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Is there any way to dictate a strategy in Slic3r? I was trying to print a single wall, hexagonal shape and instead of just following the outline of the part, it is trying to jump all over doing one short section at a time in seemingly random order. The result is a bird's next of plastic filament. I'd like to dictate that it follow a continuous path or something to that effect to defeat the hopping around. Is this possible?

Do you have randomize start points activated? This will make each new layer start in a different place on each layer.

I will say, Slic3r makes some of the most off the wall moves at random pointless times.

Try KisSlicer. It makes more predictable moves, but still doesn't always move as you would generally expect.

I haven't tried Cura, I did dabble in Skeinforge about a year ago but it is very hard to get set up a running quickly. They both have a feature called Joris (something similar) that will produce a continuous single wall perimeter all the way up. Think vase, cup.

As a machinist watching Slic3r produce a layer drives me crazy. You could almost cut the print time by a third if it didn't do all it's unneeded moves. KISS is much better but still not perfect, something that takes about 4.5 hrs with Slic3r usually takes KISS about 3:45 to 4 hrs. Slic3r does have it's uses and more options than KISS, but I use it maybe 10% of the time.

I guess I'm going to have to try KISSlicer because I think a lot of the problems I am having have to be due to the way it generates the code. You're right, Slic3r does some bizzare stuff.

The new version of slic3r that just came out earlier this week eliminates a lot of these problems and has some other nice features.

Okay, I'm going to download it then. I didn't even realize there was a new version out. I feel very comfortable with it already. I'm very strongly feeling that Slic3r is doing weird stuff that is causing a majority of my problems and probably masking the actual problems with the machine setup.