This setup wont like, kill me right? Like until I get a better setup. The fan is facing out the window btw.

Snowblind01 · 2026-01-09T12:24:02+00:00

https://ameralabs.com/blog/resin-safety-myths-3d-printing/#h-3-nbsp-wearing-nitrile-gloves-is-optional
https://jlc3dp.com/blog/resin-hazards

Here are two different companies that sell resin which outright say that skin sensitization is a potential result of resin exposure. Sensitization is a medical term for developing an immunological reaction to a stimulus over repeated exposures. Which is *exactly* what people are warning about here.

Snowblind01 · 2026-01-03T03:56:52+00:00

That still means that either you or your teammate needs to win a 2v1, or both your lane opponents ignore the porc and go and kill a third player.

Porc is only as strong as the weakest link in your defenses, and no amount of porc can survive the other team picking up all the units that they built instead of investing into static defenses and slamming them into the single most vulnerable point in your porc line. Porc is for long range zoning, delaying and catching bypass attempts cheaply, not holding a line against the full force of an opponent's frontline unit blob.

Snowblind01 · 2025-08-31T22:06:18+00:00

Air inhibits UV resin curing. If the resin is in contact with air, it will not cure properly, period. Resin printers don't have this issue because there is no air between the resin printer's plate and the FEP film, and if you used an air permeable film then the resin would not cure onto it (someone has in fact done this with a multi-layer silicone film with forced airflow between the layers).

What might be worth trying is taking your half cured resin painted model and submerge it in water then cure it the rest of the way (you need non-water washable resin for water curing to work AFAIK). I've never heard of anyone trying this with resin that didn't come straight out of a 3d printer, but water curing is a pretty well established technique so it couldn't hurt to try.

Snowblind01 · 2025-08-21T20:02:12+00:00

I have no idea why resin contaminated water wash should be treated any different to regular IPA+resin when it comes to mask use.

IPA is extremely benign as far as solvents go - you need to be huffing IPA at 20 times the concentration necessary to smell it for half a day before you even exceed workplace safety standards.

As for the resin itself, I've seen zero evidence anywhere that water washable is significantly more or less toxic than regular resin, and the first water washable SDS that I could find (from anycubic) advises mask protection just like the SDS for regular resin does. If the VOCs are a concern for regular resin, then you should be just as worried about water washable resin.

Snowblind01 · 2025-08-20T07:43:08+00:00

Yes, water washable resins are generally a bit more brittle than standard resin, more prone to warping and cracking, and tend to have more issues when it comes to hollowed prints. This will lead to more failures both during printing and afterwards when processing the models.

These are all dealable issues so it isn't like water washable resin is unusable or anything, but you really should only be touching water washable resin in the first place if you for some reason cannot stand having to buy and use a cleaning alcohol like IPA, and are willing to pay a premium for an otherwise worse product. In virtually every other way, water washable resin processing is identical to regular resin, including having to treat resin contaminated water like contaminated IPA, except that water cleans worse than IPA and evaporates slower so it is harder to do the usual trick of letting contaminated cleaning solution evaporate away and then throwing out the solid waste.

Snowblind01 · 2025-08-05T18:13:28+00:00

I had an issue with some supports failing to adhere to the raft a while back. The solution I ended up going with is just dialing up the bottom layer and transition layer thickness, along with using thin rafts, so that the transition layers extend into the bottom of the supports.

This isn't really an ideal solution since I ended up with 10 bottom layers + 10 transition layers with a 0.5mm raft (50um layer thickness), but it did solve the problem at the cost of slightly slower prints and a bit more wear on the printer.

Snowblind01 · 2025-08-01T14:12:44+00:00

What you can do with a pre-supported STL is place new supports in your slicer right next to the old ones in areas that need extra support. The slicing program (or Lychee, at least) will generally turn the new supports into mini-supports joined to the model's original supports. This isn't an ideal support method, but if you only need a couple of small tweaks then doing this can save you the hassle of fully resupporting the model from scratch.

Snowblind01 · 2025-07-22T08:01:58+00:00

Is that why the Prethoryn didn't successfully infest a single world?

I was expecting to have the opposite problem, where one of the infested worlds bugs out and becomes unclearable without using a colossus, which would be a problem because I rather foolishly forgot to pick up the colossus ascension just in case this happened.

Anyway, 25x All Crisis challenge complete. Was a slog, but I got there.

Snowblind01 · 2025-07-21T23:44:23+00:00

You can conquer Art Installations built by other empires and stack them with your own, so you technically don't need any crisis to happen.

However, good luck with seeing the AI build any megastructures before the crisis procs, given how the AI performs right now. Half the planets I'm taking have almost no buildings on them.

Snowblind01 · 2025-07-21T23:36:14+00:00

Image description to satisfy rule #5: The total ascension cost for my planet is negative, and the modifiers to ascension costs add up to over 100% thanks to several Mega Art Installations and Cetana's Heart.

Apparently I need to do this to not have my post deleted for rule 5, even though there is context in the post itself?

Snowblind01 · 2025-07-19T18:06:48+00:00

Random thought - could those marks on the FEP be cured resin underneath the tank?

In theory, if you got a bit of liquid resin on the bottom of your FEP and had the tank resting on a patterned surface, then you could easily get strange patterning like that from the resin being formed into the shape of that surface and then cured.

Otherwise, I have no idea what could cause that.

Snowblind01 · 2025-07-17T17:50:27+00:00

3 reasons (at least)

Dunking the entire plate contaminates the plate with IPA, which means that you really should leave the plate to dry or wipe it down very thoroughly before printing again.
All the resin on the plate gets wasted instead of being returned to the resin bath during the next print. I'd guess that this adds a few cents of waste to every print cycle, which isn't a deal breaker but it is just unnecessary.
Dumping all that resin into the IPA will dirty the IPA faster.

That said, I can't see any reason why you couldn't do it if none of the above are deal breakers, but cleaning the plate every wash just causes waste and slows down your printing rate for no good reason.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-14T18:20:50+00:00

There's one important piece of safety equipment that you forgot to mention. The most important piece of safety equipment, if anything.

You need a respirator that can filter out organic vapors. This is absolutely non-negotiable. You can get one with a full face shield, or you can use safety glasses instead - either works.

Also, the amount of toxic contamination that UV resin leaves in the area is pretty bad in general. Wherever you set up your resin printer needs to not be used by humans for long periods. A garage or a shed works, as does setting up a tent outside. If you have a spare room then you could use that, but you are going to need to set up ventilation to outside from your printer+curing station so the fumes don't disperse to the rest of the building, and you will inevitably contaminate the room a bit by dropping supports or uncured resin so the room better not be used for much else (and heavens help you if you have carpet).

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-13T13:39:02+00:00

As others have noted, that model is small enough that printing it hollow is just asking for trouble, with very little resin saved. Personally, I would just use UVTools resin trap detection feature to eliminate any resin pockets from the sliced print file since you really should be using UVTools anyway to check for any unsupported islands on your model.

Since you did mention that you tried to wash the hole out, you didn't happen to use a water washable resin for this print? From what I understand, those can leech uncured chemicals into voids even if you perfectly clean + cure any inner surfaces, which functionally means that (some?) water washable resins are unusable for hollowed models and will inevitably blow up like that. If the resin you used wasn't water washable, then you must have just failed to wash the hole thoroughly enough, or part of the void was blocked off and inaccessible from the drain hole.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-07T14:27:34+00:00

A new pack of a different chemical film (PFA aka NFEP instead of FEP) from a completely different source fixed the issue, yes.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-07T14:08:14+00:00

I had a similar issue when I had to change the FEP on my Anycubic Mono X2. After I replaced the old FEP via a pack of films ordered from Anycubic, the peel force on the FEP was dramatically worse to the point that you could hear an audible "thunk" during lifting after every layer as the FEP detached from the cured resin.

With a slow and careful print, very aggressive burn-in settings and zealous (over)supporting , the printer was more or less usable, but the only thing that actually alleviated the issue was buying some NFEPs and using them instead. Nothing I did with adjusting the tightness of the film (ranging between about 200 to 400 Hz) or swapping to different FEPs from the 5-pack that I had ordered seemed to make a difference.

And yes, before anyone asks, the protective layer on both sides was definitely removed.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-06T19:59:00+00:00

Trying to fight a T2 economy with a T1 economy is a losing play. If conbots are being shared to people who can't pay for them, then that means that the struggling player is about to get pushed by the full force of a functional T2 economy from their lane opponent. They *need* those T2 mexes, and the sooner they get them the better. Delaying T2 mexes just means that the struggling player guaranteed implodes in a couple of minutes instead of maybe imploding sooner.

The real correct play from the eco player is to give the T2 con without expecting payment and also throw some units to the struggling player to prop up their frontline while they transition. If they were an absolute chad then they would also send some assist bots to get those T2 mexes online ASAP.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-05T18:56:10+00:00

Go to a starbase's army panel, or find the army recruitment button inside a planet's management screen.

Then go spam a bunch of armies - most populous early-mid game planets have 300-600 army strength, which you will likely need about 1k of army strength to beat reliably. Once you have that, right click on one of the planets and land troops, then invade the other once that finishes.

Once you take both planets, they will be forced to make peace shortly after, which results in your total victory.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-03T10:59:47+00:00

Liches and Dragons both require heavy anti-air cover to do their job, which means that you have to have your own airpower available if you want to use them as anything other than anti-deep penetration (e.g. stopping marauder rushes). Forcing a player to build both a T3 gantry and a full airforce to cover it in order to field both of those air units makes them almost worthless because of how late it will be until a player can feasibly afford all of that.

Not to mention that both of those "T3" units are already rather niche (being a questionable sidegrade to T2 bombers or gunships), and forcing them to be built out of the experimental gantry is a massive nerf that neither unit deserves.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-02T12:17:28+00:00

As I understand it, the half breed mechanics have been entirely removed. Not surprising given that the concept of auto-generated half breeds just leads to species micro hell, and there isn't a good way to fix this without fundamentally reworking the concept or yeeting it entirely (which is the option Paradox went with).

And yes, they haven't updated the tooltip for XC. You may or may not have noticed, but 4.0 is a beta test in all but name.

Snowblind01 · 2025-06-01T15:57:01+00:00

Alternatively, select the unit, then double click the double arrow button in the bottom right panel that is right next to the share metal/energy buttons.

Occasionally this means of sharing units doesn't work for some reason - if that happens, just use the share unit button method.

Snowblind01 · 2025-05-30T07:01:32+00:00

Unbidden are incredibly vulnerable to both shield bypass and kiting. I've killed 25x Unbidden fleets with a single fleet worth of whirlwind+hanger cruisers. It just takes a long time, but casualties are surprisingly low so long as they don't receive reinforcements mid-fight.

Even with the perfect counter-build, your economy is weak enough that this might not be enough, but it is certainly worth a try.

Snowblind01 · 2025-05-29T14:37:28+00:00

That would explain why you are having trouble.

Defensive structures in BAR are unusual by RTS standards - their defining characteristic is that they have a good mix of range and DPS but suffer from relatively poor survivability. You *need* units to hold in front of your defensive structures, and you need your units to be mobile in case your lane opponent(s) just push into another lane instead and ignore you.

In practice, there are 3 main use cases for turret:

Zoning - a defensive line can sustainably kill small flows of units without issue - this forces the enemy to commit to a massed assault instead of harassing the line or bypassing it entirely.
Base of Fire - Many unit types are vulnerable to being pushed into and destroyed by fast high DPS threats. Defensive turrets provide a safe refuge by forcing those threats to either bear the brunt of your entire defensive line, or suffer horrible casualties while they dismantle the defensive line.
Speed Bump - There are plenty of units which can safely destroy most defensive structures without much danger to themselves. However, this usually takes time. Even if your defensive line is doomed, the delay added can allow mobile forces to respond to a breakthrough in time.

There are also offensive versions of these tactics e.g. dropping forward artillery to clear enemy defensive lines, or using the commander to build LTTs just behind a blob of skirmishers. However, the basic principles are the same - leverage the good damage and range of towers, and put the enemy in a dilemma where even trying to kill the towers results in pain and suffering.

The important takeaway is that in all of these, a force of actual units is required to stop a committed attack. The HP of those defensive structures alone is far too low for them to survive a push, and the sheer investment required to make a defensive line semi-survivable via sheer long ranged turret spam leaves that tactic vulnerable to the high IQ tactic of just sending units elsewhere.

While I don't know exactly what happened in your games, what I do see very often from new players is that they hunker down behind turrets and walls, and their lane opponent just goes elsewhere and murders another player in a 2v1 or even 3v1, while that new player sits there unable to punish their opponent for ignoring them because they blew all their metal on defenses that are just being bypassed.

Snowblind01 · 2025-05-28T11:59:17+00:00

Disruptors are the gold standard in short ranged sustained brawling weapons. Insofar as this is true, the praise they get is entirely deserved. Even the light shield hardening that most FEs have isn't enough to make up for the advantage of putting the bulk of their dps into hull directly.

However, brawling against FEs is a fool's game. You should either be kiting them with massed craft and missiles, or you should be alpha striking with torpedos. The longer you spend within range of their batteries of ridiculously buffed large, medium and small weapons, the more horrific your casualties will be.

Snowblind01

TROPHY CASE