Enthusiast 3D-printed Mantis Blades from Cyberpunk 2077, and they turned out to be a handy gadget

Cyberpunk has spent decades warning about a future where people stuff weapons under their skin and lose their minds to chrome overload.

Reality will probably be far more mundane. Give someone extendable combat limbs, and the first thing they will do is reach for a cup at the far end of the table.

That is exactly what a video making the rounds among Cyberpunk 2077 fans shows. In the clip, a maker demonstrates 3D-printed mantis blades, the forearm implant from the game.

Instead of blades, the tips hold grabbers, and the folding mechanism shoots forward with a flick of the wrist. At the end, the builder deftly picks up a sippy cup, and that moment won over viewers.

Based on the Portuguese comments and jokes about SENAI, a Brazilian network of technical schools, the invention comes from Brazil.

In the game itself, mantis blades are among the flashiest melee weapons in Night City. A ripperdoc installs them in the forearms, and in combat they spring out for slashing strikes and leaping attacks from a distance. Popularity of the implant only grew after the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners came out in 2022.

One commenter pointed out that the printed version is actually closer to the finisher animations than the usual cosplay "sickles." In those animations, the blades pierce the target like the limb of a predatory arthropod rather than chop.

Best of all, anyone with a printer can build one. The models are posted on MakerWorld, Bambu Lab platform. According to people who have already looked through the files, each arm takes around 50 hours of printing and roughly a kilogram of filament.

There is an engineering complaint too: the wrist has to bend too far for a full extension. Raising the gear ratio would cut the wrist movement needed, but precision would suffer during partial extensions.

Everyone thinks cyberware would cause cyberpsychosis, when in reality people would just be doing stuff like this.

Considering how many eddies it costs to install the implant, this version looks plausible.