Prusa x INDX brings 8-tool multicolor printing to CORE One

Prusa and Bondtech just attacked the ugliest part of multicolor printing, and the numbers are the story: 13 mg of priming waste and 10 to 17 second tool changes, with no purge tower swallowing half a spool in the corner. That is the kind of stat line that makes a desktop system feel less like a demo and more like something you could actually build around.

The Bondtech INDX upgrade for the Prusa CORE One first surfaced at Formnext 2025 in Frankfurt, where the two companies positioned it as an eight-material, multi-tool system for a printer that was already built as a compact, enclosed CoreXY platform. The pitch is simple and aggressive. Instead of loading a single hotend with all the complexity, INDX shifts the heavy parts, induction heating, sensing electronics, and extrusion, onto one aluminum Smart Toolhead, then keeps the other tools lightweight and passive.

That architecture is what lets Prusa say the CORE One can carry up to eight tools with just 35 mm between tool centers. Prusa also says users can start with a four-tool setup and expand to eight later, which matters more than it sounds. It turns a big-ticket multimaterial upgrade into something you can grow into, instead of forcing an all-at-once commitment.

Bondtech says the system uses wireless induction heating, contactless temperature sensing, and Dynamic Dual Drive extrusion, with nozzle heat-up taking 4 to 12 seconds and a full tool change, including heat-up, around 14 seconds. Prusa’s launch material puts the waste-saving promise in blunt terms: no purge towers, no filament rewinding, no filament cutting, no filament flushing. In practice, that is the difference between a multicolor print that looks elegant and one that turns into a sacrificial blob farm.

The material mix is where INDX gets interesting for actual shop use. Prusa says it is meant to handle combinations like TPU, PLA, carbon-fiber-filled materials, and soluble supports in a single job. That pushes the CORE One beyond cosplay multicolor and into the kind of mixed-material work people have been hacking toward for years. It also slots neatly into the CORE One+ platform, which is fully enclosed, uses CoreXY kinematics, and offers active chamber temperature control up to 55 C.

Prusa has been here before. The company’s first desktop multi-material system was the MMU1 in 2016, while the Prusa XL went a different route and swapped whole toolheads. INDX lands between those two ideas, but closer to the practical end of the spectrum. Prusa says the Prusa Edition INDX kits start shipping in June 2026, after Bondtech’s first 1,000-unit Founders Edition run was lined up for Q1 2026. If the real-world performance matches the pitch, this is the closest desktop multimaterial printing has come to feeling like a normal production feature rather than an expensive experiment.