How to 3D Print Resin Dungeon Terrain Tiles: Modular Sets for DnD and Pathfinder
Printing dungeon tiles in resin is a different workflow than printing miniatures. Orientation, resin choice, magnets, and batch washing all change once you're printing terrain instead of characters.
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Printing a dungeon tile set is not the same job as printing a miniature, even though it’s the same printer and the same resin. Tiles are wide, flat, and thin. They get judged from table height, not up close. And you’re not printing one, you’re printing thirty, so every setting decision gets multiplied across the whole batch.
I learned this the slow way, running my first OpenForge set through the same orientation and support settings I use for characters. Half the pieces had visible support scarring on the top face, and I burned through a full liter of detail resin printing floor tiles that didn’t need anywhere near that level of precision.
This guide covers the workflow differences: orientation, supports, resin choice, magnets, and the batch washing and curing that a full tile set actually needs. If you haven’t printed a miniature yet, start with the complete beginner’s guide to resin printing first, since this assumes you already have supports and slicing basics down.
Pick Your Tile System First
Two ecosystems dominate resin-printed dungeon terrain:
- OpenForge: Free, open-source, huge file library covering dungeons, caverns, sci-fi corridors, and more. Community-driven, so quality varies piece to piece, but the sheer volume of free content makes it the default starting point.
- Fat Dragon Games and Printable Scenery: Paid, higher and more consistent production value, broader piece variety within a single coherent style (ruins, dungeons, sci-fi, fantasy towns).
Pick one system per table setup and stay in it. The connector edges (the tabs and slots that let tiles snap together) are dimensioned specifically for each ecosystem. A Fat Dragon corridor piece won’t reliably interlock with an OpenForge room, even though both look like “dungeon tiles” at a glance. Mixing systems means keeping separate, non-interlocking zones on the table rather than one continuous dungeon.
Need somewhere to actually find these files? The best STL sites for miniatures roundup covers where terrain files, OpenForge included, are hosted, and the free DnD STL roundup has some terrain pieces mixed in with the character models.
Orientation: Flat, Not Tilted
This is the single biggest habit to unlearn if you’re coming from printing miniatures.
For a humanoid character, you tilt 40-50 degrees to reduce peel force and hide supports on the underside. For a dungeon tile, that same tilt does the opposite of what you want:
- It adds significant Z-height to a piece that’s naturally short, which means more print time and more resin use per tile
- It puts the tile’s top face, the side people actually see on the table, at an angle that catches more support contact points than a flat orientation would
- Flat, wide geometry printed at a tilt also increases peel force per layer since you’re dragging a wider cross-section off the FEP at an angle instead of a clean vertical pull
Print tiles flat on the build plate, face up, with zero or close to zero tilt. Yes, this means larger flat suction surfaces on the underside, which is the trade-off. That’s what the next step is for.
Supports: Sparse, Underside Only
Auto-supports on a flat tile will try to blanket the entire underside with a dense grid, because the slicer sees one giant flat downward-facing surface and treats it like any other suction risk.
Switch to manual support mode instead:
- Space supports every 15-20mm across the underside in a loose grid
- Use light density, similar to what you’d use on a miniature’s cloak edge, not the heavy settings meant for large flat mechanical parts
- Skip the top face entirely. If your orientation is flat and face-up, the top shouldn’t need supports at all
The underside is hidden under a game mat or the table itself, so support scarring there is a non-issue. Heavy supports on a flat tile mostly just cost you resin and cleanup time without improving print success meaningfully once you’ve got a reasonable grid down. If you want the general support logic that applies across both miniatures and terrain, the guide to adding supports for resin miniatures covers the underlying principles; this is the terrain-specific application of them.
Resin Choice: Save the Detail Resin for Characters
Terrain doesn’t need the same resin you’d reach for on a hero model with a face you’re going to paint up close.
A dungeon tile is judged from a foot or two away, across a table, usually under regular room lighting, not a macro lens. A standard resin in the $20-25 per liter range holds plenty of detail for stonework texture, mortar lines, and tile edges. Save the $35-45/liter detail resin for the miniatures standing on top of the terrain.
This matters more here than almost anywhere else on the site because terrain consumes resin fast. A single 6x6 inch tile can use significantly more resin than a whole squad of 28mm infantry. Across a 20-30 piece dungeon set, the per-liter price difference between standard and detail resin adds up to real money. For the actual math on how resin cost scales with print size, see how much resin a miniature uses, the same size-to-volume logic applies to tiles, just at a bigger scale.
Don’t Resize the Whole File
This is the mistake that ruins an otherwise good tile set: scaling the model down in the slicer to save resin or fit a smaller build plate.
Modular tile systems are dimensioned to a specific real-world measurement, usually 1 inch per tile edge for OpenForge and similar systems, so that connector tabs and slots from different pieces (and different print sessions, months apart) still interlock correctly. Scale the file to 90% to save resin and the connector tolerance shifts just enough that pieces won’t seat cleanly, or won’t seat at all.
If a tile doesn’t fit your build plate at full scale, split it in the slicer into two or more sections and glue them together after printing instead of shrinking the whole file. Most tile creators design pieces with this in mind and provide pre-split versions for smaller printers. Check the file listing before assuming you have to cut it yourself.
Magnets: Worth It for a Set You’ll Reuse
If you’re printing a one-off dungeon for a single session, skip magnets. If you’re building a reusable terrain kit you’ll assemble differently every game night, magnets are worth the extra step.
Files with built-in magnet sockets: Print as designed. After washing and curing, press-fit the magnets into the printed sockets. Usually no glue needed if the socket tolerance is tight, though a drop of CA glue adds insurance against magnets popping out during storage.
Files without sockets: Drill a shallow pocket by hand after curing, using a pin vise sized to your magnet’s diameter. Glue the magnet in with cyanoacrylate super glue. This is slower and adds a manual step to every single tile edge, so factor that time into a large set.
Magnet size: 5mm diameter by 2mm thick N52 rare-earth magnets are a common choice for tile edges. Strong enough to hold tiles together during play and transport, small enough not to add noticeable bulk or show through a thin tile wall. N52 magnet sets are cheap enough in bulk that buying more than you think you need for one set is worth it, since you’ll want them again for the next batch.
Watch polarity as you glue. Flip one tile’s magnet the wrong way and it’ll repel instead of connect. Mark the “up” face on your magnets with a marker before gluing so every socket gets the same orientation.
Washing: Extra Time for Flat, Recessed Detail
Flat tiles trap wash liquid differently than miniatures do. A miniature has varied geometry that a wash station’s agitation reaches from most angles. A tile has shallow recessed detail, mortar lines, floor cracks, worn stone texture, that liquid pools in and doesn’t always clear with a standard wash cycle.
Run tiles for 60-90 seconds instead of the usual 30-60 second miniature wash. For pieces with heavy recessed detail, a soft brush worked into the grooves before the final rinse clears out anything the agitation alone missed. Skipping this step shows up later as a slightly tacky finish in the recessed areas after cure, right where you’d notice it most.
Curing: Space Pieces Apart, Flip Halfway
Wide, flat pieces block UV light from reaching each other if you crowd them on a curing station’s turntable or stack them to save a cycle. Space tiles so each one has a clear line to the light source across its full surface area, not edge-to-edge with a neighbor.
Flip every tile halfway through the cure cycle. A tile cured only from one side often shows uneven hardness, the top face fully cured and rigid, the underside (especially inside recessed support-scar areas) still slightly soft or tacky. That unevenness gets worse the wider and flatter the piece is, which is exactly the geometry you’re working with here.
If you’re setting up a dedicated cure station for a terrain-heavy print queue, the wash and cure station roundup covers which stations have the turntable clearance and multi-angle lighting that flat, wide pieces benefit from most.
Putting a Set Together
A full modular dungeon build usually runs in stages rather than one giant print queue: floor tiles first (the bulk of the volume), then wall sections, then doors and connector pieces, then small detail pieces like rubble and furniture last. Printing in this order means you can start laying out a room with the floor tiles while later stages are still queued, and you’ll catch a resin or wash-cycle problem on a floor tile (cheap, easy to reprint) before you’ve invested a full liter into wall sections.
Keep gloves on and ventilation running through the whole batch. A 20-30 piece dungeon set means a lot of consecutive wash and cure cycles, and it’s easy to get casual about PPE by the tenth tile when nothing’s gone wrong yet. The resin printing safety guide covers the ventilation and disposal setup that matters more, not less, the longer a print session runs.
Once the terrain is done, the miniatures walking around on it deserve the same attention. If you haven’t picked a printer with the DnD table in mind, the best resin printer for DnD miniatures guide and, if your table runs Pathfinder instead, the best resin printer for Pathfinder miniatures guide both cover build volume considerations that matter for printing tiles and characters off the same machine.