CopperTablet

Ironically, the Modular developers are not so adept at worldbuilding, at least in the classic lore sense. The cookie thing is overtly dumb and is probably worse than no lore at all. We can see from the bakeries in Assembly Square and the donut shop that cookies are not forbidden.

21318 Tree House has not been retired as of 3 Dec 2020. However, it is in demand: perhaps people are army-building this set to get a forest village. You have to be quick and get an order on the Lego website fast, or use the secondary market.

Why do they build houses on stilts in the air? The answer is that they're easier to defend from the people on the ground. Great job.

I wonder if Lego doesn't want to market a modular post office due to their partnership with FedEx? Companies can be fussy about perceived competitors. Anyway, one thing I like about this relative to the bookshop is how modular it is, in terms of expansion. If you want a bigger building, you can buy a 2nd set and the extra floors incorporate naturally into the facade.

Have you seen The Lego Movie? The police take orders from the sinister President Business, it's very realistic. Fittingly, the play theme of the set is that they are committing acts of violence against a man so destitute he has to steal bread products. The set is actually deeply cynical about the authorities and I love it. There is an animal in the set, it's a blue bird that looks like the Twitter mascot.

Throughout the years, Lego has made a number of "villain lair" sets, like 4748, 70809, 70631 and now they expand this tradition to the Modular line with 10278. You can teach your children about the brutal enforcers of capitalism with this set. Great design, though, the $199 price point gives Lego more space to work with.

How would we build a highway on/off-ramp with these? I guess the obvious way is to use 2429/2430 to establish the radius of curvature, a lower layer of round plates like 4032, and a tile layer of 98138.

The video is on the Promobricks YT page in German. Youtube can translate the closed captions to English for you, but there's not much more info about it.

The interior of the bookshop is a bit odd. Floor 1 has books for sale, floor 2 is a reading room, and floor 3 has a bed and a chameleon in a terrarium. Who sleeps in that bed? They don't have any running water or a toilet. Why not just have more merchandise for sale on the top floor? The nice thing about Lego is that you can mod it if you like, but a random bed in a store is a very odd design choice.

If you want to use the new roads with your modulars, you can just replace the baseplate with 4 16x16 plates.

The backgrounds are period-accurate and you have gone to an incredible length cleaning and de-yellowing all the bricks, especially with so many electrical components. By placing all the sets together in NM condition, it takes you back to an era that predates many of today's AFOLs. It's a weird sort of pre-nostalgia in which you see something that makes an emotional center in your brain say "You should be nostalgic for this" and the rational part says "...but I didn't exist in 1985."

If Aanchir is correct, the new road plates look much, much better than the old road baseplates. The studded area on 44336px4 is not conducive to Modular streets, because you either have a massive gutter in the streets between the solid white lines and the sidewalk, or you build the Modulars on the studded area. The issue is that this deviates from the official instructions that come with the modular building, which can be intimidating. But, the new road plates are better for other reasons too. They are conducive to the use of ramps and elevated roads, which are commonplace on real highways but nearly nonexistent in Lego. Finally, moving away from the 16x32 baseplate to two 16x16 plates (with antistuds) facilitates the design of underground structures. Baseplates introduce an irregular nonzero height that makes this more of a challenge. Basically, AFOLs get a ton of verticality to build with without really losing anything.

I look for presence more than detail, since the interior details are kind of lost on display anyway. You can miss me with the hidden cookie smuggling compartment. Astrid's designs were actually great in that regard. 80107 Spring Lantern Festival is one of the most exciting 2021 sets, because it shuns interior details almost completely, but yet manages to be innovative and Modular-adjacent.

I liked Corner Garage. I prefer larger buildings for Modular, perhaps the size of Grand Emporium. Hyper-detailed interiors go unseen in displays. Furthermore, one thing that kind of irks me about 10270 is that the townhouse has no middle floor to enable scaling if you wanted to make it taller. It's not a bad set, by any means, and you should absolutely buy it.

You have touched upon one of the issues with Lego buildings: they don't really do underground architecture well. The baseplates are one reason why: display is another. Why build something no one will see? Your design has no back (or no side, depending on how you look at it) for viewing of the underground areas. This makes sense from a display perspective and the texture of the dirt is quite creative.

Nice job: it almost hurts to look at from the angles. I hope no heat sources were used in the making of this MOC.

Seems pretty obvious to me that Promobricks has the image and wants to keep it as a silhouette to deter bad actors from counterfeiting the set. I did look at some Ninjago City MOCs and Rebrickable listings and couldn't find anything that matched the silhouette at all, so they didn't just take someone's MOC and try to pass it off as a real set.

I wouldn't be too worried about it. "Top selling themes" tend to fluctuate a lot. The really weird thing is why a privately held company releases reports like that at all. Maybe it's a Danish thing.

Recently, they re-released 10189 as 10256. Historically, there have been a few re-releases. But, this should not convince any AFOLs that re-releases are coming for 70620. There are a lot of common, standard bricks in 10256 like 388 trans-clear 1x1 plates (part 28554), 240 white 1x2 modified bricks (part 2877) , and 276 white 1x1 rounds, and no minifigures. 10189 is a simple set to re-release because of this: all of these parts are things Lego produces every year. In contrast, 70620 has a ton of minifigures and specialized pieces in less typically produced colors. Such a large, elaborate design was only produced because of the movie (which did terribly and is never getting a sequel). So, is it possible? It's not forbidden. But, it is as unlikely as all heck.

"This product is not for you." -Mark Rosewater In any large line of collectibles, there will be things that interest you, and things that don't. I have no interest in the mosaics but people like pixel art stuff like Perler so maybe Lego can compete.

Richard- 0% chance of re-release.

I think it's real, and here's why The Promobricks article describes a Japanese-inspired garden. There was a Japanese Tea Garden that was somewhat Ninjago-inspired on Lego Ideas: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/9af5661d-d8a0-42a3-a2fc-43b6c5e9c56f/official_comments#content_nav_tabs The set was not produced, despite hitting the 10,000 supporter mark needed for an official review. Dear Coosey__Goosey, First, thank you for building and submitting your very well done Japanese Tea Garden . Regretfully, we have chosen to archive your project and no longer consider it for production for reasons communicated to you privately. Your project will remain visible on LEGO Ideas, but in a status where it can no longer be supported or commented on. This way fans can still admire your creation. We're sorry to be the bearers of this disappointing news! But, if you look at the other sets that hit 10,000 supporters and were not produced during this time period, the rejection notice from Lego is very different, and takes the form of a form letter. https://brickset.com/article/45895/lego-ideas-results-arriving-today! https://ideas.lego.com/projects/461fb3b6-31c5-4fa0-b5e0-7c8fbc3f1d85/official_comments#content_nav_tabs https://ideas.lego.com/projects/46e0efff-9756-42fe-a5ea-519b2579abeb/official_comments#content_nav_tabs https://ideas.lego.com/projects/2fb777d6-5c93-455a-974c-fee28963075c/official_comments#content_nav_tabs Review Results for (set) Our team has thoroughly considered the possibility of releasing this project as a LEGO set according to the criteria of the LEGO Review. Unfortunately the LEGO Review Board has decided that we will not produce this project as a set. Thank you to (user) for the passion and creativity that went into this project, and to all of you who voted so that we would have the opportunity to consider this as a potential LEGO set. We’re sorry to deliver this disappointing news. So, for some reason, the Japanese Tea Garden was rejected in a very different manner than all the other rejected Ideas sets with 10,000 supporters, and yet they gave the creator a reason (unlike the others). Without asking the creator to violate privileged correspondence with Lego, I can only speculate that the reason was the ongoing development of the Ninjago City Gardens.

I bought a set used on Ebay that came with a number of dark red 3062b elements that broke on the lower ridge (where the stud goes in on the adjacent brick). Was the previous owner just storing them improperly, or is this a known issue with this element and color?

I really hope this isn't what we're getting in the place of a Ninjago City add-on. It's not very appealing to me in that you can't really expand onto it linearly, which I derive a lot of fun from. It feels more like a discrete 3D sculpture commemorating TLM2. The minifigures are great though

Great work I can't help but wonder what The Designer's Republic could have come up with if they were into Lego at their peak