My son’s really into the game Starbound. The Matter Manipulator is the tool that you start off with in the game.



He’s been making these paper craft Matter Manipulators for weeks. They’re all over the house. I figured since he’s really into it, I’d have a go at 3D printing one for him.



I jumped into SketchUp and put something together. Of course, I took some artistic license with the model.



It’s made up of 18 pieces so that I can print them individually in the right colors.



It’s going to be pretty big. One of the main yellow pieces almost takes up the whole print bed.



The two large yellow pieces were going to take 24 hours each to print with my default medium layer height and 20% infill settings. I lowered the quality to “LOW” for a layer height of .3mm and changed the infill to 10%. That’ll save me a ton of time as well as PLA. It took about 8 hours to print each one. All the other parts took from minutes, to about an hour each.

So, about 2 days later…..the model was complete. A little Krazy glue and some hot snot and it was good to go.



Needless to say, my son was over the moon. I just hope I haven’t set a precedent. If I have to print a full scale diamond pickaxe, I’ll lose my mind!