Games Workshop 2026 Horus Heresy Roadmap Helps Painters Plan Long-Term Projects

Games Workshop's 2026 Horus Heresy release calendar has a clear bottleneck, and it arrives in roughly three weeks. The Legio Custodes Battle Group pre-order opens April 11, with shelf date April 25, dropping a full army's worth of golden plastic simultaneously: a Battle Group box loaded with classic Custodian infantry and a Contemptor variant, new grav-tanks including the Caladius and the Coronus transport, a Shield Captain character model, and dedicated Dreadnought kits. Painters who are already mid-project on another force should flag that date in red, because this wave is wide and the Auramite plate on Custodian models rewards serious brush time.

The accompanying Liber Custodes book ties the entire release together, covering not only the Custodians but Sisters of Silence and an Agents of the Divisio Assassinorum addendum, with dedicated rules for Constantin Valdor and Jenetia Krole. Both characters are named centrepieces that will almost certainly headline painting galleries and tutorial content for months after release. If you plan to tackle either as a display piece, pulling reference images and palette-testing your gold recipe now, before the sprues arrive, is time well spent. Custodes gold responds well to both classic metallic layering over a dark undercoat and NMM approaches; the ornate detail density on Valdor in particular makes it one of the stronger NMM showcase subjects the Heresy range has offered in years.

Elsewhere on the 2026 calendar, the Mechanicum wave that cleared pre-order in late February and hit stores March 14 brought the plastic Vultarax Stratos-Automata alongside the Myrmidon Destructor Host and Skitarii Battle-Pilgrym kits. That cohort paints very differently from the Custodes gold: loyalist Mechanicum stays in reds, blacks, and whites with metallic trim, while the Traitor/Dark Mechanicum palette leans into blackened iron, corroded brass, and stained steel. If you have any of those kits in your backlog, clear them before April 25 or they will almost certainly stall under a pile of unassembled Custodians.

The Glaive, a Fellblade chassis mounting a volkite carronade, is also incoming in plastic and represents the first time the kit has been available outside resin. The multi-part build includes hull and sponson options, which means Legion-matched colour modulation across large flat armour surfaces will be a priority technique for the release. Super-heavy vehicle painting at that scale is a multi-session commitment; anyone wanting a finished Glaive ready for photography at the same time as their Custodes will need to stage the work carefully.

Rob Baer's April 6 update to the SpikeyBits roadmap also flags continued Legions Imperialis support, including the Saturnine Heavy Assault Cadre with twelve Terminator bases, two Saturnine Command squads, and four Saturnine Dreadnoughts, giving small-scale painters a parallel project track that pairs well with full-size Heresy work. The commission market for Custodes schemes specifically tends to spike hard after plastic kits land at accessible price points; painters who have a gold recipe they're confident in may find it worth refining now before client requests start arriving.

The practical priority order from the roadmap: finish any Mechanicum or vehicle work in progress before April 11, start gold palette tests this week, and treat the Liber Custodes character models as a separate display queue that deserves dedicated time rather than a batch-paint slot.