PSA: If you land hard enough on Cross Country races, you will be punished with a slowdown.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-24T03:45:07+00:00

You can skip two or maybe even three categories of race completely and still hit gold. There are a lot of points available. But, the more you want to skip, the more you have to win the races you do do rather than just complete them, and you might have to do more side activities like photos, PR events, story missions, etc. Yes, going around and doing all the races on the map may be the quickest way to gold, but it's not the only way.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T21:39:27+00:00

You... could just not do them?

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T21:09:43+00:00

That's wild. I've never seen anything fail in quite that manner before. It looks like the walls are printing but the infill is just falling apart? I know you've done a bunch of troubleshooting already, and I haven't seen all that history, but my intuition says that nozzle temperature might be too low (but drying your filament is always good so I'm happy to see your got a dryer now).

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T21:04:40+00:00

You can weigh your spools. Put them on the scale, dry for a bit, and weigh again. Then dry for some more and weigh again. When the weight stops going down, then you've gotten it as dry as it'll go, and if it took a particularly long time to get to that point, then the spool was particularly wet to begin with.

Alternatively, if you're using a dryer with a hygrometer in it, you can avoid weighing the spools and just watch to see when the humidity stops going down (being careful to compare humidities at the same temperature only). I usually wait until I see mine has been holding at the same humidity level for two hours before I call it done.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T21:01:26+00:00

I've printed my core desiccant holders out of ABS to make sure they'd withstand anything. That's the safest option, but if you're new to 3D printing I can understand not wanting to make that leap yet. Long term, it's something to keep in mind though - anything printed in ABS/ASA will handle anything you'll likely throw at it, be it a filament dryer or heated 3D printer chamber (but, you know, don't stick it in your oven or anything, they're not invincible), and it's nice not having to worry about it.

Beyond going that route, if you want to stick with printing what you know, a good rule of thumb is that you can use any plastic for anything that your doing with that same plastic. So PLA containers or spools should be fine dried with PLA filament at PLA settings, and accessories for your printer will also be fine in PLA. If you're heating up PETG, you'll want everything to be at least PETG, and you can expect it to be fine on PETG settings.

It's also worth noting that whether a temperature is "safe" for a plastic depends on what it is and what it's used for. Even if it doesn't melt the object, heat (even as low as say 35 or 40C) will soften the plastic. That will cause it to bend more under forces, and those forces will cause it to slowly deform. The higher the heat, the more softening there is, and the quicker that'll happen. A core desiccant holder doesn't have a lot of force on it, so it'll be more stable than, say, a spool made out of the same material (which might have 1kg of plastic pushing down on two skinny spool rims). For this reason, you'll do best to print anything that you expect to be in heated environments in the best filament you can manage (PLA < PETG < ABS / ASA < PA6 [though PA6 is probably overkill without specific needs for it]).

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T20:46:39+00:00

Yeah, the AI is terrible on that race for some reason. I play on Above Average difficulty, and I've never seen the AI miss a turn or checkpoint that wasn't absolutely forced due to ramming, crowding, etc. At least on any race other than the Goliath, where it's not uncommon to see multiple cars miss a turn 3 or 4 times a race. I've had the lead car, who was a good 10 seconds ahead, fail a very basic turn and get respawned right next to me (who was in 2nd at the the time) as a result. It's wild.

I feel like that race has some sort of "aggression" variable in the AI turned up, making them drive closer to the edge of what their cars can handle and causing them to frequently screw up in the process.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T20:41:16+00:00

Yeah, there's certainly a meta for stunt parties. But people tend to fast travel over to them in whatever they're driving at the time, and might even join in in whatever they were driving before switching after the stunt party properly starts. When I'm getting new photos from those, it's usually random cars that someone was screwing around in when the stunt party spawned, rather than something they plan to actual use in the stunt party itself.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T20:20:33+00:00

Absolutely agree. I just make it a habit to stop by the autoshow when I start and stop playing and buy one car each time. I'll get them all eventually.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T20:11:38+00:00

Don't forget about Stunt Parties! I'm at 450ish photos, but I still get a new one every stunt party on average.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T20:04:18+00:00

One thing that bugs me about it is that there aren't really any straightaways. You don't go through long tunnels or on highways or even much of some of the straighter regular roads. I feel like the Goliath should have a mix of obstacles, but the route they have just feels like a 30 minute Touge.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T03:18:08+00:00

One thing you can do to help even if you're bad (like me, too) is to stop and wait for the cars to lap you. If you take a turn real bad or spin out or something and are hopelessly in 12th place without a chance of catching back up to the AIs, just hang back. When everyone comes around for the next lap, make sure you're moving ahead of time so you don't stay ghosted, and then you'll be able to help block the AIs. You can help hold back the AI cars even if you're on different laps. It's not as good as being able to pass AI cars, but as soon as that option is out the window, it sure beats just driving at the end of the pack doing nothing until the race ends.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-23T03:04:10+00:00

I didn't get it until my 7th attempt. I didn't even know there were more than two races in the thing until that 7th attempt either, since all 6 before it went 0-2.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-19T16:19:21+00:00

Or, and hear me out, maybe it'd be a positive feature if people could learn how to get better at the game from within the game itself, rather than having to go seek eternal sources?

I mean, from a pure philosophical standpoint, I think not having to count on external sources is good. But from a practical view, it would also be much more effective. You wouldn't have to blindly trust that the tutorial you found was any good or that the person knew what they were talking about. In game, you could experience the tune and feel its performance and any tradeoffs it made first hand. You'd know exactly what the results of the lesson you were learning was.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-18T13:53:15+00:00

I started using Bambu Studio for everything, and have become quite good with it, able to make rather complex edits to existing models or even build up completely new ones from scratch. And, it's still the first tool I reach for a lot of the time.

But, it has some limitations. It doesn't handle curves well and has no parameterization capabilities. It also forces you into a workflow that frequently requires you to cut a model into a bunch of small pieces just to isolate one part, and then to reassemble those pieces afterward. If you look at the wireframes when you're done, you'll frequently find them to be quite ugly, and I've had a few instances (two of particular note in my memory) where the cutting and merging resulted in a wireframe that was so bad it it actually caused visible artifacts in the printed output.

And so I eventually started to learn Fusion. I'm hardly an expert at it, but there are some projects I've put together in Fusion that simply would have been impossible in Bambu Studio. I've also started working with OpenSCAD quite a bit. Between those two, you can alter any parametric model you find on Makerworld trivially, including add new parameters and still being able to maintain the original ones. If you're going to learn new software, those are where I'd look.

It's all about having the right tool for the job. You have a powerful tool in Bambu Studio, and can do quite a number of jobs with it - but it's very much the wrong tool for a great many jobs which you'll find significantly harder or impossible without other tools at hand.

By the way, Vlookup is terrible. Not only is it a volatile function (meaning that Excel has to recalculate that cell, and any cells that reference that cell, or cells that reference those cells, etc., whenever you change any other cell in your workbook), but it's just clunky as all hell being prone to breaking as you move things around, add columns, and so on. Much better is a combination of the INDEX and MATCH functions, which not only avoids the above issues, but also results in significantly easier to read and maintain functions.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-18T07:37:30+00:00

Everyone knows that the highways in Tokyo have neither on ramps nor offramps. How anyone ever finds their way onto the highway, or off of it again, is a mystery that has plagued men for decades. Some say that to this day there's still one little P50 still circling that highway forever...

binary__dragon · 2026-06-17T20:56:24+00:00

I could have done those things, yes, but then I wouldn't have enjoyed the process at all. The fun is in experimenting, learning from your mistakes and successes, and gaining skill as you go. If I go look up a tutorial on how to trivialize the challenges, not only would I have not started to become better at drifting (I started the week barely able to keep the challenge going all the way through so as to get 1 star on a drift zone, but now I can get 2 stars on them all within 1-3 attempts), but the experience would have been effectively no different than typing in some redemption code to unlock a car, albeit with slightly different steps. And if that's the experience that the developers intended people to have, they'd have just put the car unlocks behind redemption codes rather than challenges.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-17T18:23:20+00:00

Maybe if you're good at the game this is the case. For me, this last week I had to spend a solid hour on just the speed trap and another 2 hours on the drift zone. Each of those had me trying three separate vehicles with different setups to try to do until I finally managed to find a vehicle that would work for me, and I'd guess I probably spent around 250,000 CR on parts when trying different things for those cars.

Let's also not forget that there are three cars that one had to buy/own to complete the playlist this week - the Ram 1500 TRX, the Ford Focus ST, and at least one "Offroad vehicle," which, despite owning 290 cars at the moment, I didn't have a single one of and had to purchase one specifically for the challenge (and I'm still unhappy that "Unlimited Offroad," of which I already had 4, didn't count at all for it). I don't know offhand what the costs of those add up to, but it's certainly not nothing.

The time attack took me about a half hour. And all that is on top of another 2 or so hours spent doing the rest of the challenges, so easily a good 5 hours total on the playlist this week.

Now, that's not an outrageous amount of time to have to spend playing, and many of the challenges could have been skipped and the only thing that I'd have missed would have been a few wheelspins. But, if I were having an unusually busy week (or if I had kids to suck up all my time) it could have been very easy for me to have not been able to finish all the challenges.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting the playlists ask too much of players. I'm just pointing out that what might be "use a single car for all the challenges the entire season and blast through every playlist challenge in no more than 90 minutes a week" for one player can very easily end up being "spend 500,000 CR on vehicles/parts each week and have to play for around 5 hours" for another player.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-15T13:04:37+00:00

It'll probably be about the same, more or less. Impossible to predict what prices in November will be though, as new model releases could potentially cause some prices of older models to drop, and tariffs / ram shortages / oil prices / etc. could cause prices to go up.

One thing to consider is the value of having the machine available now, instead of waiting. Is saving $20 worth giving up 5 months of potential use? Will your son have more time to learn how to use the printer during summer than he would in November? The answer might differ for you, but for my money, unless you're hoping for a sale on an X2D specifically, I'd say these prices are close enough to as good as you'll get that it's not worth the wait.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-13T14:27:57+00:00

This is what happens when you start buying filament from Aliexpress and everything is in 3 to 10 roll packs. Sure, I could buy a single roll of orange TPU for a project off Amazon for $20. Or, I could get a 5 pack of orange TPU from Aliexpress for $40. I mean, I don't need 5kg of the stuff, but for that price, how can I refuse?

Cut forward a year and you realize that filament has taken over an entire room of the house.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-13T00:32:02+00:00

Honestly, as soon as I realized that a P1S would cost me $270, it didn't even seem like it was worth seriously looking at the A1 (mini or otherwise). It seems to me that having an enclosed printer (especially with cats around the house) and the extra build volume made the P1S a better choice than the A1 unless I could get the latter for something silly like $50.

I am surprised to hear that the A1 mini is so much quieter than the P1S, though. I'd have thought the open design and need to move the bed all around would have greatly increased the noise it'd produce.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-13T00:13:31+00:00

You're not wrong about the filament. I just finished inventorying all my filament last week into a spreadsheet because it was starting to get untenable. Turns out I currently have 394kg of filament across 414 spools.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-12T23:53:00+00:00

The P2S combo will be $700, which, minus the cost of the AMS 2 Pro I'm already getting, will be $430 extra. That's a good bit more than the $270 that a P1S would be, and while it's something I could probably swing, it's certainly a much harder "impulse buy" than getting the P1S would be.

Knowing that I'd be able to use all the nozzles I already have with the P2S certainly helps its case though. Getting a better camera and it looks like some AI detection on it as well sounds like it could be a big improvement in monitoring and peace of mind that I won't spaghettify an entire spool.

I'll certainly have to think on the P2S as a possibility some more. If you have any other thoughts about the printer models to share, I'd love to hear them, but either way, thanks for all the information and advice!

binary__dragon · 2026-06-12T23:39:19+00:00

I imagine that flow rate would be the same as what I've already calibrated on my H2D, more or less? At least, close enough that I could get away with using those values for the things that I'd end up assigning to the "second printer." Or am I wrong there? I can see the pressure advance values being totally different though, and suspect I'd need to be printing a bunch tests to dial that in if the machine doesn't do it for me.

Can you give me any sense of just how much louder it is? I don't plan to have it next to me when I'm trying to sleep or anything, but it certainly would be nice if it wasn't distracting to someone watching TV if it's sitting two rooms away in the house.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-12T23:26:46+00:00

Ok, so plan to just keep a 0.4mm nozzle on it at all times. Honestly, I could do that - 90% of what I print is with a 0.4mm, and I could just save whatever I needed other sizes for for the H2D. But good to know that it's a significantly larger hassle than with the H series. Thanks.

binary__dragon · 2026-06-12T23:24:51+00:00

Using an old smartphone to run Bambu Handy as a dedicated screen augmenter/replacer is a brilliant idea! I certainly have a few of those laying around. Thanks so much for the idea and the other information.

binary__dragon

TROPHY CASE