Prusa refreshed its entire current printer range on August 13. The XL becomes the XL+, the CORE One+ becomes the CORE One+ (Gen 2), and the CORE One L becomes the CORE One L+. New hardware in all three, and no price increase on any of them.
The naming is a mess, and Prusa’s own comment section noticed within hours. Bolting “Gen 2” onto a printer whose name already ended in a plus sign was never going to come out clean. One commenter suggested it should have been called G1.5 to match the new belts, which is funnier and clearer than what we got.
What matters more than the badges: this is a parts refresh with upgrade kits promised for machines already sitting on desks, not a new generation you are expected to rebuy. Here is what each printer actually gained.
What all three machines get
Two changes are shared across the whole refresh.
The first is a nozzle wiper, which Prusa says was one of the most frequent requests it got from users. It went with a standard, widely available wiper instead of a proprietary one, on the reasoning that a wiper is a consumable and you should be able to replace it from Prusa, a local 3D printing shop, or wherever is easiest. It cleans the nozzle before the print starts, so a blob of oozed filament does not get dragged across your first layer.
The second is GT1.5 belts. Prusa describes their effect as making “unwanted fine repeating patterns” less noticeable, which is a polite way of saying vertical fine artifacts, the faint striping that shows up as a reflection on smooth walls and is invisible from any other angle. Prusa illustrated that section of the announcement with an image file named vfa2, so there is no ambiguity about what the belts are aimed at. If you print large flat surfaces in a glossy filament, you will see the difference. If you have never noticed VFA on your prints, you will not.
The XL+ gets the biggest change
The XL was the oldest design in the lineup and it shows in what Prusa did to it.
The headline item is a new 360 degree part cooling system, bringing the XL in line with the MK4S and the CORE One series. More total airflow, distributed more evenly around the nozzle, which is the sort of change that pays off on overhangs, bridges, and small features rather than on print speed.
The more interesting one comes straight off the INDX toolchanger: a tool offset sensor that checks and aligns every toolhead during setup. The old method used a removable pin and took long minutes. The replacement is a permanently mounted eddy current sensor that Prusa says is roughly 20 times faster. On a five toolhead machine where every head has to agree on exactly where its nozzle tip sits, that is not a small quality of life note. It also works with the silicone toolhead currently scheduled for this fall.
High flow nozzles are now standard on the XL+, and the printer is rated for chamber temperatures up to 60 degrees Celsius. The redesigned enclosure is better sealed and reaches around 50 C on the printer’s own waste heat alone. A chamber heater to close the last 10 C is coming, but Prusa has no shipping date for it and said so plainly, which is more than most companies manage when teasing hardware. Anyone printing large PC Blend or PCCF parts, or big boxy PETG that likes to pull its corners in, is the intended audience.
Build volume is unchanged at 360 by 360 by 360 mm, still three times the CORE One+ and one and a half times the CORE One L+.
CORE One+ (Gen 2): the waiting is what got fixed
Beyond the shared belts and wiper, the CORE One+ got a redesigned heatbed mounting, and the practical result is the best change in this entire refresh for everyday printing.
The heatbed can now come up to temperature and stay flat without the extra soak, so for any material printed at a bed temperature of 85 C or lower, which covers PLA and PETG, the “Absorbing heat” step is simply gone. Higher temperature materials still soak, but start sooner than before. If you are the kind of person who wants to watch the first layer go down before leaving the house, you now spend noticeably less time standing next to the printer to do it.
The Gen 2 also inherits the snap-on top panel from the CORE One L. It comes off in seconds with no tools, and the automatic top vent mechanism underneath was made more robust at the same time.
CORE One L+ gets the least, for a good reason
The CORE One L+ picks up the GT1.5 belts and the nozzle wiper, and that is the whole list.
That is not neglect. The CORE One L is the newest design of the three, and several of the improvements arriving on the CORE One+ this month were borrowed from it in the first place. Its 300 by 300 by 330 mm build volume, actively controlled chamber, and all aluminium AC heatbed carry over untouched.
What this means if you already own one
If you have an open order that has not shipped yet, Prusa will upgrade it to the new version automatically, regardless of when you placed it. There is nothing to claim and nothing to pay.
If your printer is already on your desk, upgrade kits are coming, along with the individual components sold separately. Prusa is starting with assembled machines and CORE One+ upgrades, then rolling out CORE One L+ and XL+ upgrades around the end of August and the beginning of September, as it finishes the upgrade manuals.
Existing XL, CORE One and CORE One L machines keep receiving firmware updates, PrusaSlicer improvements, print profiles, spare parts, and support. Worth saying out loud, because a lineup refresh is exactly the moment owners start wondering whether their machine just quietly became last year’s model.
On availability: assembled CORE One+ (Gen 2) and CORE One L+ printers started shipping immediately, with assembled XL+ units following later in August. Kits and parts trail behind over the following weeks.
The things Prusa buried at the bottom
The announcement ends with a run of things that are arguably bigger news than the belts.
Automatic pressure advance calibration before every print is the one I would watch. Prusa is replacing the single fixed pressure advance value with a model that accounts for filament behaving differently at different flow rates, and the load cell will measure the loaded filament and calibrate that model before each job. It is also adding extrusion aware acceleration limits so the printer never asks the extruder for a flow change it physically cannot deliver. This is still in internal testing with no release date, and Prusa says it wants it working reliably across every filament it can get hold of first.
INDX for the CORE One+ is nearly out, with first units shipping very soon and full compatibility with Gen 2 machines. Prusa also confirmed it is running INDX tests on the CORE One L.
PrusaSlicer 3.0 gets its first alpha within weeks, and since PrusaSlicer is shared across the whole range, older machines benefit from that one too. The HT hotend for high temperature engineering materials arrives in September for the CORE One and CORE One L families, delayed because Prusa wanted it to survive brittle third party filaments rather than only the handful it tested in house.
Last, PrusaLink is being retired in favour of Prusa Connect Local, a from scratch rebuild that puts the Connect interface on your local network with no cloud connection required, built as an open multi protocol system. Early access is open, aimed for now at people comfortable compiling software themselves.
Worth upgrading?
Depends entirely on which machine you own and what annoys you about it.
CORE One+ owners printing mostly PLA and PETG get the heatbed change, and that one shortens every single print you start. XL owners get a calibration routine that stops eating minutes, which adds up fast if you swap toolheads often. CORE One L owners get belts and a wiper, which is a nice afternoon but not urgent. And if you were about to order any of the three, the decision has been made for you already.
Sources
- Prusa Research, Better Prints, Easier Use: Prusa XL+, CORE One L+ and CORE One+ (Gen 2), Our Big Product Upgrade, official announcement published 13 August 2026, last modified 15 August 2026.
- Tom’s Hardware, Prusa Research XL, Core One, and Core One L all to receive second-generation upgrades.
All specifications and dates above come from Prusa’s own announcement and were verified on 18 August 2026.