How to play

3D Printing Empire Idle Tycoon · a five minute guide to your first hour

You start in a garage with two printers, a bench and a spool of filament. You finish running a mega-factory. This page explains what the buttons do and, more usefully, what to spend your money on first. Play free in your browser while you read it.

The loop

Everything in the game comes back to one cycle:

Print something. Pick a model, pick a filament, send it to a printer.
Sell it. Finished prints turn into cash, either straight away or through a contract that pays more.
Reinvest. Better printers print faster and print things worth more. Better filament makes every print worth more. Both compound.

The game keeps running when you close it. Come back after a few hours and there is money waiting, as long as somebody was minding the machines. That is what crew are for.

The drawer

Everything you control lives in the drawer at the bottom of the board. Five tabs:

Printers is where you buy machines and upgrade the ones you have. This is the tab that decides how fast you grow.
Supplies is filament. Each type is worth more than the last, and a print is worth roughly what you feed it.
Contracts is orders from clients. They pay better than selling loose, but they ask for a specific model in a specific filament.
Awards tracks everything you have ever printed and pays you for filling the collection out.
Store is Golden Spools, the premium currency, plus the things you can spend them on. You never have to buy any. You earn them by playing.

Your first twenty minutes

The single most common mistake is buying more printers when you should be upgrading the ones you own. Machine quality drives your income far more than machine count. Ten cheap printers churning out cheap prints earn less than three good ones.

Tap a printer to start a job. Do it by hand a few times. It is slow, and that is the point: it teaches you what a job is worth.
Buy a manager as soon as you can afford one. A managed printer keeps working without you, including while the game is closed. This is the first purchase that changes the game, and it is worth skipping a printer for.
Upgrade before you expand. When you have spare cash, put it into the machine you already have before buying another one.
Move up a filament as soon as one unlocks. It raises the value of every print from then on, not just the next one.

Printers

There are eight machines, and they arrive in order as you grow: the Sparrow 3, Anvil MK1, Hive HX, Spire Delta, Lattice Array, Fiberwright Pro, Monolith M9 and finally the Nano-Forge. Each one is faster and handles better materials than the last, and each has its own colour on the floor so you can see at a glance what is running.

Every machine has upgrade rungs. Climbing them costs less than buying the next machine and usually earns more, so climb before you buy.

Crew

Crew members work the floor: they fetch spools, feed printers and clear jams so you do not have to. A printer with someone assigned to it keeps producing while you are away.

You get four crew slots for free. Four more can be bought with Golden Spools. You can never have more crew than machines for them to run, so there is no point rushing them.

Contracts and market days

Contracts are the best money in the game. A client asks for a quantity of one model in one filament, and pays a premium over the loose sale price. The catch is that you need the right filament unlocked and a machine free to run it.

Contracts only ever ask for things you can actually make where you are, so you will never be offered a job you have no way to complete.

Market days let you sell a batch at once at a bonus. Worth saving stock for.

The Daily Rush

Once a day a rush order comes in. Accept it, pick a printer, and you get a small first-layer minigame: guide the nozzle and keep the line clean. The better your coverage, the bigger the bonus.

It is worth doing every day. The payout is scaled against a meaningful chunk of your hourly income, and there is a streak calendar on top that pays Golden Spools on day three and day seven.

Moving up

You outgrow seven locations: the Garage, Maker Workshop, Print Shop, Print Farm, Warehouse, Industrial Plant and the Mega-Factory. Each is a bigger room with space for more machines, and each one looks completely different. Relocating is the main milestone of the mid game.

Franchising

Eventually you franchise: you hand the business on, start again in the garage, and keep permanent bonuses that make the next run faster. This is the long game, and it is optional. If you would rather keep building one shop, you can.

You are paid for how far you build a floor out, not just for reaching it, so a location you actually filled is worth more than one you passed through.

Lights Out

Find the wall switch and flip it. The shop goes dark and every machine, spool and finished print glows in its own filament colour. It does nothing for your income. It looks great.

Saving and playing across devices

Your progress saves automatically on the device you are playing on, with no account needed. If you want the same shop on your phone and your computer, sign in with Google and the save follows you. See the Privacy Policy for what that stores.

If you play on two devices and they disagree, the game shows you both and asks which to keep. Choose carefully, because the other one is discarded.

Golden Spools

Golden Spools are the premium currency. You earn them from the streak calendar, from awards, and from milestones. You can also buy them, and buying is entirely optional. Nothing in the game is locked behind them.

Still stuck?

Email support@pipedcreations.com and tell me what happened. The game is made by one person and every message gets read.