Houses - What can be done?

We've heard a few questions about printing the halfling hole houses included in the releases, and wanted to address things.

First of all, most 3D miniature terrain at this point in time is still printed using FDM (Filament) based printers. This is a due to the fact that most FDM printers have larger build plates, and that filament printing is generally quite a bit less expensive when doing larger objects, compared to resin printing.

Supports are a very complex topic when it comes to FDM printing, which is why the house files are unsupported. Though in the case of the halfling holes, I would recommend if you are going to print them via a FDM printer, to consider laying their back flat on the build plate and giving that a shot. This may not result in the best quality depending on the FDM printer, but it usually means no supports are needed, which means no quality loss from having supports. Beyond that there are of course vertical and 45 degree orientations/etc.

We test printed all the houses using both FDM printers (Any with a 200x200mm build plate which is fairly standard will fit all the houses fine), as well as in resin using a Form 3 printer, with the houses angled at around 45-60 degrees, and supports along the back of the house.

What if you don't have a FDM Printer?
If you are wanting to print one of the house models out on a regular consumer grade resin printer like an Elegoo Mars, or Anycubic Photon, Phrozen Sonic Mini, etc, all of which have fairly small build plates there are only a few options unfortunately.

1. You can scale the model down until you can fit it on the build plate of your printer. I would recommend a steep angle to minimize the shrinkage, and to keep most of the supports towards the flat back of the model that isn't normally seen.

2. You can cut the model into multiple sections. Or if there is interest, we're happy to split the houses into 2 or 3 sections to fit most resin printers. This may of course result in some visible seam lines where the pieces need to be glued together.

3. If you are interested in printing larger terrain pieces in resin, you should also consider looking at a wave of new printers that are starting to come to market, which are all larger build volumes. There are quite a few options on the market at the moment, Peopoly Phenom, Phrozen Transform, Epax 10.1", etc. Supposedly end of November Elegoo will also be releasing the Saturn which has a larger build volume, is 4k resolution, and should retail atleast in the USA for around $500, making it likely the cheapest large format resin printer available.

The future at One Gold Piece:
Moving forward after our initial halfling adventure, we will in general no longer be releasing larger terrain pieces which can't fit on regular size resin printers. If large format resin printing becomes more common place, we will look at this issue again.