Every printing community's first commandment: the print is won at the bed.
Ask a print to fail politely and it fails at the start: corners lifting, lines not sticking, a skirt that won't stay put. The printing communities carry one shared commandment about it, and this site's filament tools exist in the same spirit — the first layer decides the print. The habits that make it decide well, in order of use:
The commonest first-layer failure needs no settings at all: fingerprint oils on the build surface. Wash the plate with dish soap and warm water, dry it with a clean towel, and handle it by the edges afterward. Grease is invisible and it is enough.
Leveling is the printer learning where the bed actually is; the first layer's squish is the result you're aiming for — the first pass of filament pressed flat into the plate, lines kissing their neighbors with a hair of daylight between them. Too far away and the lines sit like rope; too close and the nozzle drags plastic across the surface. The leveling dance varies by printer; the squish is the constant.
First layers run slower than the rest of the print, on purpose: adhesion is a physics problem that likes time. Most slicers carry a first-layer speed control — use it, and let the print speed up only when the corners have earned it.
And the failure this bench keeps coming back to: wet filament shows up in the first layer before anywhere else — bubbles, hissing, an extrusion line that starts strong and turns stringy halfway across the plate. The drying table in the drying guide carries the cure (PLA at 50 °C for eight hours, PETG at 65, and on), and the spool weigh-in tells you whether enough filament exists for the whole job before the bed is committed. Both checks cost a minute; both prevent the midnight restart.
Brims and skirts have their places too — a brim holds corners down on difficult plates, a skirt prints a practice line to watch — but they are accessories to the same commandment. Clean, level, squished, slow, dry: five words and the print starts telling the truth.
Weigh it, dry it, print it through. — the bench crew
