Creator Set | SerialBuilder | Pre-order update #3

The quick update

1. The pre-order is confirmed, but we’re extending the timeframe to the end of the month. Cards will be charged on 1st Nov.

2. Bagging will be done according to build - we’ll update regarding the Core Edition.

3. We did some testing of the bricks - quality is good / comparable to LEGO.

4. Tell us what beast you’d like to see us attempt to build next.

The not-so-quick update

We’re officially past the half-way point to our goal!

The issue of the Core Edition not really getting close to the target is one that we’ve been thinking about and so we’ve come up with a plan on how to address this so that all our Core Edition customers will still get their sets.

We’ve switched our approach and will be combining the Core and Complete orders so that we’re able to get to the minimum order threshold faster. To help explain this change, I made a graphic.

What this means is that we’re able to submit the order for the Core Edition since it now meets the minimum requirement we need. We’ll end up with a few extra ‘Upgrade Packs’ but that’s OK, because it means that anyone who purchased a Core Edition, will have the opportunity to upgrade to the Complete Edition if they so wish at a later date.

We’ll be making a slight change to the campaign percentages and will combine them too, so we’ll have a single number to represent what’s remaining.

I know we’ve listed tentatively that we were going to end the campaign on the 15th of October, but I think we need a little bit more time to get enough pre-orders in to be able to make the sets. We’ll be extending the timeline to the 31st of October. What this means for you is that we’ll be looking to charge the cards on the 1st of November, so be sure to have the funds ready by then.

If there are sets remaining after 31st Oct, those will still be able to be pre-ordered until they run out.

We’re pretty excited to be getting closer to making this all a reality and to be able to ship the sets out. I’m frantically working on getting all the fixes in for the sets so that we’re able to include all the extra necessary parts for everyone - that’s a teaser for a future update

The quality of the bricks

In the previous update I showed that there is very little visual difference between the bricks that we’re using and LEGO bricks. However, this isn’t the complete story and there are a few differences that I feel is important to document, so we did some scrappy home-made tests and put together a video to compare LEGO bricks, our bricks and another unnamed alt brick which we were testing but ultimately rejected due to it not meeting our standard. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, but my videos might be pretty boring compared to Sean’s videos, but if you like to nerd out a little, this is a bit of a change of pace. Enjoy, or skip, I won’t take it personally.

If you skipped it, but are still reading, I have a summary of my long and boring (to some) video. If you watched it and got bored, just know, that it’s nothing compared to the boredom I faced editing the video. The experiments themselves were quite fun however. Here are my takeaways from the tests and my opinion about the bricks that we’ve chosen to use.

Clutch power

When it comes to clutch power, the no name alt brick had the most, whilst LEGO had the lowest, with EB closer to the LEGO brick. This was generally the case for bricks across the board. Higher clutch power doesn’t necessarily translate to a better build experience because it can mean that bricks require a bit more effort to connect and separate them. But you also don’t want too little clutch power as the model won’t hold its own weight. The ideal place is to strike a nice balance between ease of attaching/removing and ability to hold itself up, which LEGO does a good job of finding, especially when their core customers are little kids with lower strength than adults. When you get to bigger builds however, a bit of extra clutch power does indeed become a little more useful, so I’d say our bricks are a bit more appropriate.

We built the sets with all types of bricks and I can tell you that you wouldn’t want to build these giant sets with the unnamed alt bricks. These should be reserved only for torture sets where you gift them to people you don’t like so that they cry whilst building their sets. My mind is buzzing with ideas for a new type of set for the future.

Ball joint strength and articulation

For ball joint strength and articulation, we found that the EB parts were the joints with the tightest fit.

This resulted in the strongest connection and the most friction, which makes them require a little bit of effort to connect and disconnect them, as well as to move them around. Without this sounding like I’m trying to turn every L into a W - when it comes to larger builds, we’ve found that a tighter fit helps to keep things in place due to the increased weight. LEGO ball joints are easier to move, which makes playing with sets a lot more fun, however, since we’re not building play sets, but rather display sets, we actually prefer to have a tighter fit. It just holds up better over time.

The sounds of building

Part of what makes building with legos so relaxing is that sound of the snap, so it was important to test this too. As you can see, from the graph, we placed LEGO and our bricks fairly closely, with LEGO having a slight edge due to the lower clutch power. Maybe nostalgia was also just doing its thing, but that sound really does have a calming effect. The unnamed alt bricks on the other hand were pretty loud and again, would be perfect for that yet-to-be-released Frenemy Set™.

Consistency

Another thing that’s important is that we get a consistent build experience across all the builds. We’ve been testing with a bunch of bricks and this one is a bit more subjective since we haven’t had the patience or time to test them all with our home-made testing lab, but we’ve had a lot of people test out the bricks and have gotten their feedback regarding the quality. On the whole, our bricks and LEGO bricks are quite comparable in consistency and we had a few people comment about how they couldn’t tell the difference. The same couldn’t be said for the unnamed alt brick. OK, now it just sounds like I’m pooping the unnamed alt bricks and if I’m completely fair, they weren’t so bad. It’s just that when you compare them against the alternatives, all the little things add up and the extra stinging and the louder snaps and the extra effort required to pull bricks apart and the slightly chipped nails all just turns a usually relaxing time into a bit of a nightmare when the builds are this big. If the builds were small, I certainly wouldn’t have noticed it as much.

That was a pretty long summary…which calls for a summary to the summary!

To further summarise

Overall, I think (and of course, this may be biased) that our bricks and LEGO bricks are pretty comparable in quality and actually are the preferred option for our particular purpose - building ginormous sets. They will require slightly more force to attach than LEGO bricks, and so we recommend gloves when building the sets - your fingers will thank you for it.

Bagging update

Thank you for the feedback in the comments section of the previous update. The sorting by builds have it! I mentioned earlier that we’re combining the sets, so how does all this work together?

Here’s the plan…

However, Daniel brought up a great point that we’ve also been wondering about…

This does indeed become problematic for the Core Edition customer. Either we decide on a default build for which the bags are optimised, or we find another way.

We’re working on a smart solution that should allow you to easily identify which bag your pieces are in for the set you’re building. We’ll share this once it’s built out.

Feedback on our Specter MOC

Finally, I just want to do a shoutout to those of you who have written in about the mistakes you found in the Specter MOC. I wasn’t expecting it to come in so early, but it seems like people we’re excited enough to get building straight away. I really appreciate you taking the time to identify the issues so that I can easily rectify them. I’ll be updating the instructions and parts list soon.

As for where to find the updated instructions - we’re working on a way for you to have access to the different versions of instructions for all builds so that you can see what changes have been made for yourselves. It’ll be a bit like version control but for physical builds. The reason for this is because it just makes sense according to our approach to continuous set upgrades. We imagine that we’ll be incrementally improving builds as we get feedback from you all, so the most updated version is the always accessible and you can upgrade your existing sets if you like. This also paves the way for LED upgrades…

Have I said too much? Maybe I should stop typing already and get back to implementing all the fixes.

Let me distract you with our question for the post instead!

Q: What beast would you like us to attempt to release next?

Tell us what you want to see in the comments and we’ll add the most doable one to the ever-growing list of things we want to get done. Also feel free to ask any other questions you may have.