❖ Version History ❖

January, 2025
Hello again, and welcome back to another wild and crazy ride on the Librarium Games Design Journal! Today, we are going to continue from our last post discussing the process of upgrading our manufacturing abilities as a company. In our last chapter of the journal, we had been searching high and wide for a solution on how we might go about manufacturing the custom dice we will need for Royal Threadcount (a d4 that has colors for tips rather than numbers).

At the end of the last post, we had decided to purchase a brand new BambuLab x1c 3d-printer. Today (after nearly a month of waiting for all of the parts to arrive in the mail), we are going to talk about the results of this decision!

So, as you can see in the photographs, we have clearly gotten the machines setup & ready to run! But what exactly is going on in this setup? How does it all work?

Well, to explain the setup that you see here a little bit, we basically have x4 machines working in sync:

• We have x2 A.M.S. (Automatic Material Switching) devices that hold the spools of PLA thread, ~these are the machines with the little white lights. Each of these machines can hold up to x4 spools of PLA, and they have special motors that are controlled by the 3d printer for extruding & retracting the PLA from the printer. At the time of this picture, I have only set up the white, black, and red PLA for the test print that we see at the top of this post (just to make sure the color switching is working).

•These two machines are wired with P.T.F.E (polytetraflouroethylene, also known as ‘teflon’) tubing to a switchboard which takes multiple inputs of this ptfe tubing and reduces them down to one single tube that feeds into the 3d printer itself (in this photograph, you can only see the last piece of tubing inside the glass top of the main print bed).

•Finally, we of course have the main 3d-printer bed (the large cube). This is where all the magic comes together to form our little plastic masterpieces. Inside of this space, we actually have two little cameras that film & track the printing progress (constantly checking for errors), we have the print bed, the hot end, and some really interesting tools for cleaning the hot end.

Now that everything is wired correctly & our first print test has come through successfully with the x3 colors… it is time to test our hand at the first x5 color print!

With a little bit of tinkering on the software side we got all x5 colors of the PLA loaded into the AMS machines & we are ready to rumble over here.

For our first print test of the dice, I want there to be more than one of them to see how the machine actually manages the print… but I do not want to make all that many of the dice in case something is not set up correctly (always trying to limit & mitigate the waste over here!).

As you can see in the picture, printing these first three dice is going to take about 3.5 hours, which isn’t too bad. This screen is also telling us that we have 104 layers to get through, but what it does not share is how many times it is going to have to perform color changes in order to make that happen! (there are about 190 color changes in this print, because the first 62 or so layers feature all four of the base colors, and then there are several layers of just black, until we get to the last color change of just white at the top). As you will see later in this post, this creates a lot of… “purge poop” as the community so lovingly calls it.

Once we have this ready to go, I apprehensively press the print button and hope for the best!

Of course, for the maiden voyage, I cannot help but sit here and stare. Watching this machine work is absolutely mesmerizing… and I cannot look away.

It is certainly a bit of a laborious task for the printer to manage all of these color changes. What we are asking it to do is a surprising amount of work & it handles it (almost) flawlessly. But one thing I do not think people realize is just how… (stressful?) this is for the printer. Doing a print this small means that the printer & the AMS machines are working together to extract, heat up, test, print about .05g of plastic, cut, retract, extrude, & start all over again almost every minute of this print.

What does this mean exactly? More important than anything, it means that doing a printrun of this few objects with this many color changes is actually wildly wasteful. This is a totally new concept to my mind for perceiving the production, and it makes me fully understand the logic behind how making 50 of these dice only takes twice as long as making 1 of the dice. When the printer has the opportunity to lay down more of one color at a time, it is actually significantly more efficient. It doesn’t have to change colors as frequently, which means that there is less room for error, and more time to get smoother print flow.

So, when this first test comes out successful, I immediately turn around and set the printer to produce a batch of 50 of the dice for me. I need to see what the differences are like in the printing process, and I am excited to see if the quality for the bulk print is any different than the small batch. I fiddle around with the software side again to figure out how I am going to fit this many dice onto the print bed at one time and then I do my best Dr. Evil impression as I look at this incredible machine and say “Fire the Lazer!”

By comparison to what I have seen the Ender 3 accomplish, looking at my print bed and seeing this array of x50 perfect multicolored dice coming to life doesn’t even seem real. It is honestly hilarious to think that this is the difference of only a few years in technology… I named this post “From BMW to Buggati” because this is the first time in my life that I have owned a piece of technology that performs better than I believed to be real. A better comparison is that I have taken trains all my life & this is the first time I am experiencing a bullet train. It is just impossible to think that these could both be called trains, you know?

But. Not everything is roses in this process.
Having this many moving parts in the construction process leaves us with very high risk for small things to potentially go wrong. Sometimes there is a snag in the AMS machine, or the PTFE tubing, or there is a small piece of plastic that gets caught somewhere in the switchboard, or the hot end clogs, or doesn’t cut correctly… many little things can happen which interrupt the printing process. Luckily, this printer is so advanced that it will pause the print and wait for you to try and figure out what is wrong. This can help tremendously with saving the print (sometimes if a small error happens on the ender printer, the print is lost immediately with no way to save it). But, this adds time, it makes things somewhat stressful, and it does not always save the print in the end (after about 10 batches of making these dice now, I have had two failures). ~And I have had to learn a lot about the mechanics of this setup to keep it afloat. This takes work.

However, when the print does make it to the end, it is a miracle to see these beautiful perfect specimens come off of the tray! The dice are pretty nearly pristine in shape & function, and it is awesome…. not to mention it is a huge relief, because this means that our Hail Mary shortcut for this manufacturing process is actually going to work.

As you can see in this picture though, what we are printing in terms of plastic quantity is more than you might realize. In this photo, we have x3 different piles of results that just came out of the printer at the same time:

1. On the far left, the final dice product.

2. in the lower/middle, we have the scaffolding material that is printed to keep the top pyramid of the dice suspended correctly. This material is peeled off of the finished dice once they come off of the print bed.

3. on the right side of the image we have the “purge poop”. This colorful squiggly pile of PLA is the results from all of the color changes the printer must perform in between the layers. This material is ejected out of the back of the machine while it prints. It looks like a lot of PLA (and it is), but is also significantly less dense than the dice, so spatially, it’s not as bad as it seems.

The long and short of it though is that this is a process that definitely produces waste. We calculated this waste into our initial budget, but it is interesting to see it in person now that we can actually perform the prints. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do with this waste, because the world of recycling PLA is still somewhat young. But luckily, it is not going to be too bad in the end. I have been measuring this waste carefully, and in order to create about x2,000 dice, we will be only filling about 1 regular size garbage bag with this waste. (not ideal, but not too bad either).

So yeah.
This is the scope & scale of the process that we will be doing over the next couple of months. It is my intent to make these dice now even though we haven’t even successfully funded the production of this next game, because I know that we will need them later, and I want to take the time now to learn how to make them perfectly (and i have a few interesting ideas for other products these dice might be good for later too).

Be sure to tune back in sometime soon for one last little chapter on making these dice for the time being. While they are nearly perfect coming off of the print bed, we have one last little cleaning stage that I am going to share in our next episode of the Librarium Games Design Journal! And as always my friends, Thank You for reading!