Hi Joe,
Engraving
Cricut sells an engraving tool for the maker. It’s basically a hardened point that scrapes a shallow line. There is also a de-boss tool that has more of a round tip point (like a ball point pen) it impress your pattern into the material.
The engraving tool is pretty nifty, but the complexity of something like a brick pattern can easily overwhelm the Cricut Design Space software, it trips up on too many open lines. I had to design my bricks in Adobe illustrator and connect them so they were closed shapes (basically I connected all the horizontals alternately at each end and ran a dummy line back to the start to start to flow them into a continuous shape).
Also, you can’t do a project that uses both the engraving tool and the knife blade.
You can use the de-boss tool with the knife blade. I didn’t really have much luck etching brick patterns, but I think it could be useful for something like impressing a year on a tunnel portal or adding corrugated relief to a wall.
As for settings you can indicate what to do with every shape in Design Space (Cut, Score, Engrave,De-Boss). The option is in a drop down box on the tool bar. As far as I know you can only control cut settings. In my observance everything that is not a cut only runs one pass at a default pressure. So if you engrave and cut something, it will run one pass for the engrave and the up to 24 for the cut. So if you want to increase the relief with another tool you have to layer multiple copies of those shapes on top of each other.
For styrene I made my own cut setting that uses the fine point blade at max pressure.
