That being said it's pretty easy to get set up, play some great 40K and earn RP for your Crusade
Step 1: Buy Tabletop Simulator on Steam. It has some tutorials that help you learn the basics of moving things around, I would suggest playing through them before confusing yourself with 40K stuff.
Step 2: Go to the 40K Tabletop Simulator Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TTSWarhammer40 ... this_post/ - this will give you a Discord link to follow. If you don't have a Discord account already, it's worthwhile as it's a handy way to do voice calls for gaming as well as giving you access to lots of gamer communities.
Step 3: On the Discord, go to the download_links channel and follow the instructions to download and install the TTS Forge Mod Compilation
Step 4: Get your army together! Start up Tabletop Simulator and create a singleplayer game. Browse into your saved games, you should have folders for all the factions, and inside will be save files of all the armies (or dozens of files if you're Space Marines). Open the one that looks best for you up. You should see something like a table full of minis. Select all the ones you want (either ctrl + click or just move them all together and drag a box around them), right click and choose "Save Object". Give them a name (like "Space Wolf Crusade Combat Patrol"). You can now load that object into other maps, which is how you get your minis into an actual game.
Step 4a: You may not be able to find everything you need from the mod bundle. That's OK, on the Tabletop Simulator page in your steam library, go to Community and then Workshop, and search for the things you're missing (for example my Impulsor, Smash Wolf Lord, Intercessors and wolves all come from the mod bundle but my Incursors are their own workshop package and Ragnar was in a big bundle of named characters and such someone put together in the workshop). Hit the Subscribe button for the workshop package you want, the next time you start Tabletop Simulator you'll be able to go into it and save an object like you did above, you'll just find it under the workshop tab rather than saved games.
Step 5: Play some 40k! Easiest way is to play with someone who had some TTS games under their belt, sing out - so far Karantu and I both have some experience, I'm sure many more of us will soon. Otherwise, go to the next step to set up your own map.
Step 6: There's a ton of maps and things, the one I use is "War on Seven Fronts: 40k 9th edition maps hub" on the workshop. When you start that up (start a multiplayer game, give a server name and password), you'll see a ton of useful 40K things like dice rollers, points counters etc but no actual map. Off in a corner is a weird little interface where you have to press an "i" button in the field, which changes to "lock" which you need to press, then you can press the globe with a 1 button to get something like a system map. One of the options is "Battlefields", click into that. There'll be lots of buttons, click one that has "30" rather than "60" for the size of games we're generally playing. You should see a "build" button appear near the interface. Click that. You'll get a fair bit of loading as the map and a ton of terrain load in. You'll need to organise the terrain yourself to get a good 9th ed map, but you'll find if you hover your mouse over a piece of terrain the tooltip will show its 9th ed traits, super handy. Select all the terrain once you're done, right click and select Toggles > Lock to stop it moving around. There are also controls near the board itself that can show deployment zones, if you right click on the button for the mission type, right click on it and select state, there should be a state for each mission that will show the zones on the board.
If you get through all that and are looking for some games, yell out, there's plenty of us eager for good dice rolling times and racking up RP for our Crusades
