YouTuber Akruas has printed the topography of his city in the city-building video game “Cities: Skylines”, documenting the process step by step in a series of Tweets.

Altengrad is a fictional Central European city that Akruas has showcased in detail on his YouTube channel. To prepare it for slicing, he first made a few modifications – removing wires, plugging terrain holes, reducing overall brightness – before screenshotting it isometrically, then converting those screenshots to vector graphics in Inkscape, so they were scalable.

The scaled PNGs from Inkscape were then put into 3D Slicer, a medical software used for CT scans, to create a 3D model – and ultimately STL file – of Altengrad. After that, printing was relatively straightforward, with tweaks and other changes made in Blender before using PrusaSlicer to create the gcode.

The results, which resemble top-down architectural models, are a bit rough, but nonetheless impressive for a first attempt at a project this scale. Akruas does, however, offer one tip for would-be city printers: avoid using a hot-air gun to remove plastic whiskers or oozing, as doing so will warp your print. Your city-dwellers will thank you.

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