In Germany there is a Lego subscription service.

Put sets on a wishlist, they send you one of them. You build it, unbuild it and send it back. One set a month.

Why do people put up flowers? No skill (I think...?) involved in getting a bouquet and putting it a vase on a table. Or buying (not creating) art. Some people just like the look and it;'s hard to argue about taste.

If people have a Lego set on display, that is surely a conversation starter for me. Especially if it's a ginormous Minas Tirith or Sagrada Familia set, or an old Technic set.

Not for everyone I suppose.

It's not about the result. Most people who build these sets get satisfaction from the build process itself. It's a form of therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

For me, when I was into legos, the answer would be: take it apart and add the pieces to my larger collection, from which I can build whatever I want.

Sometimes the build is the fun part. Haven't you ever put together a puzzle?

Enjoy its presence. If that doesn’t sound like something you’d enjoy, then it’s not the right set for you. Not something I’d ever buy, but I’m sure many will.

> Once built

If the LEGO are truly accurate to the real thing, that might take a while!

My wife took on building the plant inspired lego sets several months ago. They are OK in that they don't look that ugly scattered around the house. I like it because it is a hobby she enjoys a lot and it makes it easier for me to buy "the right" gifts haha.

I've never had the patience to build those. I think I have PTSD from my childhood, when my dat bought us a "cheap" brand of lego-like toys (called TENTE I think) for which the bottom pieces fell as you plugged the top pieces.

you don't build with legos expecting it to not fall apart. it's kind of the whole point, really...

why do Buddhists make intricate sand sculptures only to rake them over when they're done?

> Once built, what does one do with this?

Are you asking about the church or the lego set?

> Your kids can't actually play with it.

Good luck to anyone who builds a lego set and then tries to tell my kids we can't play with it or steal parts from it for another build.

LEGO has a wide audience. Some of these go to adults who build them and put them on display. Others will go to kids who build them and then take them apart to build the next thing.

I wouldn't buy this huge set for my kids because that price tag is crazy, but I like buying some of the mid-size sets for them because it's a nice injection of specialty pieces that they like to incorporate into other builds.

kragle!

Just put it up for display. Me and my wife built several sets just to have an activity to do together, and then the resulting displays are memories of those fun times.

People treat giant lego sets the same way they treat other complex model sets, it’s not really for disassembling as much as it is for the fun of building and then having / being proud of, I guess, mostly. I mean you can never really speak for everyone but generally speaking.

You must be fun at parties.

What's the point of a colouring book? Once you've coloured your drawing you can't do anything with it. You can display it but you're not showing any real skill.

^ bizarre thought process tbh. Both building it and displaying it is fun. That's all.

Ha! This set it designed to take 114 years to construct and for maximum verisimilitude, Lego will run over your foot with a Lego tram after only a few decades of trying to build it.

I'd love to see the back of that if you actually integrated the LEDs into the main engine (and I apologize if you did post other photos, I have X mostly blocked so I can only see the directly linked post.) I've been hacking at adding some lights to a few sets that I thought would look great with actual lighting on them, and my biggest challenge has been the routing of all the wires in a way where the lights actually look like they're integrated into the set and not just randomly sticking out of places.

That adds up. I have the Tower Bridge, Grand Piano, and Lighthouse that were similar. Tower Bridge was 4200 and 20 hours, Grand Piano, 3600 and 15, Lighthouse about 3000 and 12.

I pre-ordered this, though!

12000 pieces over 200 days, means about 60 pieces per day. I'd say that is a reasonable about actually.

Why would you scale by height and not volume?

Don't forget to include time to handle lawsuits and funding delays! Also, someone may break into your house and rip up the instruction book.

Well now I'm disappointed that it doesn't come with scaffolding.

I’m a little disappointed that someone beat me to this.

My kids have a ton of legos, it's their favorite thing. However, and this is the important part: you have to let go of the concept of a set.

Keep new assembled kits out, let them play with it as built from the instructions. But then as it falls apart with play, and the kids don't fix it the same way it was originally built, it eventually goes into a big box of former kits that are all jumbled together.

We did this, and without prompting to do so, the kids started building their own things out of the box, exactly as you did with your kits.

You just have to learn to let go of the set, and it becomes exactly what you want.

Edit: I'm not sure if a $800 set has that same property, but for the everyday $5-$40 sets, absolutely treat them as temporary collections, and life is great.

> When I was a kid I used to spend entire days building and creating new stuff once I built the designs from the booklets.

Kids still do this.

I don't know why this idea persists. There have always been sets with custom pieces. My kids go crazy over the custom pieces because it sparks new ideas for their other builds. My kids know every custom piece from every set they've ever built and will describe them in great detail so we can search through the bin until we find it.

> The Lego spirit of ever combining and creating with same pieces over and over again is gone

For you, maybe. The kids are still doing this and having a great time.

That seems to be somewhat of an exaggeration. These $800 models are obviously not for kids. The creativity is still alive in the price brackets that aren't targeting collectors. Custom builds that involve scavenging other kits for pieces still go viral pretty often.

I'm not very tapped into it, but last month I saw a DIY Lego Rocky from Project Hail Mary going viral. I think this week I saw a very detailed jellyfish model doing the rounds.

All new kits? Gone? I'm not so sure about that. I don't think the target audience of an $800 kit is a 10 year old, sure. There are still plenty of kits at the $100ish and below price range that are targeted for that sort of play.

There's a recurring theme on the Lego subreddit where people build the millennium falcon out of any arbitrary lego set, so the spirit is not COMPLETELY dead, fwiw

Weird perspective. When I was a kid (I'm 41) we were given sets - pirate ship, submarine, police sets. They were designed as a kit... and once we built the kid we'd pull it apart and use the parts for all sorts of things. Now my kids do they very same thing with modern kits. I'm not sure why you think today's lego is different?

These are toys for adults, to be put on the bookshelf once complete.

There was a period that was very true when Ninjago were a thing. But in the last decade while they sometimes still come out with new pieces there is still a tonne of reusability and creativity in Lego pieces.

You can still buy bulk Legos to mix and match from Lego. And similarly pricey and collector oriented Lego sets existed 20 and 30 years ago as well.

Legos releasing single build sets that are clearly targeted for adults (look at the 18+ age statement) does nothing to harm you - it's targeted a different consumer demographic.

It's like Taco Bells now serving alcohol or Costcos now selling Asian groceries. Companies will not stay stagnant and will look at additional opportunities to expand to new buyer demographics.

I mean yes, there are kits like this that are clearly meant for one kind of build, but nothing stops someone from just getting bulk kits or taking apart other sets? There's lots of other stuff on their catalogue which look just like the stuff I grew up with.

I swear every lego-related post you see people dooming about this when all they look at are the giant sets clearly targeted towards adults that _want_ this sort of thing and not the plethora of other stuff.

yes, this, thank you. just wrote a comment lamenting about this specifically.

you could not be more wrong

https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/

you just enter the number to find alternate builds, some sets can be built into dozens various creations

Have they completed the real thing ? I thought it was still being built…

One of the small Insta360 cameras would work well, but they only shoot ~180°. It would be a great excuse to use a probe lens!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFZ0MFYup-o

Yeah I agree. 12k pieces except you're building 100 pillars and 100 spires, all the same.

They're doing the best they can given the budget and size constraints. The set has to simultaneously be interesting and not tedious to build, cost a somewhat reasonable amount, not be too huge that no one can display or even reasonably build it at home, and able to closely enough replicate what they're trying to model.

Could they make a bigger version of this set that is more closely resembling the real thing? More than likely, yeah they can; look at the displays they have at Legoland. But would that more detailed version be accessible for even the well off AFOL? Most likely not. It'd be too big, too expensive, and too unwieldy, and will probably still fail to capture some of the details of the real thing.

12,060 pieces

Only the collectible ones. It's do different with shoes, cars, Pokemon cards, etc

Question is, are Lego fans going to buy a similar-quality chinese product or do they only buy Lego?

it's already a thing in China, you can buy Lego clones for 1/10th - 1/3rd of the original one

it's crazy how much ask Lego for few order of plastic, I couldn't believe how cheap rest clones are in China, it's shame they are not that cheap on AliExpress

lego doesn't have patent on brick, so they can be exactly same and compatible, from my experiences only difference is in manual

Not to all, plenty of us call them Legos.

That's a strange way to spell Portugal

If we're drinking the Danish Kool-Aid, you're supposed to write it "LEGO".

That would actually be really cool if each stage of the build reflected the actual construction history

And/Or halfway through have to change the design

It is not a cathedral, is a basilica: https://sagradafamilia.org/en/history-of-the-temple that will be finished next June 10th, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death and the visit of pope Leo XIV to Madrid.

I wonder when they'll release the Spanish Inquisition set. Nobody will expect that.

Adjusted for inflation, lego set prices have been consistent over the years:

> https://bricknerd.com/home/greed-or-inflation-an-economic-an...

Inflation-adjusted price per piece has actually been declining over the years, dropping from ~$0.25 to a current $0.10 on average. This set is $0.06 per piece, so even less expensive than a median set by that metric.

BlueBrixx is becoming fairly popular in Germany right now. The sets look competitive to me:

https://www.bluebrixx.com/en/bestsellers/

If you can't afford to buy the lego, you definitely can't afford to have the space to display it.

Pantasy, Cobi, Funwhole, megabloks, etc. There's tons of alt bricks at nearly any reasonable price point. But you're still not going to find these sorts of multi-thousand piece sets for <$100 because it takes at least a few cents to produce a dimensionally accurate, quality controlled bit of plastic.

I just looked and of course there are: https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005010679835500.html

There are cheaper alternatives. People still generally prefer Lego.

Also, is this one even that expensive? It's only 6 cents per piece.

there are tons of them in China, you can buy them on AliExpress, though that are expensive there for 1/2-1/3rd of Lego

but you wouldn't believe if I told you how much it cost in China, you can buy sets with hundreds of pieces for like 3-4 euros, I couldn't believe it when I saw the prices, Lego prices are highway robbery for piece of plastic

and don't tell me about paying for their creativity, there are alternate builds made by fans for free which are better than the original sets

So, fun trick with sets like these, that are in the more 'professional' space of Lego is that most of the time, these sets are very open ended because they only provide you a bunch of common pieces. Which you can buy yourself.

Bricklink has a wonderful feature that you can take a set and then part it out into a wanted list, and then search seller inventory to find those parts. That's how I built that giant Imperial Star Destroyer set from the aughts for a little over $200 instead of the like $1000 that used copies of the set were going for at that time (it's probably even more now.)

Just for funsies, I looked it up, and you can get the whole 21050 set for about $150 now on bricklink, which is a pretty good $/psc price. Considering what the set is, and the lack of stickers, means it should be easy to wash a used set to get all the pieces nice and clean; a laundry bra bag with a fine mesh works great for this.