Playing a bunch of #shapez while sick at home, and just unlocked the quad printer. It's the first programmable element; it can apply color separately to each quadrant of the output, controlled by a set of four wires.
However, I think its efficiency is pretty poor, as it consumes 4x paint for each shape. A previous unlock uses only 0.5x paint per shape (as long as you give it two inputs at a time, which is trivial.) White paint has to be assembled from red+green+blue which consumes a bunch of space, so it seems better to avoid using this unlock, and instead paint each piece separately, then cut and assemble. (But assembly tends to be slow... so I guess it might be a reasonable trade-off.)
Because the unit is programmable it might be feasible to paint the shape white first, then "mask" it and paint the red parts. Then it would only be inefficient in the relatively-cheap red paint, not the expensive white paint.
#FactoryGames