Prusa spent the better part of a year building toward this: a toolchanger for the CORE One and CORE One+ that swaps nozzles in about 12 seconds and wastes a fraction of the filament that most multi-material systems do. As of this month, it’s actually shipping in volume, not just to a small batch of early testers.
What’s shipping now
The Bondtech INDX Founders Edition, a limited first run built with Prusa’s manufacturing partner Bondtech, is essentially sold through, with only a handful of orders still outstanding. Prusa’s own "Prusa Edition" kits are the next phase: since the Founders Edition itself shipped later than planned, Prusa pushed this timeline back too. First units were scheduled to leave the factory by the end of July, and the company says it’s on track to ship the entire first batch by the end of August.
If you haven’t been following INDX, it’s an add-on toolchanger, not a new printer. It bolts onto an existing CORE One or CORE One+ (not the larger CORE One L, at least not yet) and replaces its single nozzle with up to eight independent toolheads. Each toolhead keeps its own nozzle, so switching materials mid-print doesn’t mean purging old filament out of a shared hotend the way single-nozzle AMS-style systems do. One shared "Smart Head" does the actual heating: an induction coil brings a nozzle up to temperature in seconds when it’s picked up, then lets it cool back down once it’s parked.
Two kits are available. A 4-tool kit leaves four dock positions open for adding more toolheads later, and an 8-tool kit ships with the full set from day one. The 4-tool kit is currently listed at $693.52 on Prusa’s store. Both use hardened, high-flow CHT nozzles, and you can load different nozzle sizes, from 0.25mm up to 1.0mm, across the toolheads at once, which comes in handy if you want a fine-detail nozzle and a fast 0.8mm nozzle ready in the same print.
Why the waste numbers matter
This is the part Prusa leans on hardest, and the numbers back it up. In an internal comparison across five different printers using the same multi-color model, the least efficient system tested wasted as much as 696 grams of filament, worth $10 to $21 depending on the spool. INDX finished the same print at 29 grams of waste. On a more complex model, a competing system burned through 842 grams, nearly a full spool, while Prusa says INDX used close to 30 times less. Each tool change on INDX purges only 13 to 15 milligrams to stabilize nozzle pressure, which is also why there’s no wipe tower: Prusa found that amount of material was too small to build a stable tower out of, so tool changes route through a small waste bin with a silicone nozzle wiper instead.
What’s changed since the original announcement
A few things have been added since INDX was first revealed. The most useful is automatic tool offset calibration: a small sensor board measures each toolhead’s position using an inductive scan on X and Y plus a loadcell reading on Z, and it now runs at the start of every print instead of requiring a manual calibration pin. Prusa says this precision is what makes ColorMix, a new halftone-based color-blending feature in PrusaSlicer and EasyPrint, actually work well, since it depends on tight alignment between nozzles. On the 8-tool kit, ColorMix can blend toward a CMYKW-plus-RGB style palette instead of printing flat, single-color layers, which is a step beyond what Prusa’s older multi-toolhead XL was doing.
Prusa also reworked the front docking panel to be less enclosed, so parked tools are actually visible, and released firmware 6.6.1 with more print profiles said to be coming soon.
What’s still missing
A CORE One L version of INDX is "actively being worked on," according to Prusa, but there’s no date attached to it yet. A version of the CORE One that ships with INDX pre-installed, rather than added afterward, is confirmed as a future plan too, also without a timeline.
Installing the kit yourself takes around 5 to 6 hours by Prusa’s own estimate, and it costs a little print volume: the usable build area drops to 248 by 205 by 270mm with INDX installed, a 2mm cut on the X axis and 15mm on Y. For anyone running a CORE One who’s been putting up with single-nozzle purge blocks to get multi-color prints, that’s a small tradeoff for what Prusa is describing as the most waste-efficient toolchanger it’s built.