Hey all — owner of two Creality Hi printers here. Like a lot of you, I got tired of watching the printer home Z twice, take forever to clean the nozzle, and sit there waiting on temperatures it doesn’t even need yet before it starts moving.
Spent some time reverse-engineering the stock Klipper config/macros on this printer and found the actual root causes (not just symptoms) for each one. Fixed them with small, surgical config changes — no loss of bed leveling accuracy or print quality across multiple test prints on two units.
Measured results (cold start, same file, before/after):
| Stage | Stock | Tweaked |
|---|---|---|
| Wait for nozzle temp before first homing | ~35s (blocking) | ~0s (heats in background) |
| Second Z-homing (before bed mesh) | ~57-61s (full re-sync) | ~17-23s (skipped, already synced) |
| Nozzle cleaning | ~168s | ~102s |
| Total time to first layer | ~7-8 min | ~5-6 min |
What’s actually going on, briefly:
- The Z-align mechanical sync (ZDOWN) runs on every G28 Z, even when nothing could have desynced it since the last one seconds earlier — stock does it twice per print start for no reason.
- The nozzle-clean routine does more probe touches and waits to cool further than it needs to.
- The touchscreen issues a blocking wait for nozzle temp before homing even starts — even though homing doesn’t need any heat at all, so that wait is pure dead time that can just happen in the background instead.
I wrote it all up with the exact before/after config blocks, why each one is safe, and what I deliberately did not touch (and why) — including the bed/camera LED dimming issue some of you have probably run into, which I confirmed is a closed-firmware limitation with no config-level fix.
Repo (patches + install guide, works over SSH or the built-in web file manager, no need to expose anything to the internet): GitHub - nachorepara/creality-hi-klipper-tweaks: Klipper config tweaks to cut print-start wait time on the Creality Hi (F018) — faster homing, nozzle cleaning, and bed leveling. · GitHub
Standard disclaimer: this is unofficial, not supported by Creality, back up your config before touching anything, intermediate/advanced users only. Full details + install steps in the repo.
Tested on OTA firmware 1.1.0.74. If you’re on a different version and something doesn’t line up, open an issue on the repo — happy to help figure out what changed.