"How much wood would a wargamer chuck ..." Topic

… on to the table as terrain?

Or, more broadly, what types of materials do you use in your terrain and to what extent?

1) Foam Board – half the buildings
2) Plastic – the other half of buildings and almost all plants, and most interior (building, cave, dungeon) setups
3) Balsa – most building details (window frames, doors, etc)
4) Papier mâché – occasionally for hills and caves or specialty pieces
5) Clay – Often for the bases and ground on a terrain piece
6) Paper Pulp – I use a lot of paper pulp packing material as ersatz adobe/wattle buildings and defenses.

I'm with you on 1through 4 but clay no. Not keen on paper pulp either

Foam core adobe Mexican/Near/Far East buildigs,original Armorcast resin for WWII and Tudor(and wish I'd bought a whole lot more!). Acheson Creations resin for a lot of little walls 'n things.
Aquarium pieces make great Pulp/SF/Fantasy terrain.

I have a lot of card buildings I made myself, along with some foamcore one's.
Hills are expanded polystyrene or thick card contours.
Rivers are 2mm MDF, thin plastic or felt.
Roads are masking tape or felt.
Rough ground/swamp is MDF with flock etc.
Fields are doormat, felt or either MDF or plastic sheet with either long static grass or ploughed fields made from corrugated card.
Hedges are made from plastic pan scourers.
Barbed wire made from wire:)
Rocks made from rocks.
Pillboxes made out of foamcore or plastic.

Commercial stuff is made of all the usual: resin, plastic etc.

All scratch built wooden buildings.

By weight or volume, very little of my terrain is wood. Even my gaming tables are plastic and metal.

My buildings are mostly plaster or resin, plus a few lead microarmor pieces. My trees are almost all plastic (Woodland Scenics) with ground foam foliage, but in really small scales they're nails with ground foam foliage. My flat terrain (fields, woodland areas, swamps, towns, etc.) are homemade from felt or sheet metal with a lot of stuff glued on, except roads which are now FatFrank rubber items, and rivers which are either cast latex or homemade from plastic transparency sheets.

The only actual wood in my terrain collection is in the scratchbuilt fences, hedges, and modular fortifications, made from toothpicks, craft sticks, and wood trim. OTOH, I also have a few feet each of plastic white picket fencing and post-&-rail fencing. There's quite a bit more wood in the bases of my 15mm miniatures, which are largely MDF, plywood or balsa.

- Ix

I use a fair bit of small wood; toothpicks, balsa pieces, tongue depressors, bottle rocket tails, strip wood from fruit crates, twigs, etc., among the foam core and plastic signage, Styrofoam packing, different weights of cardboard and so on. I have painted on clay as the daub on wattlework simulated with burlap. Paper mâché can make nice thatch; use thick paper and line up the raggedy edges, paint with oil colors.

As an aside, try to reach out to your favorite national retailer's visual merchandiser. (Go in the morning and look for someone hanging signs.) vThe amount of foamcore, plastic, and variable weight card thrown out as outdated advertising can reduce your materials costs to near zero.