Everything Is 3D-Printed in the Future

The name of this trope says it all: the use of 3D printing in 20 Minutes into the Future settings.

3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD or digital 3D model, normally done by depositing materials, like plastics, liquids or powder grains, which are then fused together with heat. It has several advantages, like the ability to produce very complex shapes or geometries that could be borderline impossible to make by hand (including hollow parts or with internal trusses to reduce weight while still being precise), the creation of objects at a much faster rate than if they were made by hand or by industrial machining, and reducing the cost and waste of manufacture (as all that is needed is a computer to create the design, the printer, and material for the "ink").

This trope rather is flexible, as it can appear in both hard and soft sci-fi without breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief. It can also be used to provide justification for elements of the story without having to resort to an Hand Wave. For example, a necessary device can be effortlessly printed while say, in a colony in another planet, without easy access to a supply route. It's also popular in Video Games, to justify a crafting system while not using any obvious tools or materials. Beware however to not overdo it, as it runs the risk of causing the audience to ask why it simply hasn't replaced normal manufacture or to avoid turning a printer into an immediate problem solver.

Expect the Gadgeteer Genius to have one and use it regularly to create his latest devices. Also, assume that one of the first things its users will think to do with it and as proven by Real Life is to make firearms with it (probably blocky ones). This trope is also a simple way to add Technology Porn to a work, by either describing or showing a printer while functioning or by displaying the printed object after it is complete.

Despite the popularity of this trope in the second half of the The New '10s onward, the basic concept of 3D printing is surprisingly older, with early forms of it having been described in the short story "Things Pass By" by Murray Leinster, written in 1945 and in "Tools of the Trade" by Raymond F. Jones, written in 1950, where it is described as "molecular spray", and with the first patent for such a machine having been issued in 1971. It took until the 1980s to reach a level similar to today. Some examples of this trope before its boom in popularity may use Nanomachines to assemble the material in the required shape rather than layering it until the object is complete.

In Real Life, 3D printing has a significant amount of uses, mostly in engineering-heavy industries, such as the automotive and aerospace industry, as it can create prototypes and proofs of concept quickly, with low waste and at a very cheap cost. In fact, early in its infancy, it was referred to as Rapid Prototyping. There is also a significant hobbyist scene that creates designs for everything, from the simple to the extremely complex.

Compare and contrast to its older and softer cousin the Matter Replicator.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dr. STONE reboot: Byakuya: At the end, Rei makes a giant 3D printer in space out of satellite parts to essentially recreate the entire International Space Station, and ultimately, Rei itself.
• Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045:
  • The first version of the opening sequence shows the Major's prosthetic body getting printed.
  • In the penultimate episode, one of the Posthumans hacks a food printer on an American submarine to make herself a Remote Body for hijacking the sub and its nukes.

Comic Books

• Transmetropolitan has these in the form of makers, which all seem to come with an A.I. and require large blocks of non-radioactive material as a base. Spider's mafia-made one spends most of its time producing drugs... for itself.

Fan Works

• Using the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual as a reference, Bait and Switch (STO) has a mention that one of the supplies the USS Bajor takes on when she docks at Deep Space 9 is "replicator mass" (because replicating stuff from pure energy would require frankly ludicrous amounts of power).
• World War Etheria: Like many examples mentioned here, the fabricators, products of the First Ones, are treated as very sophisticated 3D printers and as such are restricted to base materials on hand such as needing to make circuit boards out of sand and appropriate metals as need be, with the added caveat that they "pattern crystals" for the various sophisticated projects they can do. With this out of the way, they can create sophisticated prosthetics, armor, weapons, vehicles, even more versions of themselves. It's later shown that properly equipped ones can create edible organic food too, even beer — interestingly, this can extend into creating organic replacements for limbs. Having access to these is a major industrial leveler for the Horde, once they find a way to reliably power them when they're up against the magical One-Man Army that are each of the individual Princesses.

Film — Animation

• Big Hero 6: Hiro uses a 3D printer in his family's garage to construct his inventions. And the villain has a whole automated assembly line system using printers to make the component bots of a Microbot Swarm.
• Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling: Upon returning to Earth after 20 years, Rocko finds that his old workplace, Kind Of A-Lot-O Comics, has been replaced with a kiosk that can 3D-print comic books in seconds.

Film — Live-Action

• In the 2144-set part of Cloud Atlas, the Neo-Korean, McDonald's-like Papa Song's is shown rapidly 3D-printing food from sophisticated spray nozzles.
• The Cloverfield Paradox has a 3D printer used to create food from worms being kept for protein. Someone has taped a "Worst Bagel Machine Ever" sticker on the printer, implying that the stuff tastes about as great as it looks. It serves as a Chekhov's Gun for the creation of a literal Chekhov's Gun when it's used to 3D-print a firearm.
• Early in Jurassic Park III, Billy prints the resonating chamber of a Velociraptor. Dr. Grant later uses it to confuse a pack of Velociraptors in order for the group to escape. It's notable for the fact that the characters refer to the printer as a rapid prototyper, as 3D printers were not commonly known by the average person when the movie was released in 2001.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Tony Stark uses 3D printers of his own design to fabricate most of his Iron Man suits.

Literature

• The Diamond Age has "matter compilers" that are essentially nanotech fabricators using matter from the "Feed".
• The Peripheral is partly set 20 Minutes into the Future where everything is 3D-printed, leading to mass unemployment (the other half of the book is set in an even more distant future where functional nanomachines have taken it to the full-blown Matter Replicator level).
• Ren, protagonist of the Planetfall Universe, is a 3D printing engineer.
• Multi-material 3D printers are commonplace in The Pride of Parahumans, and nanofabricators are alluded to but not actually seen in the novel itself.
• The Star Carrier series uses nanotechnology to achieve this. Deep Space has a scene of a character ordering a coffee and having it basically 3D-printed by nanites. Starships are "grown" in record time by grabbing a nearby resource-rich asteroid and unleashing nanites on it. They strip-mine it and use the materials to quickly build a ship. Arcologies are "grown" the same way on Earth. It's pointed out that the reason the Space Navy can't replace old model Space Fighters with new ones quickly isn't because they can't produce them fast enough — they can, it's just that the pilots' neural hardware and software are designed for the old models and need to be adapted, and the pilots themselves need to be retrained. It's easier with new pilots, who simply get the latest implants and training. It doesn't help that they constantly introduce new models, sometimes mere months after the previous one. This is also why there are no big cargo ships prowling the space lanes. With nano-growing, it doesn't make economic sense to lug physical things light-years away. Instead, trade ships specialize in information.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Rimuru is a living take on this trope, as he has a synergistic combination of skills that allows him to dissolve and analyze any object he eats and make exact copies from stored materials. He can also refine what he consumes into directly usable and highly potent resources.
• In Troy Rising, "fabbers" can build just about anything you want very quickly as long as you've got the raw materials. The crushed remains of enemy ships are frequently fed in to supply the raw materials in question.
• In We Are Legion (We Are Bob), molecular 3D printers are used. As with the Troy Rising example mentioned above, if you have the correct raw materials (asteroid mining) and a ton of power (onboard fusion reactors), you can build any object molecule-by-molecule. The process isn't quick, and it only nets you parts of complex devices or structures, which must then be assembled the old-fashioned way. Food can't be replicated (not yet, at least, but Bill is working on printing organic matter). Still, this tech is essential to the success of the Von Neumann probes. The Heaven-series probes are equipped with several autofactories (basically 3D printers with accompanying "roamer" robots used to deliver raw materials and assemble items from printed parts). However, in order to build something large, it usually requires upscaling to a large autofactory. For instance, in order to build colony ships for humans (each colony ship holds 10,000 people in cold sleep), Riker and Homer first have to gather raw materials or salvage debris (which is actually better, since the materials are already refined), then start building smaller autofactories, then scaling them up to a full-sized shipyard. Finally, the shipyard can start building colony ships. How long? About ten years until the first colony ship comes off the production line, and that's an optimistic projection.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Bang Theory: The B-plot of "The Cooper/Kripke Inversion" revolves around Howard and Raj, frustrated at the fact that a pair of action figures meant to resemble them end up being completely different of they ordered (Raj's figure was made black and Howard's has a Gag Nose), deciding to buy together a $5000 3D-printer to make their own. While Howard initially mentions the several applications for work, they end up just printing a whistle and pair of figures, with the length of the process being Played for Laughs. At the end, Bernadette makes him sell his half of the printer to Raj in order to pay the debt he has incurred since he used her money.
• CSI-verse:
  • CSI: NY:
    • "Officer Blue": As part of his reconstruction of the crime, Mac 3D-prints a copy of the bullet that killed a mounted policeman because the actual bullet is still lodged in the officer's horse's neck at the time.
    • "Command+P": The Body of the Week turns out to have 3D-printed the revolver he was shot with, then mistook the killer for the venture capitalist he was trying to meet, who decided to get a Ballistic Discount. The shooter is then injured when the weak barrel burst the second time he fired it.
  • CSI: Vegas: In "Under the Skin", the killer prints a pair of knives and a mask in order to kill one coworker and frame another.
• The Good Wife: Deconstructed in "Open Source". Hilarity Sues after a man 3D-prints a gun from open-source schematics on the Internet and tests it on a range, only for the receiver to burst from a misfire, causing the round to hit a man in the neighboring lane in the spine and paralyze him. A firearms expert eventually figures out this was due to the shooter's 3D printer being run in a colder room than it was designed for. Turns out 3D-printed plastic is a much finickier material than you generally want to use in firearms manufacturing.
• Red Dwarf: "Officer Rimmer" reveals that by the 23rd century, 3D printing eventually gets to the point that it can construct biological structures, up to and including copies of people. However, it still suffers from some of the issues relating to regular printing, as Rimmer learns when he tries to make super-tough clones and is left with a paper jam-generated monstrosity.
• Twice in Shark Tank, the first in season 6 with a company that made custom action figures and later in season 10 with a company whose pitch was fully functional 3D printers for children to make their own toys.
• The backdrop to the opening credits of Westworld has scenes of components of the robot hosts being 3D-printed.

Tabletop Games

• Eclipse Phase explores this concept in detail, and the use of nanofabricators (or "cornucopia machines") forms the basis of distinction between the three major economies.
  • "Old" economies restrict unlimited nanofabricators to the elite class, and having one without the clout to keep it can be a serious crime. Limited versions which produce food or small items are the most common, and pretty much what the civilian population is allowed. More advanced models have limitations placed on them such as DRM, encrypted one-use blueprints, and company copy locks which prevent one company's blueprints from being used by another company's fabricators. Most fabricators keep logs of what they make, and many are preprogrammed to alert authorities if they detect something dangerous in the works. Most of this can be overcome by a talented hacker and some time.
  • "Transitional" economies have public fabricators that all taxpaying or service fee-paying citizens can use to produce anything that doesn't use a lot of electronics or rare elements, which have to be bought or made with a desktop nanofab using blueprints and raw materials you bought yourself.
  • "New" economies, which run on favors and formalized reputation scores, don't restrict their public nanofabs, they just give everyone a daily ration of raw materials, and blueprints are crowdsourced and open-sourced to the public. This doesn't come without its own set of problems, since items requiring rare elements or huge allotments need to be paid off with favors and rep. Particularly dangerous items or components will alert the authority analogues, and the user could face some serious consequences if they can't answer some awkward questions.
• In GURPS Ultra-Tech, these are balanced by truly massive power demands that require "cosmic" energy sources to be economical.
• In Hc Svnt Dracones, stores have largely been replaced with "Buyspots" where one can order something that the owning MegaCorp produces and a 3-D printer will make it on demand. Manufacturing centers can also be added to spaceships. There's also the Spontaneous Assembly Machine, which is the size of a baseball and contains a bunch of Nanomachines and super-compressed foams for rapidly constructing things without moving parts in the field (like cover).
• In Lancer, "Printers" are a key component of Union's Post-Scarcity Economy. Simple objects like disposable tools, hardcover panels and replacement blades can all be "flash-printed", while an entire mech, complete with a full complement of weapons and wargear, can be printed from scratch over the course of 10 hours. This allows a lancer to replace a destroyed mech at no in-game cost, but upgrades require licenses that act as the game's Class and Level System. Printing technology in the setting is essentially 3D printing on crack and explicitly doesn't adhere to normal physics, but it still has its limitations such that they're not magic create-anything machines.
• Transhuman Space has universal 3D printers, which are very expensive, in the $200,000-1,000,000 range.^note In real life, you can get a plastic printer for a couple hundred and a metal printer costs thousands, and TS is still over 80 years from now.
• Warhammer 40,000 has Standard Template Constructs (STC), extremely powerful replicators able to create anything from kitchen utensils to buildings to gigantic, artificially intelligent robots. The STC themselves are capable of scanning any environment it is placed in and listing what schematics could be made with the resources available. These were given to human colonies tens of thousands of years before the start of the franchise's timeline, allowing humanity to easily colonize any world it settled on. STC now are considered the most valuable and important parts of Lost Technology by the Adeptus Mechanicus, as having a fully functional STC and a fully completed database of schematics would allow humanity to easily reconquer the galaxy has they had many eons ago. To put it in perspective: two IG scouts discovered an STC schematic for a slightly different combat knife. They were given a planet as thanks. Each. However, there's a massive case of Depending on the Writer of whether they are this trope or outright replicators, making them now Early-Installment Weirdness.

Video Games

• In the background info of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, it is mentioned that shortly after the Hyades Revolt, Hyperdyne Systems, the UPP's largest MegaCorp, began to sell licenses for fabrication blueprints. While most colonies in the area lacked either access to the necessary heavy industry for manufacture or to ships capable of serving as freighters, Hyperdyne instead used the fact all outposts in the Hyades Cluster had general-purpose commercial fabricators meant to assist in colonization efforts, catapulting them to a position of power within the UPP. Fittingly, the design shtick for Hyperdyne/UPP weapons tends to be angular, with trapezoidal cutouts, strut-like parts and flat plastic planes, compared to Armat's boxy weapons or Weyland-Yutani's round, smooth and sleek designs. Some of them weren't even originally created by professionals but by people in order to solve an immediate problem, such as the Twilight v.4 marksman rifle (the first version was developed by a group of rebel workers and distributed through the local planetary network), the AM-16 Gruppa (created by an engineer from spare parts and mining equipment to help his colony get rid of local pests) and the OCAP-91 Volcan (a crowdsourced flamethrower meant to aid in terraforming and agricultural work), with Hyperdyne licensing the designs to the UPP military. The Tientsin-class ships used by Colonial Marines, of which the UAS Endeavour serves as a Player Headquarters and Hub Level, are also fitted with 3D fabricators, meant to aid in logistics by producing the necessary supplies for long voyages, serving as justification to why the players can use weapons made by different (and sometimes antagonistic to each other) power blocs.
• Astroneer: Available in multiple tiers. One in your backpack can print items taking up 1 inventory slot, including a Small Printer. Small Printers then can print items that take 2 connected slots and platforms to put them on, including a Medium Printer. Medium Printers cover 4-slot items, including most of the base structures. Large Printers go for Extra Large items, most of which can't even be put on platforms after being unpacked, as they are the biggest vehicles and platforms in themselves.
• The Callisto Protocol: REFORGE Stations are large on-site fabricators that can be used as shops to buy and sell supplies, weapons and upgrades. The designs are quite boxy, angular, and utilitarian, and upon purchase, the machine will print out the object in full view of the player, ready for use.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III rebrands the blueprint system, that changes a weapon's caliber and other functionalities, as "Aftermarket Parts" that are, by default, represented as large parts of the gun being made of white 3D-printed plastic, even if the part they are depicting has formal production using injection-molded plastic or metal.
• Ghost 1.0:
  • The Nakamura space station is equipped with 3D printers that can be used by the Player Character to reprint herself if/when the chassis housing her Virtual Ghost form is destroyed. Each 3D printer also functions as a Save Point, with the printers also functioning as a Warp Whistle system by printing a new body at the target destination.
  • The shops around the station that sell consumable items, upgrades and weapons to Ghost also qualify, with Ghost only having to collect enough energy cubes to power the printing unit for a given consumable item, upgrade or weapon.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: Many of the ancient data files have references to the society of late 21st-century printing just about everything from prefab housing to food (though there are many comments that it never tastes as good as the real thing). This is also one of the reasons why the Faro Swarm was so unstoppable, as the Horus-class Titans had onboard manufacturing capabilities and so were essentially able to mass-print new fighting units to replace anything human forces managed to destroy and then produce more.
• Inverted in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The ancient spell Autobuild allows one to use Zonaite to reproduce structures and vehicles, something very alien to the generally medieval setting of post-Calamity Hyrule.
• Phantom Brigade: The Base on Wheels used by the titular group comes with a large-scale 3D printer, meant initially for large-scale mining equipment but repurposed to create weapons and parts for the mechs by the Brigade. With enough upgrades, it is possible to have several printers functioning simultaneously to create an entire mech (the mech's inner frame, torso, legs, left and right arms) from scratch.
• Prey (2017) has the slightly more real-world Fabricator, and its logical counterpart the Material Recycler. Put any kind of matter into the Recycler (cigar butts, plant leaves, soda cans), and it will spit out cubes of compressed raw material. Put those cubes into the Fabricator and upload a print plan, and it will recycle the raw materials into whatever you want: guns, bullets, medkits, and more. There are also Recycler Charges, which are grenades that recycle anything in their blast radius, including, as one unlucky researcher found out, part of a person's foot.
• Subnautica features a variety of 3D printing devices: Fabricators (for tools and supplies), Habitat Builders (for buildings and large devices), and Mobile Vehicle Bays (for vehicles). These allow for humans to quickly settle newly discovered worlds as long as they have the raw resources to make them. Fortunately, the player's Escape Pod is equipped with a Fabricator that can build the other devices once he has the schematics. The player is also equipped with a Scanner, allowing them to scan wreckage and technology to make more schematics for their fabricators.
• In Total Annihilation (and its Spiritual Successor, Supreme Commander), your two resources are Mass and Energy. Mass is mined by specialized facilities, and Energy is produced by (what else?) power plants. Factories use energy to 3D-print mass into Mecha-Mooks and buildings. There are even machines to turn energy into mass.
• Warframe: Your orbiter is equipped with a foundry, a 3D printer that takes raw materials and assembles them according to a blueprint. Blueprints for most consumable items can be re-used endlessly, while the DRM on weapon and armor blueprints makes them self-delete after a single printing.
• Watch_Dogs 2: Marcus has access to 3D printers in the Hackerspaces, which he can use to print gadgets, weapons, and upgrades.

Web Originals

• Future Timeline.net predicts that 3-D printers will be a mainstream product by 2015 (not quite, sadly), to be supplanted by nanofabricators in 2062 and true matter replicators circa 2190.
• In A Miracle of Science, Mars gives most of the major nations of the Sol system "Autofactories" that can produce nearly anything from basic raw materials.

Western Animation

• Futurama uses this type of device a few times.
  • "Benderama" introduces the "Banach-Tarski Dupla-Shrinker," an invention of Farnsworth's that works based on the titular theorem involving disjoint subsets: basically, it scans objects and creates two smaller replicas, though it has to be fed a proportionate amount of matter. Since Bender is technically an object, he abuses this.
  • "Forty Percent Leadbelly" achieves this using a highly advanced 3D printer to make fully functional replicas of any object using complex layers of nano-plastic. The input source can be as simple as a digital photograph; Bender snaps a picture of a guitar and is able to make a facsimile that's identical down to sound quality. After the program is accidentally left running without severing the wireless link to Bender's internal "folk song directory", the printer starts churning out functioning versions of fictional characters from a folk song Bender is working on, meaning that an entire crowd of robots he falls in with to generate material for his songwriting all turn out to have been manifested by the printer based on his lyrics. Because he added a vengeful version of Fry to his song to make it up to Fry for a dispute between them, the printer even creates a replica of Fry good enough to fool Bender himself, and it's only the duplicate Fry's Out of Character behavior that tips Leela off to what's going on.
• Pantheon is set 20 Minutes into the Future and has some pretty advanced 3D printing. It's even used by Steven Holstrom to create a virus.

Real Life

• Related to this trope is the theoretical Drexler's molecular assembler, an array of nanoscale multipurpose machines that construct whatever you want out of individual molecules and atoms.
• In Amsterdam, a temporary steel bridge was 3D printed and placed over the Oudezijds Achterburgwal in 2018 and remained there until it was removed in 2023, replaced by the repaired original one.
• The University of Maine as of 2023 currently holds the record for the world's largest 3D printed object, a 25ft (7,7 m) long, 5,000 lb (2,2 tons) boat currently being tested by the US Marine Corps and the US Navy to support operations at sea.
• SQ4D is a constrution company that specializes in 3D printing houses.
• In Myanmar, rebels fighting against the military junta have taken to 3D printing firearms for their work, while earlier in 2016 farmers had begun to use 3D printing to create and develop better farming equipment.
• This kamikaze drone developed by the UK and used by Ukraine in their fight with Russia is entirely made from 3D printed parts.

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