Prusa started shipping the HT Hotend Upgrade for the Core One line the week of September 30, roughly ten months after it first showed the part at Formnext 2025. The kit swaps the printer’s stock hotend for one that tops out at 400°C, a jump of 110°C over the standard 290°C ceiling, and it’s the first official way to push PPS, PEKK-CF and PC blends through a Core One without buying a different printer.
What’s actually in the box
The core of the upgrade is an E3D-made ObXidian 500 nozzle, a hardened-steel 0.4mm nozzle built for the abrasive filaments that eat through brass in a few hundred grams. Prusa’s product page lists the full set of newly supported materials as ASA, PC Blend, PC Blend Carbon Fiber, PA11 Carbon Fiber, PPS-CF, PPS-GF and PPA-CF. The kit also includes two separate idlers, one for standard filament and one for the high-temp materials, plus a new main plate and a pair of protective gloves for handling a hotend that runs noticeably hotter than most desktop printers ever get.
Price and availability
Prusa sells the kit on its own store for $184.26, with an estimated three-week lead time at launch. Buy a Core One L+ new instead, and the HT hotend comes preinstalled for $2,169, about $30 less than ordering the printer and the upgrade separately, according to All3DP.
Who it fits, and who it doesn’t
The upgrade bolts onto Core One, Core One+, Core One+ (Gen 2), Core One L and Core One L+, which covers every Core One variant Prusa currently sells, including the refreshed Core One+ Gen 2 we covered back in August. It does not fit machines running Prusa’s INDX toolchanger: those use a different hotend architecture built around swappable tool heads, the same one E3D is already reinforcing after its stock nozzles turned out softer than advertised.
Why it took so long
Prusa first teased an HT hotend at Formnext 2025 alongside the INDX toolchanger and its silicone drybox line. Forum posts from early this year show the company told customers in writing that it would ship in February, then slipped to June, then kept slipping. By mid-April, Prusa’s own support forum had threads of owners asking what happened to a part the company had already priced and photographed months earlier. Firmware support turned out to be the holdup: the hotend needed new temperature-control code before Prusa would sell it, not just a new heater block bolted onto an old board.
That kind of delay is normal for Prusa lately. The INDX toolchanger and the factory-assembled Core One L+ bundle both shipped later, and with more changes, than their original announcements suggested. The pattern is consistent enough that owners watching for a specific Prusa accessory should probably expect the ship date to move at least once.
Does 400°C actually matter on a Core One
For most people printing PLA, PETG or even standard PC, no. The stock hotend already handles those. The upgrade earns its price for a narrower group: anyone printing PPS, PEKK-CF or PA11-CF parts that need to survive sustained heat or chemical exposure, categories that used to mean stepping up to an industrial machine. Prusa also claims a smaller but more broadly useful gain: a 7% improvement in interlayer adhesion on Prusament PC Blend Carbon Fiber when printed at 350°C instead of the old ceiling, which matters for anyone already printing carbon-fiber PC parts and fighting delamination under load.
If your print queue is PLA and PETG, this upgrade is $184 you don’t need to spend. If you’ve been eyeing engineering filaments the Core One couldn’t touch, it’s the first time Prusa has sold an official path to them without moving up to the XL or a different platform entirely.