Cave dwellings

 Misleading title. I wouldn't blame anyone if you thought I'm into a new Neanderthal project or something like that. But the truth is I'm back to my mining town vertical board! Let's briefly recap. Last time I left you with this pic:

Here's the post. Wow, that was back in September. Shame on me.

Next step before I can go any further is finishing those two caves on the rock wall.

First of all, I thought the whole wall needed some more texture. It looked too flat, too straight, doesn't give the impression of being a desert rock formation, it looks more like a weird building. I mean, not that I'm really aiming at something like this:

Looks awesome, but it's sooo out of my reach

But anyway I could put some effort into making it all look more like rock:

The interior of the cave needed it too, of course

So I provisionally came to something like this:

Looks better. I won't say "looks good", but just simply better than before

Once you add some doors and stuff of course it looks a little better:

Now the title of the post begins to make sense

The upper cave looks horryfing empty. You know my perpetual dilemma, I'm aware I'm building a doll house, but I still need to... well, at least pretend it's playable! So I'll add some stuff but leaving enough room for minis and so. My starting point:

Disconcerting, I know. This post is made of pure entropy

It's a cologne top (the ubiquitous one I use for control panels all over) and a piece of a broken water gun from the Suberlings. Of course they needed some work...

Not that it's specially complex

...and some paint:

Now they look like part of the board

This is the centerpiece, but I also added some tubes, wires and weird stuff to the caves, so I finally got to this point:

General view of the whole board so far

Upper cave

Lower one

You can see there's nothing new, I'm just repeating the same techiques and doing the same things I've previously used on the other pieces of the board, to give a coherent look. Here you have them both:

Still need to add ladders and stuff

But I need to make some more progress on other areas before I do that, you see

I tried to give it all the same look than the other larger cave, and I reinforced that feeling by adding the large horizontal pipe on the upper part at the same height, giving the impression it's still the same thing.

Have a look at the caves with some minis:

Still playable!

A hand barely fits in there, but it's enough for gaming purposes

So this is it for today! I know it doesn't look like a huge progress, but I'm afraid it involved quite a lot of hours, so it's tricky!

The good thing is that now I have the back part "finished" (as much as I can at this stage), I can now bring the board from there to the front part, so this was a key stage of the project, which unlocks other new parts.

So I'd better go for them!