Product Updates September 2026, part 1 of 2

What shipped in September 2026, part 1 of 2

• 21 releases published between 2026-09-13 and 2026-09-21. This is an archive page — the current release notes live on the main product updates page.
• 2026-09-21 — Style DNA: Fine Frag: A new Military & Tactical Style DNA, Fine Frag — the tight machined frag inlay you see on titanium knife scales: many small raised squares in level rows with narrow grooves, the knife-scale cousin of Frag Grenade. Live in the Fabricator picker now; a member request.
• 2026-09-21 — Vector Stacker: One Rail for Guided and Pro: Pro is now Guided plus drawers: the same four steps and the same words, with the Pro tools — source and paint tools, colour separation, cut settings, kerf, bridges, cut vs engrave, bed check — folded under Style and Export instead of a second sidebar with its own vocabulary. Switching between Guided and Pro mid-project no longer changes what the page looks like.
• 2026-09-21 — Vector Stacker: Land on the Painted Stack: After any separation the Vector Stacker now opens on the painted 3D stack — matte paint under gallery light, the sheet stock named, the numbers folded underneath — with Flat and Exploded one tap away. Paint schemes never recolour the black ink sheet, and Save these paints keeps the scheme you mixed in your browser for next time. Examples now show the fox sample and its rendered stack.
• 2026-09-21 — Vector Stacker: Samples That Pass, Describe Rebuilt: Try a sample now loads a piece drawn for the recipe you are on — a fox for Painted Wall Art, a moonlit lake for Stepped Sign, a depth map for Shadow Box, a portrait for Photo Bands — and each one passes the check at the defaults, so you see a READY TO CUT before you cut anything of your own; switch recipes and the sample switches with you. Describe it is rebuilt around the same words as the page: pick the recipe first, describe what is in the picture (no lettering — it shreds), tap a style, choose your paints, and the price sits on the button. How it works is four cards that match the four steps, offered once on your first visit. Sheet stock now defaults to 3 mm birch.
• 2026-09-21 — The Check Now Fixes Itself: The Vector Stacker’s check used to list every warning with a number a maker cannot act on; it now folds them into one card per cause with the fix computed for you — make it this wide, use this material, one colour fewer, more underlap, clean up with AI, or redraw with thicker lines — each a single tap. The verdict (READY TO CUT, things to fix, BLOCKED) sits above the canvas; the full numbers fold underneath. Sheet rows and paint schemes now speak plain English.
• 2026-09-21 — Describe It: Your Paints, Thicker Ink: Describe it now asks for the paints you name: pick up to six colours (or a preset) and MASTER 2.0 draws with exactly those, the drawing is snapped to them, and the sheets you cut are the paints you buy. The prompt itself was rebuilt from measured results — a colouring-book brief with connected lines, no white sky, no text — so the ink comes back as one piece. Black lines too thin for your material are thickened automatically before the check, and a Stepped Sign no longer stalls on a few stray dark pixels.
• 2026-09-21 — Vector Stacker: Artwork First: The Vector Stacker now keeps your artwork in view on every step and every screen: the check sits under the canvas (folded to its verdict on a phone) instead of beside it, the controls follow the preview with the step’s button always within reach, and one view switcher — Stack, Flat, Exploded — replaces the two that used different words. Finished size shows in your unit everywhere and starts at 300 mm / 12 in; the header is one line lighter.
• 2026-09-21 — Describe It Draws with MASTER 2.0: The Vector Stacker’s Describe it now draws with MASTER 2.0 by default (ULTRA CORE stays one tap away): whole scenes with uniform connected linework and flat fills, no rendered shadows or perspective, and every prompt builds Layer Art — never a depth-map stack — whatever mode you were last in.
• 2026-09-21 — Vector Stacker: Guided Mode: The Vector Stacker now opens in Guided mode: four steps, one decision each. Start with a description, a picture or a depth map; pick one of four recipes — Painted Wall Art, Stepped Sign, Shadow Box, Photo Bands — and see only the dials that matter for it; read the check with plain-language fixes that name the dial to turn; export with one button. Everything else waits under More options, and Pro keeps every control exactly where it was.
• 2026-09-21 — Layer Art: Prompt or Picture to Painted, Glued Sheets: The Vector Stacker opens on Layer Art: describe a piece or upload a reference picture, choose 2–6 paint colours, and get one cut file per sheet to paint and glue. Two doctrines, both offered. Ink Window puts every black line on one connected top sheet with windows, and each colour on its own painted sheet that runs under the lines by an underlap you set, on a solid painted backer — the look of layered wall art. Nested makes terrace boards, each colour plus everything in front of it, in an order you can change. THE CHECK reads every Layer Art sheet before export: loose ink bridged back to the outline, pieces too small to glue counted and dropped, lines and windows narrower than the material can hold, and how many pieces each colour needs. The 3D preview stacks the painted sheets at their real levels, and the ZIP carries layer-art.json, validation.json and a paint-and-glue assembly guide.
• 2026-09-20 — Punch Through on Every Fabricator Engine: The hole treatment choice now appears on every engine, not only MASTER. FRAMED keeps your exact holes in front of the AI so the art composes around them; PUNCH THROUGH lets it compose across solid material and the exact holes are cut through the finished art afterwards — no standoff band around thin material, which is what a comb, a grille or a fine-toothed part needs. Your painted holes are always cut exactly either way.
• 2026-09-20 — Settings Tables, Guide Bylines, and a Straight Answer on Fit: Every bundled and operator-verified laser recipe is now a readable table on one page — material, source, machine, power, speed, frequency, hatch, passes and pulse width, 77 records across wood, metal, acrylic, leather, glass and coated stock. Above them is the method: where the numbers come from, what VERIFIED actually means (three independent operator vouches, the submitter's own never counts), and why none of it is a preset. Each row still links to its full record. A page that says plainly who Reticle Red is not for. Six cases where another tool is the better answer — machine control, offline work, CAD/CAM, a stock design library, guaranteed settings, general photo editing — each naming what to use instead, alongside what you need before it is useful, which machines and formats it covers, and what it costs. Every guide, tutorial and manual section now shows who wrote it, when it was published and last updated, and how it arrived at what it publishes — numbers from production runs on real CO2, diode and MOPA machines, and a plain statement that they are starting points for a test grid rather than verified settings for your laser. Product Updates was one 17,000-word page. It now opens on the current month, with the full history kept in dated archives one click away, so finding a release you half-remember no longer means scrolling past every release since April. Pages load lighter. The ad script no longer competes with the page during the first paint, and the shared translation bundle every page downloads before anything renders dropped by about 40 KB in English and 65 KB in Spanish. About now publishes the facts behind the site: who builds it, where, since when, how it is structured, and an explicit note that Reticle Red is laser design software and not a firearms optic — the confusion the name invites in every search.
• 2026-09-19 — Free Credits Now Fire SPARK: Your 12 welcome credits now fire SPARK CORE in the Fabricator and SPARK in the Coin Designer — the tiers they stretch furthest across, six starter designs instead of two. FORGE, ULTRA, MASTER, FORGE COLOR and 3D RELIEF unlock the moment you buy any credit pack, starting at $1.99, or start Operator Command. Your balance and saved work carry over, and nothing you have already made changes. Locked engines stay visible in every picker with a padlock, the price they would cost and what they are good at, so you can see the whole ladder before you spend. Tapping one opens the credit packs instead of failing after you fire.
• 2026-09-18 — Scene Stacker: Depth Maps Become Shadow-Box Sheets: Vector Stacker gains a Scene mode: hand it a depth map — from Depth Studio, a 3D RELIEF fire, the Coin Designer, or an upload — and it builds 3 to 8 nested cut sheets where every sheet rests on the one behind it, with a frame on every sheet, registration, an air gap for the 3D preview, and named files (01 foreground … 05 distant background). Stacking a map is free. THE CHECK runs before you export a scene: per-sheet material %, floating pieces before and after auto-bridging, narrowest feature against your material's minimum, sheet uniqueness, and plain-language warnings. A stack that cannot cut is blocked, and scene.json + validation.json travel in the ZIP so a scene can be reopened exactly. Depth Studio and the Fabricator's Export ribbon now offer Stack this map / Stack Scene, so a depth map goes straight into the sheet builder instead of the colour tracer.
• 2026-09-17 — 3D Relief in the Fabricator, and a Price Ladder That Follows Cost: 3D RELIEF is a new Fabricator engine choice: your Style DNA is sculpted as a struck-metal bas-relief inside your exact art zone by MASTER, then converted into a 16-bit depth map in the same fire, ready for LightBurn 3D or CNC relief. Two or more panels pack through PANEL MASTER automatically. 12 CR (Operators 10). Fabricator prices now follow what each engine actually costs to run. MASTER 2.0 drops from 10 to 8 CR (Operators 7) and becomes the premium default; ULTRA CORE moves to 10 CR (Operators 8); FORGE CORE and FORGE Multi-Panel move to 5 CR. SPARK stays at 2. Packed multi-panel sheets always bill the same as the engine that draws them. Coin Designer 3D Depth on SPARK is now 5 CR and Material Preview is 2 CR; every other coin tier and utility is unchanged.
• 2026-09-16 — Master Multi-Panel and an Honest Dense-Sheet Choice: MASTER 2.0 now handles multi-panel sheets. When MASTER detects 2-24 art zones it packs them into one coordinated MASTER pass, stages your selected hero panel in protected candidate cells, and restores every exact silhouette — at the normal MASTER price. Dense hero sheets (9 or more panels with a hero subject and a selected hero panel) now show a clear choice before FIRE: MASTER Multi-Panel is recommended, or keep FORGE or ULTRA at their own price as a charged one-attempt best effort with the quality audit advisory only and no quality refund. Provider and site failures still refund. Previously these sheets were quietly composed on MASTER at the FORGE or ULTRA price.
• 2026-09-16 — Multi-Panel Sheets Keep Their Finished Panels: A multi-panel sheet where a few small panels came back empty is now delivered with an inspection note naming how much of the sheet is bare, instead of being discarded and refunded. Inspect those panels and add ornament by hand, or re-fire with them enlarged. A sheet with a large empty panel still refunds automatically.
• 2026-09-16 — Keep Your Place from First Idea to Finished File: Tool search recognizes more task keywords. Homepage demos stay paused until you resume, and pricing keeps your selected plan and project context when you return from checkout. Image Lab and Puzzle recipes restore their saved settings. Compare Fabricator versions with linked zoom and pan, and review Coin export pixels and resampling before download. Creators can choose to share a style and material starting point without sharing private artwork or prompts. Machine comparisons now have shareable selections and installation considerations. Account exports show progress and can be canceled. Shop summaries load on demand, quote responses can be checked after connection problems, and optional email categories give you more control. Production handoffs keep physical-test notes tied to the source and settings. Photo Prep shows the starter LightBurn power and speed for review, and app installation opens when you ask for it.
• 2026-09-14 — Clearer Pages for Search Engines and Readers: Tool and hub pages now keep their full descriptive heading and their capabilities, questions and related guides after loading, in a collapsed "About this tool" panel under the workspace. Video, Style DNA and article pages show their pictures and tables in the crawlable page too. Shared links stay clean: English pages no longer append ?lang=en, Spanish landing pages link straight to the tools, and a capitalised or trailing-slash address for guides, comparisons and Style DNA families now lands on the right page. Social previews render on every network: each page has its own preview card in both WebP and JPEG, and the Style DNA, comparison, free-tool and policy pages no longer share one generic card.
• 2026-09-13 — Kitchen & Bar Style DNA: Explore Butcher Cut Chart, Coffee Branch & Bean and Hop Bine & Cone in the new Kitchen & Bar Style DNA family, alongside Culinary Herb & Wheat, Vine & Grape and Vintage Whiskey Label. Fabricator now keeps lettering that appears on an uploaded logo or emblem instead of forbidding it in the same prompt, and no longer adds ornament around a hero when you chose no Style DNA. Pattern Size now applies to styled fires with a subject, reference, border or palette, not only pure ornament fills. Seven Fine Engraving and Wildlife references were regenerated to match their current prompts.
• 2026-09-13 — Neural Relief Is Now Depth Studio: Neural Relief has been renamed Depth Studio across navigation, guides, pricing, search metadata and saved-work handoffs. Existing Neural Relief links continue to open the same tool and saved drafts remain compatible.

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