I have an Ender 3 S1 that I use every couple of months at this point because it’s just such a pain to use. I have to adjust the bed tramming and z offset and run auto bed leveling for every single print and often times that’s still not good enough.
It will often take 30+ minutes just to get the first layer going down successfully.
Is this a me problem or did I lose the creality lottery?
I started with a cr10s that I actually got for free. The first print was amazing, then every following attempt just shit it’s pants. I spent about 20 or 30 hours trying to look up what the fuck im doing wrong. Tried reprinting again and again and again tweaking settings only to fail and it was extremely infuriating. I then started disassembling and reassembling and found that my problem was a broken cable.
Point of the story is I learned so much about 3D printing trying to figure out why the prints are not working. Now I got 2 more printers and if something goes wrong I can easily identify what’s wrong.
Don’t give up hope. It could be that you have a broken machine, but it’s more likely that your settings are just wrong.