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3D Printed Catan

A custom designed 3D printed Settlers of Catan board

3D Printed Catan

The Janurary period at MIT is called IAP (Independent Activities Period) and is a time for students to explore new things. For IAP 2024, with Alayah Hines, I explored low temperature metal casting. We decided to make a custom Settlers of Catan board. The plan was to design all the pieces in Fusion 360, 3D print them, make a silicone mold, and then cast the pieces in metal.

We're still working on finishing the metal casting part, but we had access to a few Bambu X1 Carbon 3D printers which can print in multiple colors and thought it be cool to show off a multi-color 3D printed board.

Design Goals

There were a lot of pieces to design

Since we planned to cast everything out of metals, we couldn't differentiate between the players by color. Instead, we decided to give each player a theme:

Alayah is a CAD wizard, so most of the cool pieces were designed by her but I did a few which I'll highlight below:

Ore tile

I wanted the Ore Tile to be a mountain with a crater at the top for the number token. Then I added a train track around the mountain that a minecart could run on.

Desinging the Mountain

To get the mountain aesthestic I first made a rough shape in Fusion360 and then exported it to SculptGL - An online sculpting tool. The advantage of SculptGL is that you pull, press, inflate, and smooth the mesh like you would clay unlike Fusion360 which expects more specific dimensioning.

Mountain BaseMountain Base
Textured Mountain BaseTextured Mountain Base

Next up I rescaled the mountain to fit the board, cut out the top for the crater, and cut out a path for the minecart

Mountain with crater and pathMountain with crater and path

Then I wanted to add tracks. This was the trickest part. First I used the Pipe tool in Fusion360 to create a pipe around the path. Then I drew skeched the two train tracks and sweeped them along the pipe.

Tracks swept along pathTracks swept along path

To get the bars between the tracks, I first extruded one from my track sketch. Then I offset all the faces and patterned it on a path around the track. I had to offset the faces as since the path rotates so does the bar and I wanted a portion of it to remain perpendicular to the track.

Blocks patterned around train tracksBlocks patterned around train tracks

Finally, to trim the bars to the dimension I swept my original track sketch along the path and intersected it with the patterned bars.

Mountain with track barsMountain with track bars

Designing the minecart

I didn't do anything very fancy for the minecart. I just sketched the various parts and extruded them.

For the gems I lofted between different polygons, converted the body to a mesh, and then remeshed and reduced the faces to get a more gem-like shape.

Minecart

I also reused the cart to have a minecart filled with coal

Minecart with coalMinecart with coal

Bringing it all together

Finally, I combined the mountain and minecart and added some gems to the mountain side:

Minecart