For those that have been 3D printing terrain and other things for this game, what is a good printer to start with for a newbie that is not over expensive? I don’t want to spend a ton of money if I decide it’s not for me.

I bought a anet a8. So far its been worth it. Read up on the printers in your budget. I spent about a 100 on upgrades that some was installed during assembly. Mine was bought for few diccerent things besides gaming accessories.

Upgrades i did during assembly.

Reinforced drive belts for less stretching.

Mosefet for the heated print bed (fire saftey)

Bigger power supply (fire saftey)

Upgrades to install

Frame braces, anti z wobble, x, y, belt tensioners, e3d v6 hot end, hot end mosfet. Most of thoses was printed once i got it running.

There are a few things I would suggest inform your decision.

- How handy/mechanical are you? A lot of the more affordable printers come as kits. That means you need to be comfortable physically assembling it, connecting the electrical wiring, usually doing this off of usually poorly-translated instructions, and connecting it to your computer to use specialized software to configure your settings.

- If all of that sounds daunting, I'd say make sure you spend a bit more to get something that's assembled and configured.

- How hassle-free do you want your end product to be? I ask this specifically related to the print area. The smaller the print area, the more work you'll have to do to print terrain in pieces that you assemble and try to glue together afterwards. The larger your print area, the more stuff you'll be able to print in one piece, but it'll get more expensive.

So a few things for reference...the Anet A8 that captn referenced above has been pretty well-received, and runs $190. But he had to completely assemble that, and you can see he spent over 50% again of the price on upgraded components. Its print area is 220x220mm, which is decently-sized but will be too small to print some larger buildings in one piece. You should be able to see how large the dimensions are of a model in its description, if you're looking on Thingiverse or a shop like Imperial Terrain.

Then another popular printer is the Creality CR-10. It runs about $390, and while it still needs to be assembled the process is simplified, especially the pre-wired electronics. You can probably do this if you can follow Ikea directions. I believe you still need to get into configuring your firmware through the computer, but you should be able to see if that's the case by looking at assembly and setup YouTube videos. It also has a larger print area at 300x300mm, which is large enough for most models you'll find for the game.

Then getting to the far other end of the spectrum, I use the Formbot T-Rex 2+. It cost me about $1,500, and was pretty much assembled - it shipped in several large pieces that just needed to get bolted together, and connected with cables with fitted plugs on them. No wiring required, no computer editing of the firmware required. It has a 400x400mm print area, so I'm usually able to set several buildings printing simultaneously. It also has two independent extruders, which is of questionable use if you're printing terrain that you intend to prime and paint, but if you do other things or you're okay with not hand-painting your terrain, it's able to print specified portions of a model in two different colors of plastic.

Something you can try is look around your area - there are a lot of "hacker spaces" or "creator spaces" that have 3D printers their members can freely use. Even some libraries apparently do, although none near me. You could get a couple months of membership or perhaps even a free tutorial trial and see what's involved with running the machines and printing models. If you find it's something you want to continue with, you can then set your price range and buy something. I'd recommend trying that over getting a cheap starter printer...I bought two printers before the T-Rex and stopped using them because they were lacking specific features I decided I wanted.

I bought a Monoprice Mini about a month ago and its fantastic. its inexpensive, coming in at around $200.00. It comes fully assembled and has a heated build plate. Connects to wifi and has a micro sd card slot.

You are limited in size to about 140 mm x 140 mm. but its great for printing scatter terrain. its a good starter imo.

1 hour ago, Hadriker said:

I bought a Monoprice Mini about a month ago and its fantastic. its inexpensive, coming in at around $200.00. It comes fully assembled and has a heated build plate. Connects to wifi and has a micro sd card slot.

You are limited in size to about 140 mm x 140 mm. but its great for printing scatter terrain. its a good starter imo.

That's actually the first printer I bought. It has the definite advantage of being fully assembled and configured out of the box, and it's both a good starter and a solid printer if it fulfills your needs.

However, it has a really bad price-to-print-area ratio. 200 bucks for only 120mm; the next thing I tried was a FlyingBear P902, which was a kit that gave me a lot of trouble in assembly and configuration, but was only about 50 dollars more for a 220mm print area. If the CR-10 had been out, I may well have sprung for that instead. Thus my original recommendation stands: try to use some printers to figure out if they're for you, then figure out exactly what specifications are must-haves before you spend the money. If you only care about scatter terrain, or you're willing to do a lot of cutting models and assembling them after printing, then the pre-assembled Monoprice is a great machine. If you want to print larger pieces efficiently, it's a bad deal.

I just want to try to help other people avoid the path that I went down, buying 3 machines before finding one I wanted to keep using. Once you've used one, you're not making back all or even most of that investment.

I can agree on finding one with features you want/need. Another of our gamimg group boight a tevo trantula and has had to replace the frame hot end and add dual z steppers. Not all the upgrades i did are required. The belt mosfet and power supply can be had for about 50 bucks. I converted an old computer power supply and saved a few buckss that way. After reading and usimg mine for a little bit ill wind up pringimg the parts needed to build my next one. Do plenty of reaearch before younpull the trigger or pay someome to print what you want if you feel its out of reach for you.

I started with an M3D (total junk), went to Monoprice Mini (better, but you have to rewire the bed out of the gate and it has a tiny print area), had a Maker Select (which I loved but two of them died within a week) and recently upgraded to a Prusa MK3, which is worth every penny I spent on it ($1000).

from the experience of two of my pals, however, if you can’t go straight to a Prusa, get a Crealty CR-10s - gets you somewhat out of the “starter” kit without going up to $1000.

good luck. It’s SO much fun (when you have them dialed in).

I am going with the Prusa, probably a MK2 kit. But I have programming experience and I want to assemble it to see how it works. Shop around and look at "best" reviews, not all of them are the same. Turan is spot on with his recommendations.

I upgrade from a Prusa MK2 to Prusa MK3 in May. It is has been on almost non-stop. Never had an issue.

Thanks for the information. I found a local college that lets the public use some 3D printers. I will also have to look more into those models mentioned.

I'm planning on buying a CR10S 400 (400x400x400) for my 1st printer. After quite a bit of research it seems the correct choice for me.

What else do I neexbto buy to get going? Better PLA? Memory card?

10 hours ago, Thraug said:

What else do I neexbto buy to get going? Better PLA? Memory card?

You're going to be best off finding a good Facebook group for those questions - there might be one specifically for that printer, certainly a general Creality one.

Every printer I've heard of comes with a memory card, and you don't need to store your models on there unless you're actively printing them, so there's no real need for you to spend money on another one.

You will need more PLA than whatever sample spool it comes with. I've read stuff from people saying they've encountered low quality plastic that varies in diameter and messes up their prints, but I've usually purchased the cheapest option on Amazon Prime and never had a problem using it.

That printer comes with a glass bed, which is perfectly good, you might want to have an Elmer's glue stick on hand in case you need some help getting the corners of your prints to stay adhered to the bed.

Consider the slicing software. There are a bunch of free alternatives, Cura is popular, but look at some video reviews of Simplify3D - I found the options it has to be superior to Cura and consider it worth the purchase for me.

Kind of surprised not to see anyone recommending the Ender 3. It's a kit, but like all the kit printers you can find detailed, step-by-step, completely Luddite-proof videos on YT showing you exactly how to put it together, adjust it, tweak it, and prep it for printing, and these days "kit" is a bit of a misnomer anyway - if you don't intend to upgrade it with all sorts of extras there isn't a single wire to solder or hole to drill, it's no more complex than an IKEA flatpack.

It's from Creality, who also do the CR-10 series, has a 235x235x250mm xyz build volume(it states 220x220, but the plate is larger and you can tweak it so it does use most of that extra space), and costs less than 200 quid/bucks even if you order it from an in-country reseller or Creality themselves via Amazon or Ebay(thus giving yourself the kind of generally pretty bulletproof warranty support that can be an issue from the "agent" marketplaces in China, who admittedly will knock another 30 or 40 quid/bucks off that price and often fiddle the customs label so you're less likely to get stung by that).

From the research I've done, it's the best quality:price and build-volume:price ratio printer available. I've got one on the way, and I'm planning to spend an extra 60 or so quid upgrading the mainboard and stepper drivers(literally a case of swapping the plugs from the stock mainboard into the new one and plugging in the new driver chips just like slotting in a stick of RAM in a PC) and replacing the stock fans with Noctuas(alas this is a bit more of a mission since the Ender 3 PSU is 24v and the fans need to run at 12v, so you need to solder a stepdown into the wire between the board and each fan, but you can just watch a couple of "how to solder wires together" and "how to solder wires to a board" videos on YT and know all you need to know to get the job done), which together should both enhance the print quality on fine details and render the machine almost totally silent, essentially giving me a Prusa i3 MK3 for a third of the price.

I'd never heard of it, but it sounds like a good value. Keep in mind, this is not a 3D printing-oriented forum...speaking for myself, once I got a machine that worked well for what I wanted to do, I don't exert effort to stay informed about newer things because I'm not going to spend money on anything else ?

I think it's an exaggeration to say you'll basically have an i3 when that offers a filament sensor, layer shift detection and correction, automated leveling, automatic filament ejection, jam detection...

15 hours ago, Turan said:

I'd never heard of it, but it sounds like a good value. Keep in mind, this is not a 3D printing-oriented forum...speaking for myself, once I got a machine that worked well for what I wanted to do, I don't exert effort to stay informed about newer things because I'm not going to spend money on anything else ?

I think it's an exaggeration to say you'll basically have an i3 when that offers a filament sensor, layer shift detection and correction, automated leveling, automatic filament ejection, jam detection...

In terms of print quality and quiet operation I will. A lot of the other stuff is, eh - the layer shift thing is down to the stepper drivers and firmware, which I'm upgrading(literally to the same ones - TMC2130s); automated levelling doesn't appeal to me because it's not at a level I'm comfortable trusting yet compared to manual; the other features only matter if you're going to be leaving the machine unattended, and since the main reason I want it silent is it will be sitting four feet away from my head all day that's not really a concern

The Prusas are lovely machines, but you find that in practice there's not as much between them and the much, much cheaper alternatives than their more "evangelical" brand-loyalists insist there is. If you want something pretty much bulletproof right out of the box, by all means order a prebuilt Prusa, but spending a couple of extra hours getting an Ender 3 or a CR-10 up and running is IMO worthwhile for a tabletop hobbyist compared to spending triple the money on the Prusa, because unless you want 3D printing to become an additional hobby that you spend a lot more money and time on(eg, I wouldn't want to leave a printer running all day without me present without an Octopi setup for remote monitoring and some kind of fire suppression system, jam detection or not) we're not really likely to get all that much use out of all the various "power user" features that the more expensive printers cram in.

I started with a Lulzbot mini. Very easy assembly and use. The print bed is about 6” x 6”. I have printed a ton of terrain and vehicles from thingiverse and printable scenery.com.

The best 3D printable Star Wars terrain from Imperial Terrain. Most of those files require a larger print bed or edit the file to fit you printer. I was at the point where I print a lot and consider myself a slightly enlightened amateur, so I upgraded to the Lulzbot TAZ 6. Great machine but it is pricey at $2500.

You will also need to figure out what material to use and manufacturer. I prefer Matter Hackers for my filament.