the units that repeatedly failed morale tests.

So when Exodites finally appeared, this was never going to be just another release to me.

Starting With the Gate

The first Elderbloom piece needed to establish the entire range without relying on a faction symbol stamped across it.

That became the Twin Spire Convergence Gate.

The basic shape came from the tension between Aeldari elegance and Exodite permanence. Craftworld designs often look light, smooth, and almost weightless. Exodite structures needed to feel older and more rooted. They should still have those recognizable curves and gemstone-like forms, but they also had to look as though they had been standing in the jungle for thousands of years while the planet grew around them.

The two spires lean inward without forming a clean arch. That open space is important. It lets the piece read as a portal, psychic focus, ceremonial entrance, or something considerably worse depending on the paint scheme and the needs of the game.

I kept the large shapes readable because the sculpt had to work in plain gray resin. Paint can add depth, separate materials, and create glowing effects, but it should not be responsible for explaining what the model is. It needed to remain strong from across the table.

The cracks and broken edges keep the gate from feeling manufactured yesterday. The smoother oval forms and carved panels pull it back toward alien technology rather than ordinary fantasy masonry. It sits somewhere between a ruin and a machine, which is exactly where I wanted it.

There's also enough open space around and through the piece for actual tabletop use. A terrain model can be gorgeous and still become a nuisance if nobody can move around it, see through it, or place a miniature nearby without balancing on a decorative root. I enjoy elaborate scenery. I also enjoy finishing a game without arguing about line-of-sight.

The Shrine Needed a Different Weight

Once the gate established the form, the Waystone Shrine had to use the same design language without becoming a carbon copy.

The gate is broad and immediately visible. The shrine is more enclosed. Its central waystone rises from the base with smaller stones gathered around it, creating something that feels private and ceremonial rather than just monumental.

That difference matters when both pieces are on the same board. Two equally dominant landmarks spend the entire game fighting for attention. The shrine needed enough height to be recognizable, but its detail is concentrated closer to the ground.

The arrangement also leaves room for several interpretations. It can be a world-spirit sanctuary, a psychic node, an ancestral memorial, a dormant device, or the precise location where an expedition ignored every warning and activated something made for killing.

That flexibility became one of the rules for the whole collection. The sculpt could suggest a purpose, but it should not dictate one.

The Objective Markers Could Not Be an Afterthought

Objective markers are frequently treated as the throwaways of tabletop design. Everyone understands they should probably be there, but nobody gets excited.

Yet they still matter.

The Elderbloom set includes the Triad Hunt Objective Marker and the Waystone Objective Marker, both designed to carry the same shapes, symbols, and surface treatment as the larger terrain. They can sit away from the gate and shrine without looking as though they came from another game.

Their size also gave me a chance to compress the visual ideas from the larger pieces. The circular forms, raised stones, runes, and central objects all had to remain legible without turning the markers into visual noise.

They're useful for missions, obviously, but they can also become ritual sites, sealed mechanisms, control points, burial markers, or decorative elements on a larger display board. Not everything needs to be a portal. Hey, sometimes the suspicious alien disc on the ground is merely a suspicious alien disc on the ground. Other times it's a roomba-like monster that can kill you if you're on the ground. True story, this happened in an Earthdawn game where our friend Ed found a creative way to murder us.

Why the Plants Are Part of the Set

The official Exodite background describes maiden worlds with dense jungles, dangerous wildlife, and world-spirit structures spread through the landscape. The plants could not be an optional idea added at the end; they needed to be present while the terrain was taking shape.

Elderbloom includes three alien plant designs. They mirror the curved forms of the ruins without looking like the same object copied and resized three times. The foliage can be used around the gate and shrine, scattered elsewhere on the board, or repeated on miniature bases to visually connect an army to the environment.

Including the plants means both versions work as a complete environment: they come as printable files in the STL release and as physical gray-resin pieces in the printed kits. You can still add moss, aquarium foliage, model-railroad vegetation, plastic jungle plants, or whatever has been living in your basing drawer since 2014.

But I Didn’t Want the Jungle Glued Down Forever

One practical decision mattered here: I did not want the vegetation permanently deciding what kind of world this terrain belonged to.

The Twin Spire Gate and Waystone Shrine both have planting holes sized for the three Elderbloom plant designs included in either format. Those same spaces will also accept Games Workshop plastic foliage and most similarly sized third-party jungle plants, aquarium foliage, model-railroad scenery, and miniature vegetation.

Leave the plants loose and you can change the environment without replacing or rebuilding the main terrain. The same gate can move from a lush alien jungle to a dying world, corrupted grove, frozen archaeological site, or desert ruin by changing the foliage and basing around it.

The Waystone Shrine was broken into separate components for the same reason. Its central and secondary obelisks are supplied separately rather than fused permanently into the base, making them easier to print or clean, paint, arrange, and customize before final assembly.

That flexibility matters because Elderbloom was inspired by Exodites, but it was never meant to belong to only one faction, one setting, or even one game system. The architecture gives it an identity. The plants, paint, and surrounding terrain decide where it has been standing for the last ten thousand years.

The shrine’s obelisks are separate components in both formats, while the Gate and Shrine include planting holes for the Elderbloom foliage or similarly sized third-party plants.

Exodite-Inspired, Not Exodite-Locked

Elderbloom began with Exodites, but it was never supposed to work only for them.

There is a difference between creating terrain inspired by a faction and carving that faction’s logo into every available surface until the piece becomes unusable anywhere else. I wanted the Aeldari influence to be clear in the curves, waystone shapes, inset stones, and restraint of the architecture. I didn't want the set to become specific to just them.

That decision opened the range up considerably.

Paint the terrain in pale bone with luminous gems and it will sit naturally beside space elves, corsairs, or other elegant science-fiction forces. Use mossy gray stone and dense vegetation and it becomes an alien jungle ruin. Black material with green energy pushes it toward a sinister precursor civilization. Turquoise, bronze, and aquatic growth could place it on a drowned world. Sandstone and dry vegetation move the same pieces into a desert setting.

The Waystone Shrine and Twin Spire Gate can also cross into fantasy without much effort. Forest spirits, high elves, celestial ruins, crystal kingdoms, and ancient temple encounters all live comfortably in the same general neighborhood. On the science-fiction side, the site can be occupied by human explorers, alien swarms, robotic dynasties, corrupted warbands, or any other group whose commanding officer has decided that approaching the humming structure is definitely worth the risk.

That's what I mean by game-agnostic terrain. It has an identity, but it does not arrive with a prewritten guest list.

What I Did Not Want to Make

I didn't want ordinary ruins with pointed decorations added to them.

I didn't want generic jungle rocks sold under an alien name.

I also didn't want the pieces so overloaded with faction-specific details that they could only appear on one army’s display board.

The line had to land between those extremes. Recognizable enough to satisfy the Eldar part of my brain, but open enough for another hobbyist to take it somewhere I hadn't considered.

That last part is important. Some of the best versions of anything we release are the ones customers build after ignoring half of what I imagined for it. They change the colors, add unexpected materials, combine pieces with older kits, and create an environment that would never have occurred to me.

This is normal and healthy. I definitely don't stare at the photos and think, “I should have done that.”

Elderbloom Terrain Set 1

The complete first set includes the Twin Spire Convergence Gate, Waystone Shrine with separate obelisks, Triad Hunt Objective Marker, Waystone Objective Marker, and three swappable alien plant designs. Together, they provide one large landmark, a modular shrine, gameplay pieces, and matching foliage for alien jungles, fantasy forests, narrative missions, RPG encounters, skirmish tables, and display boards.

Elderbloom is now available in two formats: downloadable STL files for hobbyists who print their own terrain, and physical gray-resin kits for everyone who would prefer the printer to be somebody else’s problem.

The collection started because GW finally gave Exodites their moment and reminded me why I had loved Eldar in the first place. It became something broader while I worked on it—a set for alien jungles, forgotten sanctuaries, excavation sites, and worlds where the local architecture suggests that touching anything would be a terrible idea.

Naturally, someone will touch it.

That is what objective markers are for.

Choose Your Elderbloom

The designs, modular planting spaces, separate shrine obelisks, and game-agnostic use cases are the same either way. The only real question is whether you want files for your own printer or a box of gray resin delivered to your door.

Digital STL Downloads

Elderbloom Terrain Set 1 — STL

The complete gate, shrine, objective-marker, separate-obelisk, and alien-plant digital collection.

Get the STL Set

Twin Spire Gate — STL

A large printable alien gateway and battlefield centerpiece with three included plant designs.

Get the Gate STL

Waystone Shrine — STL

A printable sacred site with separate obelisks and three swappable alien plant designs.

Get the Shrine STL

Objective Markers — STL

The Triad Hunt and Waystone marker files for missions, relic sites, RPG encounters, and displays.

Get the Marker STLs

Physical Gray-Resin Kits

Elderbloom Terrain Set 1 — Physical

The complete unpainted gray-resin kit: Gate, Shrine, separate obelisks, two objective markers, and alien plants.

Shop the Physical Set

Twin Spire Gate — Physical

An unpainted gray-resin gateway kit with a rocky scenic base, planting spaces, and three physical alien plants.

Shop the Physical Gate

Waystone Shrine — Physical

An unpainted gray-resin shrine with separate central and secondary obelisks plus three physical alien plants.

Shop the Physical Shrine

Objective Markers — Physical

Two unpainted gray-resin scenic markers: the Triad Hunt and Waystone objective designs.

Shop the Physical Markers

Games Workshop, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Aeldari, Eldar, Exodites, and all associated names and concepts are the property of Games Workshop Limited. Fallout Hobbies is an independent company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Games Workshop. References to third-party plants and scenery are descriptive compatibility references only; all related names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.