I went into this thinking I had the perfect plan: print over a grand’s worth of nearly-extinct Oldhammer bits on ELEGOO’s Mars 5 Ultra, smile smugly, and ride off into the sunset with infinite retro sprues. Instead, within three hours I’d snapped the test rook in half, cured half a tub of resin into the world’s most expensive pickle jar, and managed to print the ELEGOO logo directly into the bottom of my vat by pressing the wrong button. For a machine marketed at beginners, it gave me the full Dark Souls onboarding experience—menus that don’t explain themselves, files on the USB you can’t just print, and a learning curve that happily tries to kill your enthusiasm (and possibly your lungs). Once I cheated and called in Archie's Forge—an actual adult who knows what a tank clean is and how to break the vacuum seal off the build plate—everything changed. With a sensible profile, anti-aliasing, and the right technique, I went from panic to “printing money”: full plates of out-of-production Chaos Dwarfs, shields, bolt throwers, and characters that would be hundreds of pounds on the secondary market. Then I bring it back to reality: legality (you can’t sell or give away scans of GW parts), the true all-in cost (PPE, ventilation, wash/cure, consumables, slicer subscriptions), and the unglamorous toxic-waste admin that comes with resin printing. The Mars 5 Ultra can absolutely produce gorgeous infantry-scale prints—if you’ve got the space, the kit, and the patience to stop it turning your hobby room into a chemical shed.