And there lies the trap: 3D printing technology has developed away from FDM printing and towards SLA printing, because the results of SLA are better. But FDM printing with PLA is essentially harmless, and is something you can do without many safety precautions; a simple HEPA filter on the printer, and not touching the hot nozzle is enough. SLA printing is significantly more dangerous, as it involves handling a rather toxic acrylic resin liquid; you will want to have very good ventilation, preferably a fume hood, and you need to wear gloves. You will also need to handle the flammable isopropanol used for washing, although most of us have gotten quite used to handling that, given that it is the main component of most hand sanitizers. I really, really wouldn't recommend a SLA printer for kids. And personally, although I am trained to handle chemical substances safely, I don't use a SLA printer in my home, because of safety concerns.

In other words, a SLA printer is not really a mass-market consumer product. 3D printing technology has evolved *away* from consumer-friendliness. Which in part explains why earlier forecasts of a 3D printer in every home have not come true. The other half of the problem is that even with a SLA printer it is extremely difficult to use a 3D printer to replace some broken plastic piece in your household. The emblematic model of FDM printing, the hairy lion, sure looks cool, but has no practical use. 3D printing is a rather complicated and expensive way to produce cheap plastic objects and toys. Still, I believe that a technology development towards more user-friendly and easier to use FDM printers would have led to a wider spread of the technology than going down the high-quality SLA route.

I'm still playing D&D, but my living room table has been replaced by a Roll20 virtual tabletop. I'm still playing once or twice a month, but via Roll20 and Discord. So the tokens and handouts I use are all just two-dimensional images these days. I don't really 3D print for D&D anymore.

Now of course we all have things we don't do anymore during the pandemic, but for many of these activities the idea is to get back to the old ways once we are all vaccinated and out of lockdown. But it would be foolish to think that everything will go back to the way it were. The years 2020 and 2021 have changed the way we behave, and some of these changes will stick. Some of my friends with whom I was playing around that living room table have moved away, and it is likely that we will stick to Roll20 and not get back to the real table.

Of course that is not the fault of The Lost Adventures, which remains a rather good product for a very reasonable price, even as late pledge. It is just me who doesn't really need that product anymore.

One thing that is often needed is some sort of counter, for counting things like hit points, levels, or objectives achieved. From various files on Thingiverse, with some modifications on TinkerCAD, I assembled the dials shown in the photo below. There are little 5 mm x 1 mm neodymium magnets in the top and the bottom, which hold the two parts together while allowing the dial to be turned to show the number. I had a lot of difficulties with other designs, because my 3D printer can only print one color at a time, and that made numbers hard to read. In this design the numbers stick out from the background, and I could easily paint them.The other items shown on the photo are for Gloomhaven. After spending a lot of time punching out cardboard tiles for doors, bookshelves, and other pieces of dungeon decoration, I decided that they would look a lot better in 3D. Search Thingiverse for Gloomhaven, and you will find a 3D version of every cardboard tile in the game. I especially liked the design for the doors, in which the base fits the Gloomhaven hex, and the top is removable for when the door has been opened. But I am just printing the dungeon decoration. There is a whole system on Thingiverse for you to print the map tiles as well, but I didn't feel the need for that.

For both Gloomhaven and Too Many Bones I 3D printed custom design boxes for holding cards. In the Too Many Bones case the idea was to have a box hiding the encounter deck, so that you could draw a card without seeing it first (they are printed on both sides). For Gloomhaven the big square cards with the monster stats had no place in my insert, and I wanted a box to keep them together. That sort of item is easily designed in TinkerCAD, as it is just a hollow cuboid with one open side.

All this doesn't change my evaluation of home 3D printing as a solution in search of a problem. Unless you have a good application in which 3D printed parts are useful, a 3D printer is of not much use. 

I like 3D printing. I'm not good at other methods of producing three-dimensional objects, like woodcarving or sculpting. So a 3D printer gives me the possibility to make a real object out of an idea. That is pretty cool. However, the technology has some serious limitations, most of them related to the material: A home 3D printer can only make plastic objects. Thingiverse is approaching 2 million objects, which is obviously a lot, but there are many more objects in your house that a 3D printer would not be able to reproduce, because the material or the size or the resolution is wrong. So 3D printing frequently ends up being a solution in search of a problem: You could create objects, but you don't know what to make.

For many years now I had overcome that issue by using my 3D printer for one of my other hobbies: Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, you can use coins or beads or other small objects to represent the heroes and monsters of D&D. But printing a dragon or beholder or paladin at the right 1:60 scale, printing puzzles for the players to solve, or even whole dungeons as tiles is way cooler. It really helps with the suspension of disbelief if your dragon looks like a dragon instead of like a coffee mug.

The world today looks very different from the world three or six months ago. Some of the changes are big and scary, others are small and curious. I don't want to discuss the big and scary stuff here, at least not for the moment. So I'll talk about the small and curious changes instead: My Dungeons & Dragons games now look very different than they did before, they went virtual. I am playing on Roll20 instead of around a table. While one of my previous groups isn't playing at all anymore, because they didn't want to go virtual, the other group is now playing more than before. And we have been open-minded enough to realize that playing on a virtual tabletop does in fact even have certain advantages over playing around a real table. And one of the small advantages is that creating a good-looking hero or monster token for Roll20 is fast and easy using Google image search and a tool like TokenTool.

The weird result is that I haven't 3D printed anything for months now. As I can't sit with people around a real table anymore, I don't need 3D printed figurines anymore. And without that application, there isn't much else that I would want to 3D print.

I now tested my new Flashforge Adventurer 3 with ABS. Although the temperature of the extruder is limited to 240°C, this is just sufficient to make good prints. The bed temperature of up to 100°C and the full enclosure result in little or no warping. I only needed to solve one problem: The spool holder.

The printer has an internal spool holder, but that one holds only 0.5 kg spools. The ABS I had on hand was on a larger 1 kg spool, which are far more common. So what I needed to do was construct an external spool holder, and set it next to the printer. Fortunately there are other printers out there that need external spool holders, so the problem is a known one in the community.

One low-tech solution is to use the cardboard box the spool came in. Just remove the plastic and pull the spool out from the box by a bit, I'd say by a quarter of its diameter. Then stick a pencil through the box at the place where the middle hole is, and use that as the axis. Or, if you are feeling fancy, you can print the axis.

Me, I went for a slightly fancier solution. I still had in stock a number of 608 bearings, which I had used in the past for self-printed fidget spinners. Using 4 of those and 4 relatively small printed parts, I built an Ultimate Spool Holder. Not sure I would have called it ultimate, but I can see the advantage of supporting the two "wheels" of the spool separately. It fits pretty much any spool I can think of, has nearly no friction at all, and doesn't have to be disassembled to change the spool. So I printed the spool holder with the PLA that came with the printer, and was ready to switch to a roll of ABS next. Worked like a charm.

A few days ago I received a new 3D printer, the Flashforge Adventurer 3. I purchased this as a sort of backup printer, as my main 3D printer is now already the second time for a prolonged period at the repair shop. Thus I wanted a simpler and less expensive alternative so that I could continue working on my various 3D printing projects while waiting for the repair of the bigger machine.

Now if you search for the cheapest option on 3D printers, you will find quite a number of similarly priced entry-level printers between $200 and $300. However, all of these come as a kit, that is to say you need to assemble them yourself. The resulting printer has no enclosure, which makes it difficult to print plastics that are likely to warp, like ABS. And they usually don't come with Wifi connectivity, so you need to transport your files for printing to the printer with an USB stick or SD card. Thus I decided to go for a slightly more expensive option: At $450 the Flashforge Adventurer 3 comes fully assembled, has a fully enclosed structure, and several connectivity options via Wifi or Ethernet, including the possibility to control the printer via a cloud application. Not bad, for that price.

I got the Flashforge Adventurer 3 a few days after ordering it. Unboxing and installing went very smoothly, it really is just a matter of removing the packing material. Otherwise it comes as close to plug & play as it gets for 3D printing technology. You put the roll of PLA in, press a few buttons on the touch screen display, and the machine starts printing the first demonstration object, a simple rectangular block, without any problems. Then there is a sort of a gap: The quick start manual ends at this point, and there is no hint on how to continue and print your own stuff. The solution is obviously to go to the Flashforge website and download the FlashPrint slicer software from there, but a hint in the quick start guide would have been helpful for that.

With the FlashPrint software I printed a 3D Benchy boat next. The result was pretty neat: Just a bit of stringing, but very little sagging of unsupported overhangs, and at the best possible settings the surfaces were incredibly smooth, and the details were great. And that was just out of the box with standard settings, no optimization. Rather impressive, I would say, and way better than my experience with my previous two 3D printers.

Nevertheless I do have to mention two downsides of the Flashforge Adventurer 3: One is the build volume of 150 x 150 x 150. On paper that doesn't look so much less than the 200 x 200 x 180 of my Zortrax printer. But of course if you calculate it in volume, you get 3.4 liters of volume instead of 7.2 liters, and that does make a difference. The other disadvantage is the internal spool holder for spools of 0.5 kg. The far more common 1 kg spools of filament don't fit. You have to leave the spool case open and put the large spool on an external spool holder. At least, unlike my first 3D printer from XYZ, Flashforge doesn't complain if you use filament from other suppliers.

I have since printed a series of my usual 28 mm scale D&D miniatures on the Flashforge Adventurer 3, and that worked very well. I also printed some parts for my new Gravitrax printing project, but still have to test them on an actual marble track comparison. I haven't tried printing with ABS yet, nor with PLA from other companies, as I am still on the spool that came with the printer. And of course it will take months or longer to find out how durable this printer is compared to my unreliable main one. But at the current point in time I am quite happy with my purchase. The Flashforge Adventurer 3 costs a quarter of what my Zortrax printer cost, and up to now is nearly as good, except for the build volume. So if you should be looking for a 3D printer, especially if it is your first one, I can only recommend the Flashforge Adventurer 3.

I don't currently have a working 3D printer; but my old printer is in the shop for repairs, and I also ordered a new second printer, seeing how often the first one is out of order. Now home 3D printers are a solution in search of a problem: Most people simply don't have all that many useful things they could print in 3D to make buying a printer really viable. So I am quite happy to have found a new 3D printing project: The Gravitrax marble run system.

I bought a Gravitrax marble run starter set and two expansion boxes for my brother and his children, as a sort of "fun for the whole family" additional Christmas present. That was quite a success. The system has a base plate with hexagonal holes into which you put hexagonal flat pieces, connected with rails. There are stackable hexagonal pieces to achieve height, so the rails can slope downwards and accelerate the metal marble, giving it the energy it needs to cross the flat parts. The whole system is very modular, and if you search for Gravitrax on YouTube, you will find some people who made really huge marble run tracks with all sorts of tricks.

Now the starter set costs $60 for 122 pieces, or 50 cents per piece. Special pieces, like a box with a looping and 6 rails, cost $10. And once you get building, you will quickly want more pieces. So while I hadn't thought of it when I bought the starter set, once I played with it I quickly realized that I could print these pieces. Getting me exactly the pieces I want, and for less money. Plus it turns out that people have designed Gravitrax compatible pieces as 3D prints that aren't available to buy, from the simple straight line hexagon, to the U-turn piece.

So once I have a 3D printer up and running again, I have a project for printed pieces. I bought another Gravitrax starter set for myself, in order to be able to test my printed pieces for compatibility before giving them to my brother. While the hexagon pieces are only 6 cm in diameter and thus of an ideal size to print for a typical home 3D printer, there remain some challenges. A marble run works best with minimal friction, and I suspect that the surfaces of 3D printed parts won't be as smooth as injection molded ones. Maybe if I print in ABS and then smooth the surface with acetone vapors, I can get friction-less parts.

The legal side of this project is a complete mystery to me. If I print stuff that is compatible with Gravitrax, but not an identical copy to something I could buy, is that copyright infringement in any way? As long as I don't start a business selling the pieces I am unlikely to run into any trouble, but I find the question theoretically interesting. 

I rarely talk about my day job on this blog, because I usually consider it not to be relevant for the game or hobby subjects I discuss. But in this case, it is. I have a Ph.D. in Chemistry, and since more than 20 years I am working in a research center. While I don't work in the lab anymore, I did lab work for many years, and as the company I work for takes safety really seriously, I am still very much informed about safety issues in chemistry. In other words, when it comes to the subject of being knowledgeable about the safe handling of chemicals, I'm in the top 1%.

Now I would love to own a resin 3D printer. For my specific application of 3D printing, which is tabletop miniatures for role-playing, a resin 3D printer is much better than a fused deposition modeling printer. Resin printing generally produces higher resolution pieces, and works best for small pieces. A resin printed miniature is often semi-transparent, has a very smooth surface, and has much better detail than a FDM printed miniature.

But I don't buy a resin 3D printer, because I consider it to be too dangerous to use in my apartment. The acrylic resins used, according to a typical material safety data sheet, cause skin irritation, cause serious eye irritation, may cause an allergic skin reaction, may cause respiratory irritation, are are harmful to aquatic life with long-lasting effects. I would be perfectly happy to handle this sort of material in a laboratory, with the necessary safety equipment, and especially a fume hood. But I sure as hell don't want that stuff in my house! And, remember, this is an expert speaking.

If I had a house with a second kitchen, not used for food, I might consider installing a resin 3D printer under the kitchen hood, always wearing gloves while handling the resin and printed objects. Otherwise I really wouldn't recommend this sort of printer inside your house or apartment. You can't avoid the fumes, because the acrylic resin is sitting in an open tub. And while you can make the printed objects safe to handle by washing them, preferably in several steps, with isopropanol, that means that at some point in time you will have a container full of isopropanol saturated with acrylic resin. That is hazardous waste, you can't just pour that down your drain without doing serious damage to the environment.

A FDM 3D printer, especially if you print with spools of PLA, is much, much safer than a resin printer. The details on small pieces aren't as nice, but for larger pieces FDM is the better option anyway. And you don't slowly poison yourself and your family while doing it. So if you are tempted by the latest generation of resin 3D printers for under $300, please resist that temptation. It just isn't worth the risk!

Unless you have a specific application in mind, you probably don't need a 3D printer. They are fun to fiddle around with, but in the long run you need to have a use for the stuff you print, otherwise you'll just make cheap decorative plastic nik-naks. Fortunately for me I have an application, 3D printing figurines and visual aids for tabletop roleplaying games. Obviously that is a bit of a niche thing. There are people out there doing the same thing, but it isn't a huge market. And because of that, one good place to find models to print is Kickstarter.

Now I have participated in several Kickstarter campaigns for 3D printable tabletop stuff. And I must say that up to now they all delivered. Sometimes a bit late, which is par for the course for Kickstarter, but not a single case of the campaign creator taking everybody's money and running off with it. However there is one Kickstarter campaign where I got the product and it ended up being of not much use to me: Pintsized Realms, a "3D printable kingdom".

Now I must immediately say that this isn't the fault of the creators. They delivered the core files I pledged for, and are still creating the files for the stretch goals. It is just that once I actually printed some wilderness tiles, I realized why this product isn't a good fit for me: I don't paint the stuff I print. Painting a figurine well takes a lot of time and some skill, and I have neither of those. A 28 mm scale figurine of a human takes just 2 to 3 grams of material, so with a 1 kg spool I can print whole armies. It would take me forever to paint all these. So I look for models that are recognizable unpainted. As long as you can see on the battle map who are the heroes, and who are the monsters, that is enough for my purpose.

All the pictures of the 3D printable kingdom on the Kickstarter page, except for the stretch goals, are in color and painted. A dirt path in the forest in the pictures is recognizable, because the ground has a different color than the trees, and the stones lining the path have yes another color. But printed and unpainted everything has the same color, the stones are tiny bumps you barely see, and it is really hard to make out where the path is. I printed a few tiles I put together to form a landscape, but the result is much worse than a map I would paint with an erasable marker on a battle map. I would need to paint the thing to make it even remotely useful.

As I said, it's my own fault, I should have thought of that problem earlier and not be seduced by the colorful pictures. And maybe I can at least use the village and town tiles to make useful maps for my campaign. But Pintsized Realms remains the only Kickstarter project that I now regret backing.

While I do 3D print miniatures for my Dungeons & Dragons tabletop games, I don't have enough artistic talents to sculpt those miniatures myself. As many people who print D&D miniatures, I mostly print the designs of Miguel Zavala aka mz4250, which are available for free on Shapeways. He has miniatures of everything in the monster manual, as well as specific collections for WotC published adventures. However lately I have participated in two Kickstarter projects for .stl files for 3D printing. One of them is called The Skyless Realms.

My Zortrax M200 Plus has been repaired, and after a bit of further fiddling with it is now producing satisfying prints. I'll show some examples below. Now obviously these are still not the quality of store-bought miniatures. For example you can clearly see the print layers. The models in brown I treated with acetone vapor, which improves the surface aspect. The others I haven't treated yet, and I'm not sure I will bother.

In the end these figurines will mostly be looked at from arm's length away, on the middle of a table on a battle map. The main requirement is that the players can tell which figurine is the beholder, and which one is the basilisk, and I think this is clearly the case here. And they are cheap: The human-sized figurines are below 5 grams of material, including losses from printed rafts and supports. The large sized ones are below 20 grams. And the material is regular ABS, costing just 2.5 cents per gram. So even a large figurine costs me less than 50 cents, while a store-bought Reaper Bones human-sized figure costs $3.

After waiting for a replacement part for my Zortrax M200 Plus 3D printer for 4 months, I complained, politely but publicly, about bad customer service on the Zortrax 3D printers users Facebook group. I got contacted by a Zortrax customer service representative the next day, who took my printer serial number and looked into it. He confirmed that they had to manufacture the part that needed replacing, and said they would send it "soon". A week later the replacement part arrived at the shop, and I now have the printer repaired, up and running. Yay!

Now this might have been coincidence, or it might be that complaining publicly gets you on top of the pile of requests being handled. I can't be sure. But I'm happy it worked out that way.

I don't know if you noticed that I haven't been blogging about 3D printing for months. This is not because I lost interest in the subject, but because my Zortrax M200 Plus printer broke down, after just 6 months. And if that isn't bad enough, it turns out the broken part (stepper motor casing) is not one of the parts that Zortrax sells on their website. I brought my printer to the shop where I bought it for repairs, and they have been trying to get that replacement part since October. No luck yet. Apparently Zortrax said they would have to manufacture that piece extra for me.

I consider that lousy customer service from Zortrax. In a few years larger printer companies will get into the 3D printing business, and they will have a well-organized supply chain and customer service. If the existing 3D printer companies don't get their act together, they will go out of business fast.

Just to let you know, I just backed a Kickstarter Project called Tavern-Born™: Pintsized Realms - 3D Printable Kingdoms. Basically it is a step up from the dungeon tiles I use, a tile set that allows you to 3D print overland maps of villages, towns, or wilderness. One tile of 5 cm x 5 cm (2" x 2") represents something like a section of a village with two or three houses on, or the village square, so the scale is obviously much smaller than that of the dungeon tiles. Not to be used with miniatures, but for overland travel. I think the wilderness tiles would work out well for a hex crawl (or in this case square crawl) type of gameplay.

My only reservation is that I don't paint the tiles and miniatures I print, except for painting the water tiles blue. So I am not sure how good this will look in mono-color.

I am somewhat less enthusiastic about my choice for 3D printer since I found that the Zortrax M200 plus has an extruder with only a single roller, which explains my difficulties of printing with PLA. The roller just slips on the harder, smoother surface of the PLA filament and doesn't feed it correctly. As I can't do much about the extruder, I gave up on PLA, and am now exclusively printing in ABS.

For some applications, ABS is not a bad material. It is the stuff Lego stones are made off. Which means that if I achieve good layer-to-layer adhesion, I can print items that are rather tough. However for pieces which are rather thin, ABS is not the best material, as it is less stiff than PLA. Plus it gives of more harmful vapors when heating it, although I can much limit that with the HEPA filter I bought. The tiles I print for my dungeons come out good in ABS, and are nearly indestructible. Printing miniatures for my D&D game, heroes and monsters, is often far more problematic. Of course that depends on what sort of detail the miniature has, but things like legs, arms, and weapons are inherently not very thick at 1:60 scale (28 mm scale).

Part of the problem I overcome by printing thicker supports. In PLA I used to make support structures of 1 to 2 mm diameter, now I use 3 mm. But I still had sometimes difficulties with miniatures not coming out right. In some cases I could identify the problem as being support structures or lower parts of the model moving while printing. The print head is moving while deposing the next layer of material, and if the support isn't stiff enough, it can move and ruin the print.

I printed a while with ABS or toughened ABS (called ULTRAT) from the printer manufacturer, Zortrax. The results are okay, but the material is on the expensive side, especially the ULTRAT. So I started to experiment with materials from other brands. The cheapest stuff, e.g. Primavalue, didn't give very good results. I had more luck with Fillamentum Extrafill ABS. And it turns out that while the Zortrax printer limits the parameters you can set with Zortrax material, once you set the printer to "External" material, some parameters become available that are helpful for miniature printing.

So now I am using the "print speed" parameter to print my miniatures at half speed. The disadvantage is obviously that it takes twice as long. But it avoids the problems of the print head moving around finer parts of the print. And some of the details also come out a bit better. I even managed to print some miniatures with thin legs and wings correctly. So I now have solutions for everything I want to print. I still wished I could install a better extruder on my Zortrax M200 Plus, but for now I am okay.

As I mentioned before, I have been 3D printing a lot of True Tiles to build dungeons with for my Dungeons & Dragons games. Now my local roleplaying club over the summer started a special D&D campaign: It has multiple Dungeon Masters, and lots of players. Basically it is an endless dungeon crawl, with the main rule that at the end of the session the players need to be back to base, so that the next session can be played by another DM and a different group composition from the same starting point. I first joined as a player, and now have a halfling barbarian / rogue, which is a bit silly, but more fun to play than you would think. 19 AC without armor, resistance to non-magical damage, and giving the rest of the group advantage on melee attacks on all mobs next to him.

Anyway, I then decided to also try my hand as a DM in this campaign. So I needed a dungeon. And I found just the perfect one: The Vault of Iptiz, which was made by the creator of the True Tiles, Wyloch, and comes with a helpful video on how to build it with tiles. I already had the tiles, but then printed some of the other dungeon decorations described in the module. So I wanted to show you the result:

My previous 3D printer used spools of filament of 600 grams. The new one can use spools of 800 grams from the company that made the printer, but it can also use 1 kg spools from other brands. So the spool I am currently using is 1 kg of a relatively cheap brand; it cost me 22 Euro for 1 kg, instead of 34 Euro for 800 g. As a typical 28-mm scale figurine of a medium size monster or hero is just about 5 grams, one prints a very long time with one single 1 kg spool. But I am starting to wonder whether getting half-price ABS for my 3D printer was a good deal.

One minor problem with cheaper ABS is that I need to find the best printer settings myself, while the software has presets for the Zortrax materials. Usually that takes me one or two prints of a small benchmark model to get the settings right. But with the current spool I'm just not getting there! First I had problems with layer-to-layer adhesion, the printed models breaking easily along the Z-axis. I was able to fix that by increasing the print temperature to 290°C. But at this higher temperature the molten plastic is very fluid, and flows out of the nozzle even when it shouldn't. That leaves strings and "outgrowths" on the surface of my prints. Normally you can fix that by increasing the retraction setting, which pulls the material back into the nozzle. But I already pushed that one up by a factor of 4 with no effect. The molten plastic in the nozzle is too fluid to be pulled back.

I am starting to think that this particular material simply isn't suited for my printer. At 290°C it is too fluid, but at lower temperature it isn't sticky enough to hold onto the previous layer. In addition to that this is the mauve roll where the prints come out in pink, which isn't my favorite color for figurines anyway. The good news is that I bought only one spool of this particular ABS, and I still have other spools of more expensive materials. I think I might save myself the trouble of failed prints or prints that require a lot of post-print work to fix the surface and just chuck that spool into the trash can. Lesson learned: The time and effort needed to print something is more valuable than the material used, so it isn't worth saving money on cheap ABS. I'll do some more testing with better ABS, but in the long run I might actually go back to printing miniatures in PLA, which appears to be better suited for that particular purpose.

I had a couple of different things to say on my 3D printing experience of the last weeks, so I thought I'd group them together in one post. Not sure this will become a regular column, but it might.

My dungeon tiles project has reached the point where I stopped printing, waiting to use the tiles in various games before seeing what else I need. I used 4 spools of filament to print two boxes full of tiles: One with straight wall "regular dungeon" tiles, one with cavern tiles. The regular dungeon tiles are good to faithfully reproduce most classic dungeon maps. Cavern maps however are too irregular to be fitted with any accuracy with a standard set of tiles. Still that box of cavern tiles can be used to create quickly on the spot random cavern encounters for my campaign in the Underdark, or for set encounters where mapping accuracy isn't an issue.

I did create two dungeon tiles myself, by modifying the dungeon tiles .stl files I bought. So, theoretically, I could take a cavern dungeon map and create all the tiles accurately, one by one. I'm not going to do that, because it would take more hours to create the tiles for a cavern dungeon than it takes to play through that dungeon. The one dungeon I was tempted to do, Cragmaw Hideout (the first dungeon of the D&D 5E Starter Set), has the additional complication that it isn't flat, but works with different elevations. That would be even harder to build with tiles, although some people have done it, it just took them forever, and then still deviates from the original map.

For the dungeon tiles I used a slightly more expensive material, ABS from the same manufacturer as my printer. The printer software has optimized parameters for that material, and there is a guarantee that I will be able to buy the same color of filament in the future when I need more tiles. Now I'm back to a somewhat cheaper ABS from a lesser known brand. But I had some surprises with that material. The first figurines I printed with it were very fragile, breaking easily along the layer planes. I fixed that by printing at a higher temperature to improve layer-to-layer adhesion. The other surprise was the color: I had bought a mauve filament, but once printed the objects came out looking rather pink. It turns out that this was related to the surface roughness: Fused filament fabrication 3D printing creates objects whose surface isn't very smooth. And the rough surface acts like a "white" layer on top of the original color, turning mauve into pink. As ABS is soluble in acetone, putting my prints into acetone vapors for 15 minutes smoothed the surface, and turned the color darker, back to the mauve of the filament. Still, I will avoid that color in the future.

My previous printer would *only* accept filaments from the manufacturer of the printer. My current printer is much better in that regard, allowing me to use any brand of filament. That means that I have a far wider range of colors available to me now, which I didn't have before. For example I found a nice silver filament which makes printed parts look nearly like metal. I'll probably print some "metal" doors and bars for my dungeon tiles with that, as well as figurines like heavily armored knights. The only problem is that if I switch colors frequently, I end up with a large collection of partially used spools of filaments. I don't have so much storage space, and if I wanted to do it right I would need to store the spools in special containers with a desiccant, to keep them from swelling with humidity, which would ruin them for printing. So my solution is to just keep printing with the same spool until it is empty before switching colors. The downside is that some of my figurines are not the best color, e.g. air elementals in red instead of blue. I'll have to live with that.

If you consult various sites with guides and videos on 3D printing, you will see a lot of advice on how to prevent warping: The first layers of your print curling up at the edges because of lack of adhesion, ruining your print. I have been 3D printing for over a year now, and today is the first time this actually happened to me. My XYZ printer came with squares of masking tape that self-adhered to the glass build plate and always provided perfect adhesion of my prints. The new Zortrax printer has a build plate with lots of little holes in it; the first layer enters little spikes into those holes and my main problem was that adhesion was too good.

Then this week the software gets an update to "improve adhesion", and I'm running into serious problems: The rafts stick so strongly to the build plate that I need a lot of force to remove it from the build plate, damaging the printed parts in the process. I need to decrease adhesion! In view of the bed being heated to 65°C, I can't exactly grease that build plate. So I apply a layer of candle wax by rubbing a candle over the hot build plate. The result is my first ever print with warping.

So now I know how to get too much adhesion, and I know how to get too little adhesion. Just a matter of finding the sweet spot in the middle.

This is the first diorama I set up with the dungeon tiles I have printed over the last two weeks.
I put a copy of the original plan next to it for comparison. All the tiles were part of the True Tiles sets, except for the unholy symbol at the far end, which I designed myself based on the symbol of the water cult. The cultists, priest and shark are for decoration and aren't a spoiler of the content of the room. The 59 tiles took about a full week to print, and used about 1 spool of Z-ABS (800g) for €35, including the wasted material for rafts and supports. A cheaper material would probably also have worked, but I like the color of this one.

I've printed extra parts beyond this, and am now on my third spool of filament. That should give me enough of an assortment of tiles to reconstruct the whole Temple of the Crushing Wave from the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure. Not at the same time, mind you, but room after room in function of the movement of the group. And I can re-use the same tiles (except the water) for the other dungeons.

I was thinking of creating cave tiles to build the first dungeon of the Lost Mine of Phandelver in the 5th edition Starter Set, Cragmaw Hideout. Somebody did that with another tile system; but he needed to make the tunnels much wider (4 tiles instead of 1 tile) than on the original map to get there, and then needed polystyrene foam blocks as a support for the elevated rooms. I think I'll stick to dungeons with just one level, and simpler caverns. The tiles are easy enough to create quick battlegrounds in rectangular rooms, but for complicated irregular rooms with different levels a printed map might be better.