What is it?

Faith No More - Epic (because GenX)

Ok, maybe that’s not the right question. I know what it is… this is the result of me retracting the previous filament, but not extruding the filament that I fed into the machine.

yes, I forgot to extrude the filament I loaded in…

Yes, it’s self-inflicted.

I’m even kind of impressed that the machine printed as well as it did, considering the mismatch of materials (PETG remnants, and a roll of PLA loaded), and insufficient bed temperature for the PETG.

Perhaps what I’m really asking is this:

Given that there are functions to retract and extrude filament, shouldn’t the machine maintain an overridable filament state variable?

In general, it would keep track of the loaded/unloaded state of the filament, and interlock the starting of a print based on the value. You should be able to override in Creality Print, or on the machine, if the state is not accurate (maybe due to manually removing filament from the extruder).

Clearly, this isn’t necessary, but stuff like this may make the difference with people new to FDM printing… or with the ones that aren’t new, but are occasionally absent-minded…