I got a Creality Halot Mage 8k Resin 3D Printer a couple of months ago directly from Creality on an email blast that gave me a great deal on the printer, washing/curing, extra FEP and 5L of resins to start. It was a pretty good deal, but quickly became something resembling a nightmare.

I can’t say much for Creality’s support for overcoming the language barrier for their clients. Obviously being a Shenzhen company, I expected this to some degree, but I’ve dealt with other companies without ever having to address it. I did get a replacement motherboard and some models in the end, so I can say it “all worked out” but it was well earned.

I think the best information came from articles I read while my printer wasn’t working properly I believed. It turned out the printer was fine and it was that it was unsupported by Creality’s in-house slicer and Chutubox slicer though others were having success with it. It’s odd because the printer I have only accepts version 4 of the cxdlp file format, and neither of the in-house or versions of Chutubox exports that version. V4 has ramping and all kinds of nice features, but the slicers I mentioned and installed only has v2 and v3. I finally found success with Lychee slicer after watching a YouTube channel and reading the comment section. Lychee are an outfit out of France. From what I’ve seen in the evolution of the Halot Box slicer, Creality figured out Lychee’s slicer works too. The first edition of the IDE I installed didn’t look anything like Lychee, and the latest one (still doesn’t work on the printer by the way) looks very similar in my opinion. How ever they get a working IDE and slicer, I think it’s important they provide one to their customers since they sell their printers with that belief.

Finding success with my setup is very satisfying, and now the printer is going as much as possible. I’m going to get a pro Lychee account and see what that helps with as I progress with more complicated designs. I have created multiple good prints with different models, and I have hope that things will just continue to improve. In summary, my Halot Box resin printer is amazing, I’m hooked on printing, and the detail is mind-numbingly impressive.