LettuceBrick

Hogsmeade has minifig shields new? in dark red. The Chamber of Secrets seems to have some sort of curved window pane that could be useful.

These look pretty impressive, though I'm not sure I'll be getting any just for the castle-adjacent minifigs, which is what I'm most interested in...

Angled CMF Base Roof by Nice Try, on Flickr 11 studs wide, don't mind the cheese slopes that aren't connected to the 1x1 tiles, they should both be replaced by a 1x2 bow. The 1x1 cylinders are just placed along the top, not connected.

Thanks! Curious sort of time to update.

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but have you figured out a pattern of when they are in stock?

Those torsos sure move fast! Legs are still available...

My green factions: Kingdoms Dragons by Nice Try, on Flickr Smaller Green Factions by Nice Try, on Flickr

Round-ish tower shenanigans, probably old news. Small Round Tower by Nice Try, on Flickr 12 stud diameter Large Round Tower by Nice Try, on Flickr 22 stud diameter Obviously, these can both be done with hinge bricks, but this method doesn't use hinge bricks, which can be helpful if one has no hinge bricks. This version is an attempt at some level of modularity, but you can squeeze it down to much shorter if necessary. Spiral Staircase by Nice Try, on Flickr It also allows for a decently integrated spiral staircase that is actually structural.

I've had this lying around for a while and just got around to rendering it. Classic Space Transport Shuttle by Nice Try, on Flickr Classic Space Transport Shuttle by Nice Try, on Flickr C&C appreciated, especially with regards to greebling.

I would imagine the printing itself is not any more expensive than for a long-produced torso, but every new torso has to be designed, tested, possibly focus-grouped to death, etc. etc. so I guess it could extend the timeline. The longer something takes, the more it costs, beyond the inherent costs of creating and validating a new design.

@leafan and @Aurore How do the old torsos look with the new legs?

Does anyone have approximate pricing (I know it will vary depending on currency) for the Black Falcons Torso, Legs, and Shield?

Quite likely weeks I think. All the interesting bits are out of stock for me as well.

Those trees are indeed excellent and I like the rocks. I think the path could be a bit more irregular instead of having straight sides. I'm also not sure what the purple ice cream plants are supposed to be. Are they lavender?

Let's just hope there's not like a shipping container of them that gets swept overboard and washes up on a beach somewhere...

If true, it'll surely be an unsinkable seller! (Too soon?)

Ah, ok thanks for the info!

Has that ever happened before?

I doubt they will, yeah. One option that might help calm some people down is to follow what they have been kind of doing with space in creator. Like the closest to an inhouse scifi theme is those one or two creator sets that have been released over the past few years. So maybe like release a space set, then next year a castle set, and then a pirates set. Rinse and repeat every three years, release a nice generic themed minifig in the set each time. Get everyone complaining about those sets so much they forget to complain about the lack of those themes.

If you think it's bad there, check out the TBB comments. (Or, y'know, don't.) I agree with pretty much all of the points you make. I appreciate the complexity and ingenuity of those fragile MOCs that go for the run-down aesthetic, but can't say I'd like to spend time building them. Detailing, yes, love it. Stacking thousands of 1x1 round plates to make mottled stone patterns, not for me. I'm not totally convinced by the roof, but that may be a case of me focusing on the parts rather than being able to step back and look at the whole. I've also heard people complain that it's not medieval enough (in what way exactly I'm not sure), but that seems like almost an argument in favor of widespread appeal. Not a castle fan? Change the swords and boom: fantasy/pirates/Victorian/living history blacksmith! Not a fan of pre-industrial metal working? Remove the sign and you get an old house with an outdoor pizza oven or something. Obviously, it's not perfect, and I don't like the exposed hinges in the dormer window roof, but ye-old-mountain-molehill-rigamarole seems to be back in force. I expect the minifig/animal reveal (if there is one) will create a similar firestorm. Here's a frightful final thought: KKII tribute interior!

I guess the question is how much sales depend on people who supported the idea liking the set. I have zero clue about Lego sales volume for individual sets and I guess having 10,000 people say they would be open to an idea being a set could give you a ballpark figure about the viability of such a set, but it seems like a shaky metric. According to some perfunctory googling, 600,000 Lego sets are sold per day (whether this is accurate or not, who knows). Brickset lists roughly 800 sets released per year since 2015. Putting aside questions about what defines a set and so on, and assuming that sets are available for about three years, and adding a generous margin to make the math easier, we could say that in any given year about 3,000 sets are available. Assuming that each set sells the same amount, which is obviously incorrect, we get 200 sales per set per day. That comes out to 73,000 sales per year. If it's a horrible set, or there's a cultural shift, or all the other sets are better, or rats ate the wires in the trucks that delivered this particular set and so it was unavailable, perhaps we could say that only ten percent of the 'average' sales are made. We're still at 7,300 sales per year. I would assume that most people who buy Lego are either unaware, uninterested, or un-something when it comes to the exact submission that produced a Lego Ideas branded set. If this is correct, then most people who end up buying an Ideas set are completely disconnected from what the submission was, and therefore discussions about how faithful the set was to the submission are entirely irrelevant to their buying process. Also, even if half of the people who voted for the submission hate the set, that's still 5,000 people who like it. If the worst performing sets can expect to sell about 20,000 copies overall without hype, I'm not convinced that it's a few thousand supporters that are going to make the difference. So yes, it might sell badly, but I'm not convinced that its the design changes that will be the cause. Obviously, all of this rests on the shaky foundation of several wild guesses, but it seems to me that, as interesting as the debate about submission vs set is, it's not particularly relevant to Lego's decision-making process. I could of course be wrong, and having 10,000 supporters who all think that the final product is great might correlate well to sales, but without access to the data, it's hard to know. People and situations change, especially during the time lag between idea approval and set release. A whole lot of people have a whole lot less disposable income right now than they did when the blacksmith was approved for mangling/improvement. The question is whether Lego views the 10,000 supporters as an ad-hoc focus group that allows them to gauge profitability or whether they see it as part AFOL-frustration-safety-valve / part zeitgeist-capturing-money-printing-machine.

Focus groups of AFOLs? Do they even do that? Or would everything just get leaked during the first [AFOL equivalent of recess or whatever]?

I'm inclined to like what they've done with it, but I'm waiting for more details...

Patience is key. Shop around and live with having 1/2 or 3/4 skeletons for a while.

Very nice indeed. The shields are custom right?