Why does the prime tower need to have every layer printed until the last color change (excluding smooth timelapse mode)? Couldn’t it just be printed on layer with color change, so when for example there’s a color change on layers 0-10 and 280-305 it would only print the prime tower during them (when printing higher layers couldn’t the toolhead just lower, print the prime tower layer, then go back)? That feels like it could save a lot of filament on layers where the prime tower is printed only because there’s more color changes later.
Though, I don’t really see any big reasons why it wouldn’t work, I’m quite new to 3D printing, so it would be great to know if there’s some issues that would completely stop this from working with this idea!
Perhaps the prime reason is that it takes too long to get back to correct Z height after that, defeating the idea of the priming. Another reason is it’s not always safe to raise the bed - it depends on the model so would need a lot of new heuristics. You can turn the prime tower off though, Some people do and say it works fine. I can’t recall having done it yet - the actual weight of even a very high prime tower is negligible.
Edit: A feature request I have considered, is to somehow prime to infill after a color change without a prime tower. At first I thought you could just reverse the order of walls (internal before external) but it would probably cause visual artifacts.
Prusa slicer which Bambu Studio is based on has an experimental option called ‘no sparse layers’ which does exactly as you describe.
The issues with it for the x1/p1 are:
You need plenty of space around the prime tower to allow room for the print head to go up and down.
You also need room to ensure that the x and y rails don’t hit the model when the z axis moves down
For the x1c and p1s - for a tall model, even if it missed the rails when you move the z axis up to do the prime tower - the model might end up hitting the glass top of the printer.