Tabletop Simulator

This section of the wiki will talk you through how to use Tabletop Simulator for games of Horus Heresy. Tabletop Simulator is a program available on Steam through the link here and is rapidly increasing in popularity due to the current restrictions preventing regular gaming. It is capable of replicating the majority of your typical gaming experience in a virtual setting, and whilst it isn't as accurate as a real game, it's the best option a lot of people have right now given the ongoing restrictions.

## Navigation in Tabletop Simulator

### Camera controls

To be able to play games in Tabletop Simulator, you need to be able to control your camera in order to view the board, navigate to where dice are being rolled or to get line of sight from a models perspective for lining up a shooting attack. The following table shows how to control the camera whilst playing a game or building your army in any room whilst using Tabletop Simulator.

 WASD
 Right click

Once you are familiar with those basic camera controls, you'll be able to view any part of the room from any angle.

***Please Note:** The camera is treated as a pseudo-physical object, so will be obstructed by certain objects such as tables, terrain and other "solid" object, so this may affect certain camera angles when trying to view from a models perspective.*

### Additional controls

When handling models in Tabletop Simulator, sometimes you will need to use two different tools for them; flip and drop. Flip essentially flips the model upside-down, which is very handy when representing a tank that has been wrecked or something similar. Drop will force the model to the lowest point of the table it can reach where it is, which can be very helpful when trying to get models into ruins or multi-level buildings. The shortcuts for these are listed below. You can also delete models by hovering over them or selecting them and pressing the Delete key.

***Please Note:** Any model selected or hovered over will be deleted when you hit the Delete key - be careful!*

 F
 Delete

### Locking models

Sometimes you will need to place a model in a precarious place, or place objectives down without wanting them to be constantly moved or under threat of accidental deletion. To support this, you can lock models in place. Once a model is locked in place, physics no longer effects it and it is immune to being selected with either a left click or the drag-select method. To lock a model, right click on it, navigate into the Toggles option and select Lock. To unlock it, right click on it again and navigate into the Toggles option and select Unlock .

## Setting up Tabletop Simulator

### Finding your army in Tabletop Simulator

To find your army you will need to download a unit pack from the Steam Workshop. You can access the Steam Workshop by click on the Steam icon on the main menu, as shown in the image below.

There are a lot of packs available, and the table below will provide the direct links to these packs. Some armies do not have a specific pack; in this case a comparable pack will be listed in the table below for use instead.

In addition, there is a unit pack for every Legiones Astartes faction in the Horus Heresy, however these models are in epic scale so will need to be scaled up accordingly.

* Epic Heresy: Supersoldier Legions

### Finding a map in Tabletop Simulator

Now that you have found the unit pack(s) you want, you will also need to download a map to play on. Tabletop Simulator refers to these as Rooms, and for the purpose of clarity we will refer to maps as Rooms from now on.

## Creating your army

Before you can play any games of the Horus Heresy, you will need to create an object for your army. This is essentially a saved item consisting of all the models you want to field which you can spawn into any room (provided you have the necessary permissions to spawn items).

### Plan your army

This step may be self-explanatory, but to the newer members of the Horus Heresy community it's a vital step. Before you start assembling your army in Tabletop Simulator, you need to put together your army list using whatever method best suits you. This can range from using a simple pen and paper, an Excel Spreadsheet or specialised roster creation software. Information about these can be found in the Roster Creations Tools page of the wiki.

Once you have an army list created it'll be much easier to assemble your army in Tabletop Simulator, as you can work through your list and check units off as you add them to your army.

### Opening a unit pack

To build your army you will need to have downloaded a unit pack (see the list above). To start building you will need to create a room using one of these unit packs. To do this follow these steps and select the Create button.

Following this, navigate through the windows that appear, selecting Singleplayer. Once you are in the Games window that appears after this, select the Workshop option and then whichever unit pack you want to use.

### Build your army

Once you have the unit pack room loaded, you will be presented with something similar to the view shown below.

As you can see, there's a lot of models. This is the Sons of Horus room and will be used in this guide as an example, representing a typical Horus Heresy unit pack. The room is comprised of 5 tables with models on each table essentially. Any object spawned in on one of those tables will behave as if placed on a real table, but if a model is placed off the table (in the void around them for example), they will fall out of the room and "teleport" to the nearest board edge from where they fell. This is very handy to remember if you accidentally drop something; it's not gone, just on the edge of the nearest board.

In order to start setting up your army, you will need to clear some space. It's recommended to remove the Thunderhawks on the far right board (unless you need them of course) as this will give you an entire table to work with; plenty of space! To do this, simply drag select the models and hit the Delete key as shown below.

Now that you have some space to work with, simply find the model you want, right click on it and select the Clone option. You can also select models by Left Clicking, and add more models to your currently selected group by holding the CTRL key whilst clicking on another model (or alternatively click-dragging over multiple models to select a whole group, or add that group to your currently selected models by holding the CTRL key in the same manner).

This will essentially save that model to your "buffer", which will allow you to spawn an identical copy of it at your mouse cursor when you left click.

When you have the model you want in your buffer, you can now spawn them in on the empty table space you have created. However, because of the nature of Tabletop Simulator it's rare to find the exact model you want with the exact weaponry you want. To remedy this, every model comes with a Name and Description. These can be seen when hovering over a model with your mouse, and when you keep the mouse over a model for a few seconds (Name and description respectively). To edit these, simply right click on a model and the information bar will be shown. Simply left click on the field you wish to modify, and type in the information you want.

***Please Note:** If you select multiple models and edit one of their names or descriptions, all the currently select models will be changed. This can be very handy to quickly update information for entire units or groups of models in one go.*

Following this, simply build your army based on what you want to field, using whichever models you want to use. If there are any models in a different unit pack you need, then you will need to save this as an object, so read the next steps on saving and spawning objects to see how to do that.

### Save your army as an object

Once you have you army built and are happy with it, it's time to save it. To do this, simply select all the models you wish to save.

To save the currently selected models, you will need to right click on one of them and select the Save Object option in the tooltip window that appears. It is very important to make sure you select a model rather than the table they are sat on, to make sure you select a model, hover the mouse over a model until the highlight colour changes from yellow to white; this tells you that if you right click right where your mouse is you **WILL** select that model.

You will be presented with a Save Object(s) window, where you can select the folder the object is saved into and set the name of the object.

***Please Note:** If you set the name to be identical (case-sensitive) to another object in the current folder you are saving to, you will overwrite the previous object. Tabletop Simulator will display a confirmation of this so you can still cancel if you don't want to overwrite, but be careful!*

### Scaling models

Sometimes you will have models which are not the right size, either being too big or too small. This is definitely the case with the Epic Heresy unit pack previously mentioned, as all the models in that are in epic scale. To remedy this, it's recommended to have another model that is correctly scaled as a point of reference that you can spawn in. Simply place this scaling reference model next to the model you want to scale up (or down), and right click on the model you want to scale. Simply select the Scale Up or Scale Down accordingly until the model is the right size.

***Please Note:** The most important part of scaling a model is the base size, as this should be correct rather than the actual model itself if the base is oddly sized compared to the model.*

## Spawning your army

### Hosting a server

To set up a server to have a game of Horus Heresy in, simply follow the steps listed in the Opening a unit pack section, but instead of setting up a Singleplayer game, you will need to set up a multiplayer game. The main difference is you need to specify the server name, password and maximum player count. You can also set whether the game is public, friends or invite only. When you are happy with the settings, select Create Server.

### Joining a server

To join a server that has already been created, simply select the Join option on the main menu. This will show you the Server Browser. Here you can browse the different servers, filter for keywords or arrange alphabetically. Any servers hosted by Steam friends will be at the top and highlighted in green text.

### Setting up a room

Once you have created a server, select a map you have downloaded to play on. When you load up a map, sometimes you will be presented with what look like pop-ups or error messages asking you to import textures. This is due to the texture that an object was using no longer being available for whatever reason; usually this isn't a major problem but sometimes it can mean that pieces of scenery have no textures. It is up to you whether you want to ignore this or load another map instead.

***Please Note:** It may not seem like these pop-up windows keep re-opening, but they don't. The number in the bottom left of each window shows how many are left after it and the number will decrease as you close them.*

### Spawning your army object

Now that you have a map loaded, the error messages have been resolved it's time to spawn your army in. Select the objects window in the top navigation bar to see available objects you can spawn in.

This will open the objects window, and will present you with four options

* **Components:** This is where you can spawn in dice, counters, tokens, notecards and even tablets (for streaming music and YouTube into the room).
* **Tables:** This is how you can spawn additional tables into the room if you need more space to work.
* **Backgrounds:** If you don't like the background the room has, you can change it here.
* **Saved Objects:** This is where all objects you have saved personally will be found.

Click on the Saved Objects option, and you will be presented with a list of all the saved objects you have, as well as folders if you have organised your objects into folders for whatever reason. Find the object you want to spawn in, and left click on it (you can hover over the object to see additional information such as when it was last saved).

This will spawn your object in as a "ghost" object, which means it isn't physically in the room yet, but left clicking will spawn it. Simply left click on an empty part of the board to spawn it in. Once placed, you can rotate any of the objects you have placed by selecting them, and while holding Left click over a model in the selection, scrolling up and down to turn them right and left respectively.

***Please Note:** You will not be able to rotate the object until it is physically in the room.*

And with that you're done, your army is spawn into the room and you're ready to go. Make sure you have your dice and templates handy and lay waste to the enemies of the Emperor (or Warmaster) in the world of Tabletop Simulator.

## Additional information

### Promotion

When playing in Tabletop Simulator, the host will be able to interact with everything in the room, however anyone who joins the room will need permissions to do this. Tabletop Simulator manages this by use of the promotion option. To promote a player, simply right click on their name in the top right and select Promote; a shield icon should appear next to their name which denotes they are promoted.

***Please note:** If a player leaves the room and re-enters it, or changes their team colour they may need to be promoted again, make sure to ask the room host to do that when you arrive.*

### Lighting

Sometimes it can be very atmospheric to change the lighting in a room in Tabletop Simulator, such as representing a game set at night, or fighting in irradiated wastelands. To do this, click on the Options button on the top navigation bar, and select Lighting in the drop-down menu. You can then adjust the lighting and colours of the lighting in this, and it is encouraged to mess around with these until you find something you like.

### Physics

If you want to adjust the physics in the room, you can do this by selecting the Options button in the top navigation bar, and select the Physics option from the drop-down menu. Here you can adjust the physics as you wish.

### Permissions

As the room host, you have control over what players are and aren't allowed to do. To adjust this, select the Options button in the top navigation bar, and select Permissions. This opens the permission window, and you can check or uncheck the options you wish players to have control over (or no control over).