HOPE 01 Fabricator Scan and Print

The fabricator is HOPE 01’s 3D printer, encyclopedia, and money sink in one machine. Steam’s pitch is blunt: collect 200+ useful items, scan them, and print them later for a dangerous outing or a boss run. If you treat it like a crafting bench you ignore until endgame, you will starve in a medical wing with a gun you cannot reprint. This page is the operator manual. Wanderbots’ demo footage on this page is the best public look at scanning, stash tabs, and print costs.

For the raid side of the loop, keep How to Extract open. Printing a kit you cannot extract is just a slower way to burn bricks.

What the machine actually does

Two jobs, in this order:

1. Scan. Drag an item with a blue marker onto the scanner. Scanning learns the item type once. After that, you can print more copies if you have the right fabrics. The physical item is not eaten by the scan; it still needs a stash tile or a holster.
2. Print. Spend fabrics (filaments / bricks) to manufacture a learned item. Costs are per recipe and can be steep — demo footage showed a magazine in the 175-plus-50 range of a resource. That is why you do not print a novelty gun before food.

Blue dots mean “unlearned.” No blue means you already have the blueprint. If the UI feels like a pile of slots, slow down: scanner, buy/print slot, fabric input, stash tab. Dropping a gun on the floor of the hideout is not scanning it.

The in-world flavour text calls the raw cubes cubic fabrication materials issued as a citizen stipend for everyday goods such as food and clothing. People nicknamed them fabrics or bricks. You will too.

HOPE 01 demo — scanning loot and printing at the fabricator

Fabric types you must not mix up

Footage and item text distinguish at least:

• Public / common / everyday fabrics. The stipend brick. Food, clothing-class prints, basic consumables. You always want more of this.
• Medical fabrics. Clinical prints: medical tools, probably certain heals and devices. Medical wings in the Cluster are where you farm them, not where you spend them all.
• Military fabrics. The expensive layer. Guns, serious mags, armour, and tactical gadgets compete for it.

These are not a single bar labelled “crafting mats.” A pile of medical bricks will not print a dinner. A pile of public bricks will not print a rifle. When you are looting, grab every brick type you have grid space for; when you are printing, read the recipe twice.

Getting Started tells you to scan before you print. This page tells you what to print once the library is growing.

Scan priority (the actual collect-a-thon)

Scan order is not the same as equip order.

1. Food and drink. Canned cabbage, juice, anything caloric. Hunger and thirst are loadout. A caloric converter that “burns calories to gain energized and regeneration” is a dead gadget if you never scanned a meal.
2. Magazines and ammo types. Especially mags that name a round class (heavy, light, and whatever the gun card says). You can reprint mags; you cannot reprint panic.
3. The gun you actually like. One scanned workhorse is worth ten unscanned floor legends.
4. Gadgets. Flashlight variants, medical tools, converters. See Gadgets.
5. Armour / vests. Scan even a vest you will not wear yet.
6. Everything else with a blue dot. Steam’s collector fantasy is real; the Well-read and Collector achievements exist for a reason. If it fits in the bag and it is blue, it is a future print.

Do not skip scanning a “bad” pistol. The print cost might be cheap later when you need a backup for a friendlier extract.

Print priority for Early Access kits

Spend fabrics in this order until you are bored of surviving:

1. Food and water for the next two runs.
2. Ammo and a spare mag for the gun on your back.
3. A reprint of that gun so a wipe is annoying, not a reset.
4. Light. Flashlight now, gun-mounted light when you have the blueprint.
5. One medical print.
6. Only then a new body, a fancy mag, or a boss-specific toy.

The Loadout Checklist is the hideout door test. The Early Loadouts page explains cheap kits. The Weapons Tier List is for when you have military fabric to waste.

UI traps that eat items

Public footage is full of people dropping their only gun into the wrong slot. Slow habits:

• Blue = scan first. Do not print a duplicate of something still blue; you may not even have the recipe.
• Buy/print slot is not stash. Demo coaching says to drop fabric on the buying slot at the top right. Stash is a different tab. Wanderbots moves loot to stash, then scans, then prints — copy that order.
• Costs stack. A mag that wants 175 of one filament plus 50 of another is a warning. If the number scares you, you cannot afford a boss reprint yet.
• Grid tetris. Fabrics and printed guns do not always merge the way you expect. Splattercat called this out: nothing stacks like a normal FPS. Leave holes.
• Scan is once per type. After the blueprint exists, extra copies are either equipment or vendor/stash bulk. Stop scanning the same pistol.

Hideout versus Cluster fabricators

You will find fabricator hardware in the world (demo coaching even says “find the fabricator” inside a raid). Treat field machines as emergency scanners and printers, not as a second stash. If an extract timer is live, scanning one blue item is a gift; printing a whole kit in a hostile room is how boss-adjacent players die.

The hideout machine is where you:

• Empty the run bag onto stash.
• Scan every remaining blue.
• Print tomorrow’s food.
• Rebuild the mag stack.
• Check whether you still need that caloric converter or whether you should print orange juice instead.

Economy mindset

Bending Boy Games has already said Early Access will tune the amount of fabrics, enemy balance, bosses, and quests. That means today’s generous brick pile might be tomorrow’s famine. Play as if fabrics are the rarest loot in the Cluster, because they are the only loot that reprints everything else.

Practical rules:

• Never print “because I can” on military fabric.
• Always print calories before cosmetics.
• If a recipe would empty a colour of brick, wait. A later Updates patch may change costs; your scanned library will still be there.
• Extract with bricks even when the gun on the floor is shinier. Bricks print the gun later. The gun does not print bricks.

Once scanning is muscle memory, go run a real route in the Beginner Walkthrough and stop living in the menu.