Like @Alex_vG said, you can plug a single AMS straight in but get a 4 into 1 combiner accessory and you can have 16 spools at the ready. If you get a second or more AMS units, you’ll need that combiner.
That MoPar clock face was printed face down on a textured PEI build plate. That’s how it got that pebble texture. The hands were printed the same way though the second hand came with the clock mechanism. It is indeed 5 colors and I used 2 AMS units so all color changes were automated. The crisp demarcations between the colors are thanks to the purge having pure plastic colors ready when it came time to print.
Again, like Alex said, at each filament change it has to purge the old filament from the head to not have mixing. The little wads of extruded filament let you see the colors mix during the filament purge. As long as you’re getting familiar with this stuff, you don’t have to throw the purge away if your design allows it. You can just use the purge process to print infill or support. So far I haven’t tried either and light color walls can look weird with darker colors inside. Support ends up as waste anyway but no idea if it might leave specks of other colors. In the clock face design there’s no support or much infill so all the purge was waste but it wasn’t too bad overall. Keep the color layer count down and it’s not bad at all. Some models have color changes every layer and those can generate more waste than the print itself.
On that clock face I extruded the design 0.6mm thick in Fusion and my layer thickness for printing is 0.2mm so it’s exactly 3 print layers thick. It prints the various colors with extruder purges in between but it at least is smart about it. The last color printed on one layer is the first (as long as the color is used) color printed on the next so no purge needed. I also use purge towers so the extruder has a chance to hit equilibrium for printing. That’s additional waste but just a few grams.
I also used a 0.4mm nozzle to print that with. There are very tiny missed spaces in places with acute angles where the line width got too thin to print so it didn’t. On my lightboxes and clocks, I add another 0.4mm layer (two 0.2mm printed layers to get the orthogonal deposition lines) of white filament behind the design to add strength but also to not let light shine straight through. Color designs in lightboxes and similar applications are generally just held together by whatever bonding colors have when printed next to other colors. Sometimes you can just punch colors out like they were die punched. The white layers make designs super strong. It’s up to users if they want those gaps smaller. Print with a 0.2mm nozzle and the gaps will probably nearly go away but print time will go way up.
But that’s printed on an X1C. I used all Bambu PLA filaments. It’s posted here with more photos if you want to see more. But if you search for lightboxes, Hueforge, lithophane, etc, you can see what kind of world color opens up. And that’s just the tip of what you can do. Here’s a Raspberry Pi 5 box with space for an NVMe drive I did a while back. 4 colors so fits in one AMS. Also printed face down on textured PEI with the design 3 layers thick. After the design it was all that beige PLA.
