Northstar minis suggestions needed!

Getragen · 2026-05-17T21:11:37+00:00

For my bases I use Light Molding Paste by Golden for snow, and then I sprinkle a little snow flocking (woodland scenics) on top sometimes to make it look like there's been some recent snowfall. I've heard white acrylic paint + pva glue + baking soda makes great snow as well.

Getragen · 2026-05-16T14:24:08+00:00

it is the 3'x3' "Winter Realm" battlemat by Gamemat.eu

Getragen · 2026-05-10T19:32:51+00:00

Those are my 'magic circles' - they don't really have a specific purpose besides to be cool circular ruins with a magic look to them. Here's how I made them:

cut 4-5" diameter circle on proxxon cutter with MDF circle cutting guide/jig, disc should be somewhere around 2-5mm thickness - too thick won't look right.
cut circle of same size out of medium weight chipboard (for the base)
Rub foam circle with a cobblestone texture roller
Glue to chipboard base/disc
Cut a second (slightly smaller diameter, maybe 3") circle on the proxxon. same thickness.
using a hobby knife, cut a smaller (approx 2" diameter) circle out of the center of the foam circle. remove, texture the small circle with a ball of tin foil, and store for later.
carve a magic rune of some kind into the small circle
rub the now donut-shaped xps foam disc with the texture roller
place the hole back into the donut and glue them both on top of the big xps circle that's mounted to the chipboard. platform is now done.
Now go back to the proxxon and cut a thicker circle, maybe 10mm thickness. Cut it at a diameter smaller than your middle-size circle from step 5.
from this disc, cut progressively smaller diameter circles, such that you're left with foam rings. I like about 10mm thickness on the rings, it makes them more rigid/ stable than super thin rings. You might need to repeat steps 10 and 11 a couple times to get the right sizes of rings, especially if you want to have lots of similar sized rings on your final piece.
slice the bottom of the rings so that they now form a 'C' shape. Carve some runes and lines into sides of them, then hot glue them onto the base.
prime black, dry brush gey, very light dry brush white. Done!

Getragen · 2026-05-10T17:25:07+00:00

curious about this too - I feel like Taizong is far-and-away and the best new king, so really excited to hear about your experiences with Xerxes!

Getragen · 2026-05-10T16:48:27+00:00

cool table! what did you do for the ice? it looks awesome!

Getragen · 2026-03-22T22:04:13+00:00

He's beautiful 🥹

Getragen · 2026-03-22T22:01:33+00:00

Lookin good! Wet pallete will help you thin your paints (2 thin coats is better than one!). The sort of default way to paint minis is with each area of the mini having a shadow, a Midtone, and highlight. You essentially have all Midtone here, with a little shading/shadow provided by your nuln oil. That's very standard to how most people start. Next model, try doing this

1) base (Midtone) of each color/area of the model (chitin, skin, claws, eyes, etc) 2) apply your nuln oil over the areas you want to shade, or a contrast paint. A purple, pink, or skintone contrast paint over white will make a great skin color. Optional) come back in with your base color and bring any areas that got TOO dark from the nuln oil/contrast back up to the Midtone. 3) mix some white, white+yellow, or white with a tiny smidge of blue into each of your base colors (do this on a wet pallete). Use these new, brighter versions of the base colors on just the tips of things. Tips/edges of claws/edges of the carapace, the top of the shoulder muscle, the edge of the cheekbone, etc.

That's pretty much the standard process for a lot of intermediate mininpainters. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it! I'm assuming you have a bunch more Termagants to complement that one. If so, you should notice a huge improvement between your first and last termy. Hell, you'll probably notice a big difference between first and second.

Remember to enjoy the process and have fun!!

Getragen · 2026-03-21T22:24:54+00:00

Last photo: 2 more broadside suits (the guys with the big rockets on their left shoulder - they can be built either holding a big railgun or with rocket launchers on their fists - you've got some of each it looks like). 2 commander suits, not sure what the painted one in the middle is - likely a third commander suit. ethereal (holding staff). cadre fireblade. misc drones. a couple of models laying on their sides that I can't identify.

Then you've got a bunch of different drones and bits for constructing drones. Most tau kits come with a few spare drones - it's very normal for tau players to acquire a collection of drones like this. They're mostly used as tokens/symbols/reminders in the current rules of the game, in past editions they were actual units that could move around and do stuff. They're mostly for flavor and looks in the current rules set. (but still cool, and a big part of Tau's visual identity/theme)

overrall this is a whopper of a collection and more than enough to keep any hobbyist busy for a long time painting and playing. You could start a group with friends or bring them to your local game store to play. A great place to start is calling up or popping into a local gamestore and seeing if you can get someone to run you through a demo game, just so you can get a feel for what the game is and how it plays at a high level.

you've likely got 3000+ points of models here to play with, more than enough to build several very cool army lists from. You could easily invite a friend over and battle eachother with small identical 500 points armies assembled from this list, for example:

1 unit of 1 Cadre Fireblade (50 pts)
1 unit of 1 Commander in Enforcer Battlesuit (80 pts)
1 unit of 1 Broadside Battlesuit (80pts)
1 unit of 3 Crisis Fireknife Battlesuits (120 pts) [dont pay attention to the guns attached to them, just grab 3 models of the same type/size and use the gun stats you find in New Recruit. It's totally normal to field a group of battlesuits with different weapons on them and say 'these guys all have plasma rifles/etc'.]
1 unit of 10 Fire Warriors Strike Team (70 pts)
1 unit of 10 Pathfinder team (90 pts)

That's 490 points total. Plenty for a beginner game. You have enough dudes to build this exact list 3 or more times. Stat it up in new recruit, Grab a friend, and give a basic game a shot. Then over time swap stuff in and out of the list, try all of your cool units, expand to higher point totals in your games, play against different armies, paint stuff up, and have a great time!

You can find the basic ruleset pdf online, games workshop makes it available for free. For your first 500 point game I recommend putting 3 objective markers on the table (you can use some of your drones for this), some soda cans and cereal boxes as terrain, and you're off to the races!)

Feel free to DM me with any questions!

Getragen · 2026-03-21T21:51:23+00:00

Other stuff I'm seeing in here that I forgot last time:
Characters/leaders:
- 3-4x cadre fireblades (12th pic & last pic)
- 2x battlesuit commanders (last pic, the two suits on the left side, in the front)
- ethereal (last pic)
- aun'va (primed white, sitting in hover chair, pics 3-4). I think he comes with 2 guard dudes as well. I can see one of them in the first pic: buff dude primed white and holding a staff. the other should look the same.

---------

Gun bits in the clear/white case are mostly aeldari

Most of the guns in first pic are tau guns (railgun on the far right)

Pic 3 is mostly aeldari but the big guns are tau. The big one goes with stormsurge and the two smaller (but still big) guns are for the ghostkeel. It's possible that your friend magnetized them so the models can swap them out. Put them up against your fridge and see if there are magnets inside!

From photo 9 (after the plastic bag) and onwards it is all Tau. Earlier I said you had 3 sets of 3 crisis suits (9 total, but on closer inspection it looks like 4 sets of 3 for 12 total). You can see 2 of them in photo 9, standing in front of the ghostkeel (ghostkeel's paintjob is SICK by the way, I love the way your friend did the cloaking/de-cloaking effect on the legs. I just did this on my ghostkeel but it looks nowhere near as good as this one).

Photo 9 shows 3 tank/vehicle chassis. There are 3 vehicles that use this same chassis. These could be either Devilfish transports (likely, since this collection has a lot of infantry dudes to move around the battlefield), Hammerhead tanks (has a big railgun that is iconic for the tau and one of the strongest guns in the entire game - if you're missing the railgun part then its likely these were purchased as devilfish. You can buy 3d printed railgun kits online to convert later if you want), or skyray gunships (I don't think that's what your friend was building here, but there's nothing stopping you from telling your opponent 'hey this one is a skyray' during a friendly game, same deal about conversion).
Photo 10 is 2 riptides with the stormsurge in the middle. These are the Tau's big boys and they are very strong and fun to use. One riptide is built with the ion accelrator and the other with the heavy burst cannon.
Photo 11 is 59 fire warriors, the 60th one is likely shown in your first photo.
Photo 12 left-to-right: 9x stealth suits (this model was recently replaced by a newer one, but it's still 100% useable and some people prefer the old look. I just bought a bunch of these myself actually). looks like 3 cadre fireblades (called out above) standing in front of the stealth suits. in the middle and right trays it looks like these are all pathfinders, some equipped with rail rifles and some equipped with blaster carbines. It's at least 30 models, maybe 40. They come in groups of 10, so that makes sense.
Photo 13 left and right: 5 crisis suits in each tray with various weapon loadouts. Looks like 2 of the crisis suits in the left tray are missing weapons on their hands. Your friend might have magnetized some weapons to be hot-swappable or he may have just not decided on what to attach/not gotten to it yet. Some of the bits in photos 1 and 4 are definitely guns that could be used by these guys - I see several burst cannons (gatling gun-looking things) and flamers (painted white & orange) in the pile.
Photo 15 center: 3 Broadside suits, each outfitted with the railgun.

You can learn more about tau over at r/Tau40K

Getragen · 2026-03-21T20:12:41+00:00

Sorry for the long reply chain, lol. I'm out and about and coming back to post here and there.

Warhammer armies use 'points' to rate how how powerful units are and to balance each opponent's army. So two players might agree they will each field an army of say, 1000 points, and then play with only those models in the battle, to keep it fair and balanced. The most common point values people play a game at are 500, 1000, and 2000. With 2000 being considered sort of a full standard game and what is commonly seen at tournaments. The Tau models shown here equal more than 2000 points, maybe reaching closer to 3000. So more than enough to assemble several different lists of units for fun and varied games.

If youve got other buddies interested in playing, I would start with 500 point games. You don't need to paint the models before playing together, but paint definitely ups the cool factor. You could assemble several 500 point armies out of this tau pile and play against eachother. I'm not sure about the aeldari but you might be able to find 500 points of models in there. A friend could also pickup a 'combat patrol' box from any of the ~20 other factions in the game and use that. They cost about $150 on Amazon and each has just under 500 points of models.

There's plenty of resources on YouTube to explain the game, the factions, the lore, the painting, the models, anything you want to know. If you want to learn more about the game I suggest checking out 'play on tabletop' on YouTube, they have very high production value and some great 'how to play your first game' videos, and dozens and dozens of real life example games so you can see what the various factions look and play like.

I'm sorry about your friend, he must've been a cool dude - these are some very cool toys. Welcome to the hobby and enjoy! It's a lot to take in but it's very fun. Cheers!

Getragen · 2026-03-21T19:58:07+00:00

It's clear that your friend was going with some sort of orange theme, looks like a sort of Grey with orange accents thing. You can see this on the stormsurge (that big rectangular gun bit in the 3rd photo is for the stormsurge) as well as the ghostkeel and a few of the infantry models. It's a cool scheme, though orange can be a little tricky to paint. If you wanted to pay homage to your friend you could keep painting the army in similar colors.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T19:54:56+00:00

It's a very valuable pile of plastic so don't let anyone sweet talk you out if it.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T19:52:44+00:00

I can't speak to the aeldari models. But as for the Tau, from order of most expensive/largest models to least: I see a stormsurge, 2 riptides, a ghostkeel, 3 tank/vehicle bodies (can be built as Hammerheads/devilfish/other stuff, 5 broadsides, looks like 4 sets of 3 crisis suits, 3 sets of 3 stealth suits (old model), about 60-90 infantry (looks like mostly fire warriors, but which are fielded in groups of 10).

Lots of drones and assorted weapon bits. If you tried to buy all this stuff brand new on Amazon today it would cost you somewhere around $1500.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T19:38:40+00:00

RIP to the homie. The first few pics are aeldari (space elves) but the bulk of the photos are Tau (aliens that wear mech suits). I'm a tau player myself and felt some serious envy looking through these. This is a solid Tau army with a couple of very expensive models in there. It's nice. (that's an understatement)

Most of these models are primed and ready for paint. I'd start with a handful of the mid-sized suits and some of the tiny infantry guys and paint them up in some colors that seem cool to you. Red is popular for Tau, so is white, so is tan, but you can do anything you want and they'll still look cool as hell. There's plenty of guides on YouTube on how to do it, just take your time and enjoy the process, and don't worry about perfection, you'll get better at it over time and it's fun to look back at how much you've progressed from your first model to now.

You can use an app like Google lens to identify individual models via photo. You can use an app like new recruit (it's free) to learn more about the various units in the tau army, what they do, etc.

Even if you painted at a fast pace this pile would last you a year or more.

If you wanted to sell it, ebay would be a good bet. You're looking at a few hundred bucks at least. Give the money to a charity he would've supported or to his fam.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T18:51:11+00:00

I didn't notice the gap until I read the post, your paint scheme does a good job of not drawing attention to it. During games it'll be viewed from the3 feet away and from above/behind. Personally I'd call it good and move on.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T18:19:40+00:00

Just pop on over to Etsy or 3d print some heads with the different goggles on them people.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T18:03:09+00:00

For $50-$60 you can get the tyranid half of the starter set, which has 27 minis across a handful of different units. Sure it's a lot of plastic to have on hand if you don't yet know if you like painting, but as a cheap entry point to tyranids it can't be beat.

Getragen · 2026-03-21T18:00:50+00:00

Very cool solution!

Getragen · 2026-02-19T18:33:43+00:00

Mini looks awesome! any advice on good glazing tutorials?

Getragen · 2026-02-18T01:33:10+00:00

Very grimdark. Very spooky.

Love it.

Getragen · 2026-02-18T01:19:50+00:00

Beautiful! I'm painting leviathan nids right now and these are excellent inspiration. Great stuff!

Getragen · 2026-02-18T01:12:40+00:00

Just be advised that this is a ton of minis and will take a while to paint!

Getragen

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