In Bambu Studio or Orca Slicer you switch to the Preview tab and right-click the + button beside the layer slider on the right; the menu opens, but the Add Pause line is greyed out and cannot be clicked. The forum user who opened this thread first marked a different fix, but the thread later reached the real cause: with Print sequence set to By object in the process settings, every add command in the slider menu is disabled. Set it to By layer, re-slice, and Add Pause becomes available. Below is that cause first, then the places to check in order if the option is still greyed out.
How a pause is added, which layer it stops at, and how it differs from a filament change are covered in the pause-at-layer article; I am not repeating the steps here. This article has one subject: the option is in the menu but cannot be clicked.
The symptom
The forum user was on Orca Slicer; the goal is a classic one: give the raised lettering on top of the part a different color by stopping the print at that layer and swapping filament by hand.
That detail matters. If the menu opens, the interface is working; the problem is not a missing button but the slicer refusing, at that moment, to add a command to that layer. Later in the thread the same user wrote that in a fresh project all four menu lines became available; so it is not only Add Pause that is greyed out, but every add command in that menu. The question to ask is not "where is the menu" but "why is the slicer not accepting these commands right now".
The forum user was on Orca; Bambu Studio has the same menu, the same slider and the same Print sequence setting, because Orca is forked from Bambu Studio. The checklist below applies to both. The setting is in the process settings, not in the printer profile; the make of your printer does not change where to look.
The cause the forum reached: Print sequence set to By object
When the original poster came back months later, they first wrote that switching the left panel from the Global tab to the Objects tab made the option available, and marked that as the solution. When another user wrote that the real cause was the print sequence, the poster confirmed it in a single line, but the marked solution stayed on the old reply; if you go to the thread, read the later posts rather than the marked answer. More than a year later the same person answered someone who wrote that the problem was still unresolved:
Change to Print by Layer, it won't work with Objects because it can't tell which object it needs to pause on.
The factual part is not in dispute: in By object printing the printer finishes the parts on the plate one at a time, and does not move to the next until one is complete; while this mode is selected, the add commands in the slider menu are disabled. The reasoning part is the original poster's interpretation: the slicer does not accept the command because it cannot tell which object the pause belongs to. Someone on the forum disputes that: in By object the slider counts layers cumulatively from object to object, so the selected layer does correspond to a single point. The example that user gave: a 10-layer model plus a copy gives 20 layers on the slider, and layer 15 is the middle of the second object; the preview can draw that point and even shows its G-code, yet the pause cannot be written there. Several users see this as a limitation of the slicer, even a bug, and want the pause to work in By object as well. In By layer printing all parts rise together layer by layer and the pause can be written at that layer; for now that is the route that works.
The route described on the forum is the Special mode heading on the Global tab; in Bambu Studio and Orca that heading sits under the Others section of the process settings panel on the Prepare tab, and the field is Print sequence. Set it to By layer, re-slice the model, switch to Preview and right-click the + button.
There is also a plate level. Each plate's own settings open from the gear icon in the plate's corner, and there is a Print sequence field there too; one user on the forum found the fix that way. If the plate's own setting has not been left at default, it takes precedence over the global one. If the option is still greyed out after setting the global value to By layer, check the gear of the plate you want the pause on.
Still greyed out: check in order
Each takes a glance to check; go through them in order.
| Check | Why you are looking |
|---|---|
| Did you right-click the + button | According to the first reply the options are only enabled while the mouse is over the plus-marked dot on the slider; it was not the original poster's problem, but it is the first thing to check |
| The plate's own Print sequence setting | The gear setting above; in a multi-plate project select the plate you want the pause on and check it |
| Has the model been re-sliced | Not from the forum, a precondition of changing the setting: if Preview shows an old slice, the slider works on that slice; after changing Print sequence, hit Slice again |
The slider position is not on this list: on the very first day the original poster had already picked a layer with Jump to layer and tried again, and the option stayed greyed out; the later suggestion to drag the slider down from the top is left out for that reason.
If you must print by object
In By object printing every add command in the slider menu is greyed out together. Add Custom G-code, used for custom G-code at a layer, and the filament change entry (Change Filament in the menu, called Add filament change in the earlier articles), used for color changes without an AMS, are added from the same menu, so both are blocked by the same setting; trying them as alternatives is wasted time. That leaves two routes.
Change the setting and re-slice. This is the real fix. If you genuinely want the parts printed one at a time there is one more route: put each object on its own plate, leave the plates' Print sequence on By layer, and add the pause to the plate concerned. The price is that the plates print one after another as separate jobs; what By object does within a single job, this route does not.
Pause from the printer's screen. The printer's own Pause button exists too, but it stops the head wherever it happens to be; it does not land on a layer boundary, and the color line can fall mid-layer. Nobody on the forum tried this route.
The second one does not remove the reason the option is greyed out. So look at Print sequence first, then walk through the table; think of the on-printer pause only for jobs where you are standing at the printer anyway.
